First woman to lead the Ukrainian Bolshevik party; delegate to all seven Comintern congresses
February 1917, Ekaterinoslav. The revolution, Gopner recalled, arrived in the city 'by telegraph.' Barely a year back from exile, she rushed straight to the Bolshevik committee and the editorial office of Zvezda.
The first woman to lead the Ukrainian Bolshevik party. From 1903 onward she moved across underground work, civil war, and the Comintern stage, serving as a delegate to all seven congresses. She survived the Great Terror and spent her later years as a historian.
Career Timeline
- 1901Began work in illegal Social Democratic circles in Odessa
- 1903Joined the RSDLP; sided with the Bolshevik faction
- 1905Member, then secretary, of the Ekaterinoslav Party Committee
- 1910–16Exile in France: Paris Bolshevik group, French Socialist Party, Bern women's socialist conference
- 1916–17Returned to Russia; underground work in Irkutsk, Ekaterinoslav, Bryansk; edited Zvezda
- 1918Secretary of the CC of the CP(b)U — first woman to lead the party
- 1919–20Deputy Commissar of Education of Ukraine; head of instructor courses, 12th Army Political Directorate
- 1920–25Head of Agitprop for Ekaterinoslav, Moscow, Donetsk, and Kharkov gubernia committees
- 1925–27Head of the press subsection, Women's Department of the CC of the AUCP(b)
- 1927–38Member of the CC of the CP(b)U; editor of Vseukrainsky Proletary, deputy editor of Kommunist
- 1928–43Candidate member of the ECCI; delegate to all seven Comintern congresses
- 1938–45Deputy editor of Istorichesky Zhurnal
- 1945–66Senior researcher at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism; Doctor of Historical Sciences
- 1960Awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labour
Related historical events
The Comintern Years (1928–1943)
Gopner holds a unique place in Comintern history. From the First Congress in 1919 through the Seventh in 1935, she was the sole figure to attend every Comintern world congress as a delegate of the Ukrainian Communist Party: from the founding to the last gathering before dissolution. She served as a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) from 1928 to 1943 and held a responsible staff position in the Comintern apparatus in Moscow from 1928 to 1938.
During her decade in the Comintern apparatus, she handled liaison with fraternal parties, production of propaganda materials, and international solidarity work among women's movements. Through the Comintern's shift from the "class against class" line of the early 1930s to the anti-fascist Popular Front, she remained a mainstay of the Ukrainian delegation.
The Great Terror reached the Comintern apparatus in 1937, and Gopner was caught in its wake. That year her former husband Emanuel Kvirring, a former secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, was arrested and executed. Gopner was dismissed from the Comintern apparatus and expelled from the Central Committee of the CP(b)U. Her niece Raisa Sapiro, who had married Kvirring after the divorce, received an eight-year camp sentence as a "family member of a traitor to the Motherland." Gopner herself survived. She was saved, in the assessment of contemporaries, by her unswerving loyalty to the party line since 1917, her lack of any factional past, and a temperament that made her, in the end, someone seen as personally harmless.
In 1938 Gopner left the Comintern for good and turned to historical scholarship. The international experience she had accumulated in the Comintern became a vital resource for her subsequent work as a historian.