PEROVSKAYA, SOFIA LVOVNA

(1853–1881), Russian revolutionary populist, a member of the Executive committee of "Narodnaya Volya" ("People's Will"), and a direct supervisor of the murder of emperor Alexander II.

Sofia Perovskaya was born in St. Petersburg to a noble family; her father was the governor of St. Petersburg. In 1869 she attended the Alarchin Women's Courses in St. Petersburg, where she founded the self-education study group. At age seventeen, she left home. From 1871 to 1872 she was one of the organizers of the Tchaikovsky circle. Her remarkable organizational skills and willpower never failed to gain her leading positions in various revolutionary societies. To prepare for "going to the people," she passed a public teacher's exam and completed her studies as a doctor's assistant. In January 1874 she was arrested and detained for several months in the Peter and Paul Fortress and faced the Trial of 193 (1877–1878), but was proven innocent. She joined the populist organization Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) and took part in an unsuccessful armed attempt to free Ippolit Myshkin, who was proven guilty at the Trial of 193. During the summer of 1878 she was once again arrested, and exiled to Olonetskaya province, but on the way there she fled and assumed an illegal status. In June 1879 Perovskaya took part in the Voronezh assembly of Zemlya i Volya, soon after which the organization split into Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) and Cherny Peredel (The Black Repartition). From the autumn of 1879, she was a member of the executive committee of Narodnaya Volya. In November 1879 she took part in the organization of the attempt to blow up the tsar's train near Moscow. She played the role of the wife of railroad inspector Sukhorukov (Narodnaya Volya member Lev Gartman): The underground tunnel that led to the railroad tracks where the bomb was planted came from his house. By mistake, however, it was the train of the tsar's entourage that got blown up. During the spring of 1880, Perovskaya took part in another attempt to kill the tsar in Odessa. In the preparation of the successful attempt on March 13, 1881, on the Yekaterininsky channel in St. Petersburg, she headed a watching squad, and after the party leader Andrei Zhelyabov (Perovskaya's lover) was arrested, she headed the operation until it was completed, having personally drawn the plan of the positions of the grenade throwers and given the signal to attack. Hoping to free her arrested comrades, after the murder Perovskaya did not leave St. Petersburg and was herself arrested. At the trial of pervomartovtsy (participants of the murder of the tsar), Perovskaya was sentenced to death and hanged on April 15, 1881, on the Semenovsky parade ground in St. Petersburg, becoming the first woman in Russia to be executed for a political crime.

See also: alexander ii; land and freedom party; people's will, the

bibliography

Figner, Vera. (1927). Memoirs of a Revolutionist. New York: International Publishers.

Footman, David. (1968). Red Prelude: A Life of A.I. Zhelyabov. London: Barrie & Rockliff.

Venturi, Franco. (1983). Roots of revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oleg Budnitskii