The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution

7 Transformation

7 TRANSFORMATION On September 24, 1884, the Trial of the Fourteen opened in St. Petersburg amid circumstances much different from those of the well-publicized political trials of the previous decade. For years both the Romanov autocracy andtheRussianpublicviewed thetrialsofaccusedrevolutionariesandterrorists as “great political causes célèbres.”1 Except for Vera Zasulich’s stunning acquittal ,theverdictsdoledoutbythecourtsweremostlypreordained,andthus no drama was involved in the deliberation of guilt or innocence; yet the proceedings were grand spectacles. Imperial courtrooms served as the stages on which a new type of modern political theater was performed; a curious public and anxious friends angled for admission to witness the drama as both the prosecution and defense presented cases and delivered lines designed to sway hearts and influence minds in a propaganda battle between the tsarist state and the revolutionaries who conspired to overthrow it. Although the imperial government had learned from early trials in the post-reform period and began to more strictly control the space in its courtrooms and the publicity emanating from them as the 1870s gave way to the more violent 1880s, the secrecy that surrounded the Trial of the Fourteen in 1884 was unparalleled. According to the foreign correspondent, for the Times of London, only nine coveted tickets were doled out for this latest trial.2 The regime of Alexander III decided to try the latest defendants with as little external fanfare as possible in order to prevent the accused members of the People’s Will from using the Transformation 137 defendant’s box as a platform from which to remind the country of their exploits , sacrifice, and aspirations for a more equitable and just future for Russia . But Vera Figner had other plans. Despite the small number of spectators in the courtroom, the most notorious of the defendants in the Trial of the Fourteen viewed the opportunity to speak at the trial as the role of a lifetime. Having sat behind the impregnable walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress for the last nineteen months, Vera looked at her day in court as a unique opportunity to memorialize her dying movement and her place within it. Convinced that she would be condemned to death for her crimes, she viewed her trial and the opportunity to speak to the court as the last opportunity to express herself, detail her achievements, and make a case for her significance before “the curtain irrevocably lowered on the tragedy” of her life.3 When Vera rose to address the court on the last day of the five-day trial, she was a different woman from the one seized on the streets of Kharkov in 1883. The days following her arrest were difficult ones. While she believed that her capture was the first step along a journey to the martyrdom to which she aspired ,sheworriedaboutwhatshewouldhavetoendurebeforeheranticipated release from this world. Adding to her anxiety was her despondence about the apparent demise of the People’s Will despite her fervent efforts to resuscitate this once deadly terrorist group. As she traveled under armed guard from Kharkov to St. Petersburg, Vera’s emotions overwhelmed her and she began to show signs of the toll that the previous months had taken on her. One moment she was the picture of strength and revolutionary swagger, bemoaning to her young guard the fact that she did not have her revolver with her when she was arrested so that she could have murdered the traitor who identified her; the next moment she sat silently looking out the window at the passing Russian countryside, her bravery betrayed by the tears streaming down her cheeks.4 Upon arrival in St. Petersburg, gendarmes transported Vera to the Peter and Paul Fortress’s Trubetskoi Bastion, the prison building constructed in the 1870s specifically to hold political prisoners before their trial. Incarcerated in cell forty-three, she surveyed the sparse surroundings: with only a small window situated above the eye level of the diminutive prisoner, her accommodations were limited to a cot with a thin mattress, a small wooden stool, and an iron table chained to the wall. Exhausted from her multiday trip 138 The Defiant Life of Vera Figner from Kharkov, the journey she had traveled from the Rodionovskii Institute throughZurich,theRussiancountryside,andtherevolutionaryunderground to the prison that had hosted such radical luminaries as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, and Sergei Nechaev seemed very long indeed. Great excitement swirled in official circles about the arrest of Vera Nikolaevna Figner...