The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution

2 Age of Consciousness

2 AGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS Sitting alone in an isolated police interrogation room a short carriage drive from her cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress, a thirty-one-year-old Vera Figner thought about her life. As she took pen to paper to explain to gendarmes , government officials, herself, and (she hoped) posterity, how she, a woman born to the Imperial Russian nobility, faced a likely death sentence for a series of violent political crimes, Vera sought continuity. In chronicling her revolutionary activities, she asserts that her illegal radical activity during the previous few years “had its own history,” because it was rooted in “logical links with [her] previous life.”1 Rather than viewing her revolutionary career as an abrupt rupture with a privileged past, she saw it as the understandable consequence of her own personal history and that of her country. Vera Figner’s path to revolutionary notoriety was not predestined; instead it was dictated by coincidence, circumstance, and choice. In both the confession that she wrote over a period of weeks in 1883 and the autobiographical accounts she penned over more than a decade in the twentieth century, Vera attempts to guide those who want to understand her life and radical career. For Vera, every step she took along the way toward the unforgiving prison cell whose cold, damp walls became the boundaries of her solitary universe for two decades was a conscious one; every choice she made was determined by a moral purpose and strength of will. Yet much of what impelled Vera Figner into the revolutionary underground and the annals of Russian history was timing. Being born in the twilight of the age of serfdom, and reaching the age Age of Consciousness 23 of consciousness in a period filled with political and social reform, upheaval, and uncertainty, Vera found both exciting opportunities and insurmountable hurdles. How she interpreted and managed each of these at different historical moments invariably influenced her subsequent options and choices and ultimately determined her place in history. As part of the Russian nobility, the Figner family enjoyed privileges not extended to their less affluent neighbors in the villages surrounding Khristoforovka and Nikiforovo. But the perquisites that they derived from their social position were not guaranteed and continued only at the pleasure of the autocracy; such was the nature of the political system. This discretionary system of privilege was intended to ensure the tsar of a dependable cadre of supporters within society. Yet even those whose loyalty never wavered were not completely secure and could find themselves and their material fortunes at the mercy of the capricious whims of the autocratic state. In spite of Nikolai and Ekaterina Figner’s developing sense of liberalism in the period of the Great Reforms, they were loyal subjects to the tsar, as were the members of their extended family. Yet events that took place in 1863 and 1864 more than one thousand miles from Nikiforovo illustrated for the Figner family that one’s loyalty did not guarantee one’s security in the empire of the tsars. Sensitive to the fact that relatively minor protests could swiftly degenerate into full-blown rebellions against a system rooted in inequality and repression , the imperial state reacted forcefully and pervasively to any discernible challenge to its authority. Government retribution was designed both to punish the guilty and to warn potential provocateurs against future incendiary action. Thus, the retaliatory nets that the autocracy cast were wide and often swept up individuals and groups whose only crime was that of association and those whose culpability rested exclusively in their ethnic or religious identity. Such was the case in the wake of the Polish uprisings against Russian rule in the middle of the nineteenth century. Inspired by Alexander II’s apparent commitment to reform in Russia and some modest reforms the tsar’s government implemented in Poland, disparate groups and individuals in the kingdom of Poland pressed for more substantial improvements in the beleaguered country’s subordinate position vis-à-vis Russia. As the Russian administration in Poland adopted an increasingly hard line in reaction to these challenges, the demands mutated into a full-blown uprising in January 1863 that was not finally subdued until the fall of 1864. In an effort to punish the 24 The Defiant Life of Vera Figner rebels and send a message to other disenchanted groups, Alexander II’s government reacted forcefully against both the insurgents and...