Vera Zasulich

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Vera Zasulich
Вера Засулич
Petrograd, Russian Soviet Republic
NationalityRussian
Political partyMensheviks

Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (Russian: Вера Ивановна Засулич; 8 August [

Menshevik writer and revolutionary.[1] She is widely known for her correspondence with the late Marx, in which she put in question the necessity of a capitalist industrialisation prior to socialism, in the context of the fact that there already were living farmer communities in Russia that had developed practices and cultures that had a communist component.[2]

Radical beginnings

Zasulich was born in

Sergei Nechaev led to her arrest and imprisonment in 1869.[3]

After Zasulich was released in 1873, she settled in

Lev Deich
wrote:

"Because of her intellectual development, and particularly she was so well read, Vera Zasulich was more advanced than the other members of the circle.... Anyone could see that she was a remarkable young woman. You were struck by her behavior, particularly by the extraordinary sincerity and unaffectedness of her relations with others."[4]

Trepov incident

In July 1877, a political prisoner,

British Bulldog revolver and shot and seriously wounded Trepov.[7]

At her widely publicized trial, presided over by the prominent liberal judge Anatoly Koni, the sympathetic jury found Zasulich not guilty, an outcome that tested the effectiveness of the judicial reform of Alexander II. On one interpretation, it demonstrated the courts' ability to stand up to the authorities. However, Zasulich also had a very good lawyer, who turned the case on its head so that it "very soon became obvious that it was Colonel Trepov rather than his would-be assassin who was really being tried".[8] That Trepov and the government now appeared as the guilty party demonstrated the ineffectiveness of both the courts and the government.[9]

Fleeing before she could be rearrested and retried, Zasulich became a hero to populists and the radical part of the Russian society. Despite her previous record, she was against the terror campaign that would eventually lead to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.[10]

Move to Marxism

After the trial had been annulled, Zasulich fled to Switzerland, where she became a

Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898. In mid-1900, the leaders of the radical wing of the new generation of Russian Marxists, Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin, and Alexander Potresov, joined Zasulich, Plekhanov, and Axelrod in Switzerland. In spite of the tensions between the two groups, the six founded Iskra ("Spark" in English), a revolutionary Marxist newspaper, and formed its editorial board. They were opposed to the more moderate Russian Marxists (known as "economists") as well as ex-Marxists like Peter Struve and Sergei Bulgakov
and spent much of 1900–1903 debating them in Iskra.

Menshevik leader

The Iskra editors were successful in convening a pro-Iskra

Petrograd
on 8 May 1919.

In his book Lenin, Leon Trotsky, who was friendly with Zasulich in London in 1900, wrote:

Zasulich was a curious person and a curiously attractive one. She wrote very slowly and suffered actual tortures of creation... "Vera Ivanovna does not write, she puts mosaic together, Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] said to me at that time", and in fact she put down each sentence separately, walked up and down the room slowly, shuffled about in her slippers, smoked constantly hand-made cigarettes and threw the stubs and half-smoked cigarettes in every direction on all the window seats and tables, and scattered ashes over her jacket, hands, manuscripts, tea in the glass, and incidentally her visitor. She remained to the end the old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. Zasulich's articles show that she had adopted to a remarkable degree the theoretic elements of Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the '70s remained untouched in her until her death.[12]

See also

  • Nihilist movement
  • Vera; or, The Nihilists. This was the first play by Irish writer Oscar Wilde, which is said to be loosely inspired by the life of Vera Zasulich. Though none of Wilde's characters correspond to actual Russian people of the time, it has been suggested that the plot was inspired by Vera's shooting of Trepov. The play was published in 1880 and first performed in New York in 1883.

Notes

  1. ISBN 978-1-60486-200-3
    . Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  2. ^ "Marx-Zasulich Correspondence 1881". www.marxists.org. Retrieved 31 January 2024.
  3. ISBN 978-0-313-30438-5
    . Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  4. ISBN 0-415-90715-2
    , pp.61–62.
  5. ^ Peter Kropotkin (1 January 1905). "The Constitutional Movement in Russia". revoltlib.com. The Nineteenth Century.
  6. ^ Barbara A. Engel and Clifford N. Rosenthal "Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar" (1975), p.61.
  7. ^ Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance: the "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World (2008), p. 2, 10–11.
  8. ^ Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (1977)
  9. ISBN 978-0-415-31651-4
    . Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  10. ISBN 9780828530200
    . Retrieved 28 August 2018. Let us turn to numerous articles by Georgi Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, and to a special resolution adopted by the Second ... "The exact reason why we are against terrorism is that it is not revolutionary"— thus Zasulich expressed the general ...
  11. ISBN 0-521-26325-5
    , p.472, note 6.
  12. ^ Leon Trotsky: Lenin, New York, Blue Ribbon Books, 1925, chapter "Lenin and the Old Iskra"

References

External links
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