From a narodnik revolver to Marxist criticism, half a century of one woman's revolutionary life
On 31 March 1878, the jury returned a unanimous acquittal. The crowd lifted Zasulich onto their shoulders and marched through the streets of St. Petersburg. The tsarist government ordered her rearrest at once, but the shot she had fired already echoed across Europe.
In 1878 she shot St. Petersburg governor Trepov, and a jury acquitted her. That single shot detonated public fury against tsarist autocracy, and all Europe learned her name. Yet Zasulich was the first to grasp that terror was a dead end, and turned to Marxism. In 1883 she co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group (Russia's first Marxist organisation) with Plekhanov and Axelrod. She served on the Iskra editorial board, represented Russia at three congresses of the Second International, and became one of Russia's earliest Marxist literary critics. A Menshevik, she opposed the October Revolution of 1917 and died of pneumonia under Bolshevik rule.
Career Timeline
- 1869–73Arrested in the Nechaev affair; imprisoned and exiled
- 1875–77Active in the Bakuninist Southern Rebels circle
- 1878Shoots Trepov; unanimous jury acquittal becomes international cause célèbre
- 1879–80Co-founds Black Repartition; re-emigrates
- 1883Co-founds Emancipation of Labour, the first Russian Marxist group
- 1896–1904Russian delegate to three congresses of the Second International
- 1900–03Editorial board member of Iskra and Zarya
- 1903–17Menshevik leader; later a liquidationist
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One of Russia's First Marxist Literary Critics
Zasulich was one of the first Marxist literary critics in Russia. Her work reinterpreted and carried forward the tradition of revolutionary democratic criticism (Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov) through a Marxist lens. For her, literary criticism was not merely aesthetic judgment; it was a practice that shaped social consciousness.
During her years of exile in Geneva and London, she produced an extensive body of writing. Published in 1893, her Voltaire: His Life and Literary Work was the first Russian biography of Voltaire and the first attempt to interpret the Enlightenment philosopher from a Marxist standpoint. In 1898, she published Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An Essay on His Social Ideas. Both works were later published in Russia, albeit with large censorship cuts.
Her long 1900 essay "Dmitri Pisarev" can also be read as the first theoretical statement of the Emancipation of Labour group. In it, Zasulich assessed the legacy of the nihilist critic Pisarev from a Marxist perspective, tracing how the radical impulse toward individual liberation must be sublated into collective class struggle. She also published reviews and essays on Gleb Uspensky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky (who was also her comrade), Dobrolyubov, and Chernyshevsky in Novoe Slovo, Iskra, and Zarya. She sharply criticised Boborykin's novel Differently, arguing it distorted the essence of the debate between Marxists and the narodnik publicists.
Zasulich never entered the mainstream of Russian literary criticism. Her Menshevik politics and restrained scholarly prose kept her critical work largely forgotten during the Soviet period, but it was rediscovered with the 1960 publication of her collected Articles on Russian Literature. Her criticism remains a distinctive intellectual legacy: a fusion of revolutionary humanism and Marxist analysis.