The Beautiful Nihilists: 5 Women Who Helped Bring Down an Empire
By: Denise Shelton
Tags: History, Russia, Feminism, Nihilism, Revolution

The Beautiful Nihilists: 5 Women Who Helped Bring Down an Empire

“The Nihilist” by Paul Merwart, 1882 (Souce: public domain)

“Political nihilism is the position holding no political goals whatsoever, except for the complete destruction of all existing political institutions — along with the principles, values, and social institutions that uphold them.” — Donald A. Crosby, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

When most people consider the Russian Revolution, they think of men like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Still, there were many women involved who were just as committed to toppling their imperialist oppressors. Here are a few of their stories.

Sophia Bardina (1853–1883)

Sophia Bardina (Source: public domain)

One of the first women whose name became associated with opposition to the tsarist regime was Sophia Bardina. Born into a dysfunctional land-owning family in the Tver province, Sophia became an ardent scholar to escape domination by her violent father.

Because educational opportunities for women were limited in Russia, she went to Zürich in 1871 with her friend Olga Lyubatovich and Olga’s sister Vera. All three women became involved in the Fritsche circle, a group of radical feminists.

In 1873, the Russian government required all its female students studying in Zurich to return home. After they returned, Bardina and some of her friends decided to discard their lives of privilege and get working-class jobs. They believed that the people would be more open to their revolutionary ideas if they joined the underclass and lived as they did.

“Yes, we are anarchists, but, for us, anarchy does not signify disorder, but harmony in all social relations; for us, anarchy is nothing but the negation of oppressions which stifle the development of free societies.” — Sophia Bardina

Bardina got a job in a factory and began spreading propaganda against the government among her co-workers. Russian officials arrested her for this illegal activity in 1875, and she served two years in a Moscow prison.

In 1877, Bardina and 49 others were tried on the charge of being members of a “secret association that set as its goal the overthrow of the existing order.” The Trial of the 50, as it came to be known, was the first time in Russian history that workers went on trial for this kind of activity. Other defendants included Bardina’s friends, the Lyubatovich sisters.

A judge sentenced Bardina to 10 years of hard labor but commuted her punishment to exile in Siberia. She escaped to Switzerland in 1880. There she grew seriously ill and committed suicide three years later.

“The association will avenge me, and its vengeance will be terrible. Let your hangmen and judges massacre and destroy us now, during the short time that force is still on your side. We set against you our moral might, and that will triumph. Progress, Liberty, and Equality fight for us, and through these ideas no bayonet can thrust.” — Sophia Bardina at her trial

Vera Figner (1852–1942), Lydia Figner (1853–1920)

Vera Figner, 1870 (Source: public domain)

Another defendant in the Trial of the 50 was Vera Figner. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Figner lived a long life. Unfortunately, she spent 22 of her 89 years in prison and two more in exile.

Figner was born an aristocrat. Both of her parents were members of the hereditary Russian nobility. Her brother Nikolay Figner was a famous Russian opera singer.

Her family owned over 1,000 acres of land that was worked by serfs, a semi-slave class emancipated in 1861. Perhaps this early experience with the plight of Russian peasants informed her politics as an adult.

Photo of one of Russia’s schools for noble girls, 1912 (Source: public domain, color by Klimbim)

At 11, Figner was sent to the Institute for Noble Maidens in the city of Kazan. She was an excellent student, but her rebellious streak was already apparent since she made it a practice to read books banned by her instructors.

Upon graduation at 17, Figner claimed the top academic prize. She aspired to study medicine, but this field was closed to women in Russia.

Figner wanted to attend the University of Zurich, which accepted female students, but her father forbade her. Determined, she married fellow student Alexei Filippov in 1870 and bided her time. When the couple saved enough money, some of which they obtained by selling Figner’s dowry, they traveled to Zurich with Figner’s sister Lydia, who also wanted to study medicine.

Figner studied medicine in Zurich from 1872 to 1875. Her marriage to Filippov, essentially one of convenience, did not last. As she became more radical, he became more conservative. The pair were legally separated in 1876 and had no children.

While at the University of Zurich, Figner and her sister became part of the radical feminist Fritsche circle along with fellow revolutionaries Sophia Bardina and the Lyubatovich sisters.

Although she agreed in theory with the group’s belief that to radicalize the working class, they had to live as a part of it, she did not believe the best use of her time was to work in a factory.

When the others returned to Russia, Figner moved to Bern and resumed her studies. Upon returning to Russia, she passed the assistant physician and midwife exams and was certified in 1876.

Lydia Figner (Source: public domain)

In the meantime, Figner’s sister Lydia found work in a textile factory and lived with her fellow revolutionaries distributing anti-government propaganda.

The State Secret Police arrested her along with Sophia Bardina and others for distributing Robotnik (The Worker), a Russian-language proletariat newspaper. Lydia Figner stood trial was sentenced to five years hard labor. After her release, she ceased her political activism, but her sister Vera became more militant than ever.

In her job as a physician’s assistant, Vera took every opportunity to spread propaganda among her working-class patients. Along with another sister, Evgenia Figner, she opened a school for peasant children to teach them the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Tsar Alexander II (Source: public domain)

Figner soon became convinced that the Russian people could only achieve radical social change through violence.

She joined the pro-terror Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) party and quickly rose through their ranks. Figner became a member of the Narodnovoltsy’s Executive Committee. In 1879, the party called for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and began actively planning to achieve this goal. They set up a bomb-building workshop and conducted secret meetings to discuss possible scenarios.

Figner helped plan two assassination attempts on the tsar. The first was an unsuccessful one in 1880. The second attempt in St. Petersburg on March 13, 1881, resulted in Alexander’s death by bombing. Figner and her friends were now fugitives from justice.

The Secret Police hunted down and arrested all co-conspirators, except for Figner, who set up a printing press and continued propagandizing. She was also involved in the assassination of a Secret Police member in Odessa in March of 1882. Figner became the most wanted criminal in Russia.

She was betrayed by former fellow Executive Committee member Sergey Degayev who had become a police informer after his arrest in December of 1882. Figner was arrested in Kharkiv on February 10, 1883. She spent 20 months in solitary confinement awaiting trial.

Figner was found guilty and sentenced to death in the fall of 1884. Her sentence was commuted to penal servitude in Siberia, but she was imprisoned in the fortress at Schlüsselburg instead, where she remained for 20 years. Upon her release, she spent an additional two years in internal exile.

In 1906, Figner was allowed to go abroad. For the next nine years, she traveled throughout Europe, promoting assistance and raising funds to assist Russian political prisoners.

She returned to Russia in 1915, spending the rest of her life in mostly literary pursuits, including her book Memoirs of a Revolutionist and biographies of other revolutionaries. She died at the age of 89 in 1942.

Hesya Helfman (1855–1882)

Gesia Gelfman (Source: public domain)

Hesya Helfman was born into a Jewish family in the city of Mazyr in what is now Belarus. When she was a teenager, she ran away to Kyiv after discovering her father’s plan to marry her to one of his friends.

In Kyiv, she found work in a sewing factory. She soon met and joined the Pan-Russian Social Revolutionary group, where she worked with Olga Liubatovich, one of the former members of the Fritsche circle in Zurich.

Like Sophia Bardina, Helfman was arrested and convicted of distributing illegal literature in 1875. Because of her low social status, she was imprisoned at a workhouse in St. Petersburg. In 1879, she was sent to Siberia to finish her sentence but escaped a few months later.

Helfman joined the Narodnaya Volya party, working under the direction of Vera Figner, the Lyubatovich sisters, and others to distribute political propaganda. She became one of their most committed workers.

“She (Helfman) did everything, letter-carrier, messenger, sentinel; and often her work was so heavy that it exhausted even her strength, although she was a woman belonging to the working classes. How often had she returned home late at night, worn out and at the end of her strength, having for fourteen hours walked all over the capital, throwing letters into various holes and corners with the proclamations of the Executive Committee!” — Sergei Kravchinsky, Underground Russia Revolutionary Profiles

Helfman was one of the co-conspirators in the successful assassination plot against Tsar Alexander II. She had a flat on Telezhnaya Street in St. Petersburg that the group used as its headquarters. (They used Vera Figner’s for bomb construction.)

On March 15, two days after the assassination, the police raided Helfman’s flat and arrested her. Another member of the assassination team, Nikolai Sablin, shot himself in the head before being taken into custody.

A Special Tribunal of the Ruling Senate held at the end of March 1881 convicted Helfman and five co-conspirators and sentenced them to death by hanging. A few hours after learning of her fate, Helfman revealed that she was four months pregnant. In light of this, the tribunal postponed her execution until 40 days after her baby was born.

“Hesya languished under the threat of execution for five months; finally her sentence was commuted, just before she was to deliver. At the hands of the authorities, the terrible act of childbirth became a case of torture unprecedented in human history.” — Olga Lyubatovich

Through the efforts of socialists and journalists in Western Europe, Helfman’s sentence was commuted to forced labor for an indefinite period. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl in October of 1881, whom she nursed until the child was taken from her and placed in an orphanage in January of the following year.

Tragically, due to a complication at birth, Helfman developed peritonitis which led to her death on February 1, 1882. Her child died shortly thereafter of an unknown cause.

Sophia Perovskaya (1853–1881)

Sophia Petrovskya as a girl (Source: public domain, color by Klimbim)

A leading member of the Narodnaya Volya party, Sophia Perovskaya was another key figure in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

Perovskaya was born into an aristocratic family with ties to the imperial family. Her father, Lev Nikolaievich Perovsky, was the military governor of Saint Petersburg.

Perovskaya was largely self-educated until her parents enrolled her in a girl’s predatory school when she was a teenager. Some of her friends there had radical leanings, a situation of which her father strongly disapproved.

At the age of 16, Perovskaya left home and moved in with friends. Around 1871, the girls joined the Circle of Tchaikovsky, a literary society that promoted self-education. The group also distributed propaganda to workers in the interest of fomenting social revolution.

Symbol of the Land and Liberty party (Source: wikipedia.org)

During the next few years, Perovskaya earned diplomas as both a teacher and a medical assistant.

She was arrested in January of 1874 for her involvement in secret anti-tsarist propaganda meetings and imprisoned until her acquittal in 1878. At that time, she joined the Zemlya I Volya (Land and Liberty) party.

Perovskaya was arrested again and, this time, sentenced to exile in North-Western Russia. En route to her destination, she escaped her captors and went underground. During this time, she propagandized among students, workers, and soldiers and became a member of the party’s Executive Committee.

In November of 1879, Perovskaya was involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander II by blowing up the imperial train. Shortly thereafter, she returned to St. Petersburg and joined Narodnaya Volya.

Perovkaya helped orchestrate the failed assassination attempt on the tsar’s life on February 5, 1880, when a bomb placed under the dining room at the Winter Palace exploded. The imperial family was not in the room at the time, but the blast resulted in the deaths of 11 people and the wounding of 30 others. She also helped build the bombs and stage the March 13, 1881, attack on the tsar’s carriage resulting in his death.

During the Special Tribunal of the Ruling Senate conducted at the end of March 1881, Perovkaya was among those convicted and sentenced to death. She was the first woman in Russia to receive a death sentence for terrorism. As a member of the aristocracy, Perovskaya was entitled to have her death sentence commuted. She refused to do so.

“My darling, I implore you to be calm, and not to grieve for me; for my fate does not afflict me in the least, and I shall meet it with complete tranquility, for I have long expected it, and known that sooner or later it must come. […] I have lived as my convictions dictated, and it would have been impossible for me to have acted otherwise.” — Sophia Perovskaya in a letter to her mother

Contemporary newspaper illustration of the execution of Perovskaya and her co-conspirators. (Source: wikipedia.org)

On the morning of April 15th, the condemned were dressed in black uniforms and made to wear placards hung around their necks that read “Regicide.” The London Times estimated that over 100,000 people attended the execution. Priests were on hand to administer the last rites.

After kissing each other goodbye, Perovskaya and her fellow assassins were hanged. Ironically, instead of furthering their cause, their actions set the reform movement back.

The tsar had been planning to release reforms that would put Russia on the path to becoming a constitutional monarchy. In the wake of his father’s assassination, Tsar Alexander III not only rejected these reforms, but he also reserved others that Alexander II had enacted previously.