Activities and affiliations

Social movements and organizing Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) 1844–1934 ○ Natural causes

'Grandmother of the Russian Revolution' who endured 44 years of prison and exile; co-founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party

"Mr. Kennan, we may die in exile, and our children may die in exile, and our children's children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last" — to George Kennan in Siberia, 1885.

Born into the nobility, she helped free her family's serfs in 1861, then joined the 1874 'Going to the People' movement. At the 1878 Trial of the 193 she became the first woman sentenced to katorga for a political crime, enduring 22 years in prison and Siberian exile that brought international fame through George Kennan's writings. Released in 1896, she co-founded the Socialist Revolutionary Party with Grigory Gershuni and led creation of its Combat Organization, then raised funds on a 1904 U.S. tour where she was dubbed 'Babushka.' After the February Revolution she returned as the symbolic elder of the Provisional Government and chaired the Pre-Parliament, but opposed the Bolshevik takeover and backed the White cause. Exiled in 1918, she died in Czechoslovakia.

Social movements and organizing Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) 1869–1918 ○ Renal failure

The Okhrana's paid informant who led the revolution's terrorist vanguard

In June 1902, Azef reported to the Okhrana that he had donated 500 rubles to terrorist operations, writing that it was 'necessary to strengthen my position in the party.' He was keeping books for both sides at once.

As head of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's Combat Organization, he orchestrated the assassinations of Interior Minister Plehve (1904) and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich (1905), reaching the apex of revolutionary terror, while simultaneously working as a paid informant for the Okhrana from 1893 onward, delivering dozens of comrades to arrest and execution. He succeeded Gershuni and commanded Boris Savinkov as his deputy, reshaping the Combat Organization into a centralized, disciplined elite unit; the trust he earned through successful assassinations became the currency of his betrayals. Exposed by Vladimir Burtsev in 1908, he fled to Germany, leaving the SR Party devastated, and remains the darkest point of contact between the revolutionary movement and the Tsarist secret police.

Social movements and organizing Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) 1877–1905 ✕ Executed

The poet-bomber who stayed his hand seeing the Grand Duchess and children: the 'ethical terrorist' behind Camus' Les Justes

At his trial: "I am not a defendant, I am your prisoner. We are two warring camps. Learn to look the advancing revolution right in the face."

A Socialist-Revolutionary Combat Organization member and poet, who assassinated Tsar Nicholas II's uncle Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich with a bomb in the Moscow Kremlin on 4 February 1905. Two days earlier, seeing the Grand Duke's wife and young nephews in the carriage, he had refused his throw: an act that earned him the name 'ethical terrorist' and later inspired Albert Camus' play Les Justes. He had cut his teeth in the Petersburg Union of Struggle, broken with the Social Democrats over their rejection of direct action, and joined the SR Combat Organization under Evno Azef, taking part in the surveillance for the Plehve assassination. At his trial he told the court to 'learn to look the advancing revolution right in the face'; he was hanged at Schlisselburg at twenty-seven.