Women’s History Meme || Virtually Unknown Women (6/10) ↬ Vera Nikolayevna Figner (1852 – 1942)
Vera Figner was supposed to die in 1884. A tsarist court declared it; Vera herself expected and even welcomed it. Although she would have been only the second woman in more than a century to die on the scaffold by decree of the Russian state, her notoriety and prominence within the terrorist group the People’s Will was such that few people expected leniency for the condemned criminal. If the sentence decreed by an imperial military tribunal in October 1884 had stood, newspapers across Europe would have noted Vera Figner’s execution and most likely recounted the dramatic and seemingly tragic turns that the notoriously beautiful young woman’s life had taken in the previous decades. Journalists would have found it hard to resist regaling their readers with the details of this beguiling revolutionary’s life, as it poetically seemed to symbolize the fervor, promise, idealism, and desperation of a generation of Russian radicals. In childhood Figner seemed destined for a life of privilege as a member of the Imperial Russian nobility. But amid the turbulent decade in which she came of age, Vera exchanged privilege for political radicalism; abandoned legal, professional aspirations for a life in the revolutionary underground; and foreswore marital ties for a desperate plot to assassinate the Russian tsar. She certainly was not alone in her beliefs, her dedication, or her willingness to die for her cause, but she was exceptional for the seamless manner in which her life and commitment personified her age of political radicals and exemplified the ideals to which her generation aspired. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Vera Nikolaevna Figner was at the center of a movement and a series of events that transformed the political landscape in Russia and ultimately changed the empire of the tsars irrevocably. If she had died in 1884, Vera Figner’s life would be significant for what it conveys about Russian noblewomen who came of age in the twilight of the era of serfdom and for what it indicates about those among them who pursued education as a means of intellectual and moral autonomy and a path to economic independence. Even if it had ended when she was thirty-two, Vera’s life would have historical importance for the insight it provides into the motivation that drove such a significant number of young, privileged Russians to embrace terrorism as a solution to the country’s ills. As a leader of the revolutionary organization the People’s Will, Vera Figner helped to change the course of Russian history through the 1881 assassination of the most powerful man in the country, the Tsar Liberator, Alexander II. Yet Vera Figner did not die in 1884. After Alexander III, the son and heir of the man she helped to murder, commuted her death sentence to life in prison at hard labor, her life continued, as did her revolutionary influence. Although the tsarist state resolved to bury her alive in Shlisselburg Fortress, a notorious prison known as the Russian Bastille, Vera’s two decades of incarceration became an essential element of her revolutionary identity and infused the subsequent narrative of revolution both before and after 1917. Vera survived Shlisselburg; in fact, she lived for almost six decades after her death sentence was declared and survived the regime that she had sought to topple. — The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution by Lynne Ann Hartnett
