Vera Nikolaevna Figner

Wera Figner in the 1870s

Vera Nikolajewna Figner ( Russian Вера Николаевна Фигнер , by marriage in 1870 Филиппова / Filippowa ; * June 25th ^July / July 7th  1852 ^greg. In Christoforowka near Kazan ; † June 15, 1942 in Moscow ) was a Russian revolutionary and popularist .

biography

As the daughter of a Russian nobleman , she was initially tutored by private tutors and lived in the Kazan state boarding school for girls from 1863 to 1869. In “Night over Russia” she explained how it was shaped by essays by the utilitarians who recommended the goal of every human being to “bring the greatest possible happiness to the greatest possible number of people”. From 1872 she studied medicine at the University of Zurich for three years . She joined a group of Russian students ( Frichi ), read Ferdinand Lassalle , books on the theories of the French socialists and on the labor movement . Back in Saint Petersburg , she allied herself with the illegal society Land and Freedom ( Zemlya i wolja ) with the aim of spreading the revolution to the people ( Narodniki ).

She took over a rural hospital in Saratov and incidentally agitated the farmers on reading evenings. In 1879 she left the area because of denunciations and after the split between land and freedom she was a member of the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya organization ( People's Will ), which began the struggle for political power in the Tsarist Empire . Because of involvement in the planning of attacks on Tsar Alexander II , one of which on July 1 ^. / March 13, 1881 ^greg. in Saint Petersburg on the Gribojedow Canal , the site of the later Church of the Resurrection , was successful on July 10th ^. / February 22, 1883 ^greg. arrested in Kharkov as the last member of the Narodnaya Volya Executive Committee.

She spent twenty months in custody in the Peter and Paul Fortress . In the process of Fourteen in 1884 sentenced to death , her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in the next twenty years in Schlüsselburg , on the Isle of the Dead , enforced.

Life after Schluesselburg

Figner's grave in the Novodevichy Cemetery (Moscow)

Released on September 29, 1904, she was exiled to Arkhangelsk Oblast , where she was imprisoned until winter. She later moved to Kazan and on Christmas 1905 to her sister Yevgenia Saschina in Nizhny Novgorod .

In the course of the revolution and the October Manifesto issued by Tsar Nicholas II , Vera Figner received a passport with which she went to Finland in November 1906 , which was an autonomous part of the Tsarist Empire at the time. She joined the Social Revolutionaries and in 1910 founded a committee in Paris to support political prisoners in Russia. After the events surrounding the head of the Social Revolutionaries' terrorist group, Yevno Asef , who was also an informer for the Ochrana , she withdrew from the party. Until January 1915 she lived in Clarens on Lake Geneva (Switzerland).

At the beginning of the First World War she returned to Russia and again lived under police supervision in Nizhny Novgorod before she was allowed to settle in Saint Petersburg in December 1916 . Amnestied after the February Revolution of 1917 , she headed the Aid Committee for Liberated Convicts and Exiles , which distributed 2 million rubles to around 4,000 people. She was a member of the Constituent Assembly , which was dissolved by the Bolsheviks on January 19, 1918 .

During the Russian Civil War , Vera Figner lived with relatives in the Orjol governorate . After returning to Moscow in 1921, she became chairman of the Kropotkin's Honoring Committee , which set up a museum in Kropotkin's birthplace (Kropotk Street No. 26). Until her death in 1942, she traveled to Kazan several times to support social and cultural institutions.

Works

• The prisoners of Shlisselburg , 1920
• Night over Russia. Memories of life (German Berlin, Malik 1926; reprinted edition: Berlin Volk und Welt, 1985)
• Academic years
• To Schluesselburg
• Alexander Michailow together with Anna Korba, 1925
• The assassination attempt on the Tsar Alexander II. German Berlin 1926. - Reprint: Königstein / Munich Authors Edition , 1981; bahoe books , Vienna 2017

literature

• Walther Schmieding : Revolt of the daughters. Russian revolutionaries in the 19th century. Kindler, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-463-00765-7 .
• Gudrun Goes (Ed.): Not fools, not saints. Memories of Russian folk-dwellers (= Reclam's Universal Library. Vol. 1044, fiction ). Reclam, Leipzig 1984.
• Stephan Rindlisbacher: Living for the cause. Vera Figner, Vera Zasulic and the radical milieu in the late tsarist empire (= research on Eastern European history 80). Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-447-10098-4 .
• Monika Bankowski-Züllig: Figner, Vera. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .

Quote

Everyone is talking about revolution again. Yes it takes a revolution. Another revolution, but the task is too grandiose. The revolution is becoming too unusual and we will have to prepare seriously for it. What sense does it make if the oppressed take the place of the former oppressors again? They become predators themselves, and probably even worse ... We have to start today with serious educational work on ourselves, and invite others to do so ... when man finally realizes that man has a majestic individuality, that he is of enormous value has that he is just as free as everyone else, only then will the last, dazzling and spiritual revolution take place and the "rusty chains" will fall off forever.

Web links

Commons : Vera Figner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography 1 (booksite.ru, Russian)
• Biography 2 (rulex.ru, Russian)
• Biography 3 (peoples.ru, Russian)
• Works by Wera Nikolajewna Figner in the Gutenberg-DE project