Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (July 27, 1849-May 8, 1919) (born August 8, New Style) was a Russian Marxist writer and revolutionary. She was born in Mikhaylovka , Russia, and moved to St. Petersburg when she finished schooling, became active in educating workers, conducting evening classes.
In 1878, Zasulich shot and wounded General Theodore Trepov, military governor of St. Petersburg, after he ordered the flogging of a political prisoner, who was an associate of Zasulich. At her trial a sympathetic jury found her not guilty. Fleeing before she could be rearrested and retried, she became something of a hero to the populists. While she was against the terror campaign that would eventually lead to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the incident incited more violence, and led to harsher policies by the government.
She was one of the founders of Emancipation of Labour group in 1885 with Georgi Plekhanov and Paul Axelrod. Zasulich was commissioned by the group to translate a number of Karl Marx's works into Russian. With Lenin and Plekhanov she was a member of the editorial board of Iskra. She later fled to Switzerland, where she became active in the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP).
After the split in the SDLP, between Lenin's Bolsheviks and Jules Martov's Mensheviks, Zasulich sided with the latter. She returned to Russia for the 1905 Revolution, but her interest in revolutionary politics waned with its failure. She supported the Russian war effort during World War I, oppsed the Bolshevik Revolution, and held a hostile attitude to the Soviet government. She died in St. Petersburg, May 8, 1919.
In his book Lenin, Trotsky wrote: "Sasulich 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 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. Sasulich'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.
External links
