People

Narodnaya Volya Narodniks 1852–1942 ○ Natural causes

Last survivor of the Narodnaya Volya Executive Committee who spent 20 years in solitary confinement and wrote its definitive memoir

"I often wondered: could my life have ended in anything other than the dock? And every time I answered: no!" — at the 'Trial of the 14,' 1884

Born into a noble family in Kazan Governorate, Figner studied medicine at the University of Zurich, where she joined the revolutionary 'Fritsche' circle. Elected to the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya in 1879, she helped plan Alexander II's assassination and was the only committee member to evade arrest after the 1881 attack. Betrayed in 1883, she spent 20 years in solitary confinement at Shlisselburg, then wrote the memoir 'Запечатлённый труд' (Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 1921–22), a definitive primary source on the revolutionary movement. Though she never joined the Bolshevik Party, she remained in the USSR and during the Great Purge wrote appeals to Stalin seeking clemency for old comrades.

Narodnaya Volya Narodniks 1854–1946 ○ Natural causes

Narodnaya Volya theorist of terror who became a scientist during 25 years in prison

At a sanatorium in the mid-1930s, when asked "Are there any Party members here?", the old man replied: "I am a Party member. Member of the 'Narodnaya Volya' Party."

Nikolai Morozov was a member of the Narodnaya Volya Executive Committee and a leading theorist of revolutionary terrorism in Russia. In his 1880 pamphlet The Terrorist Struggle, written in Geneva, he argued that small independent terrorist groups could bring down the autocracy, a position his comrades considered radical but which left a lasting mark on the terrorist strategy of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. After 25 years of imprisonment in the Peter and Paul and Shlisselburg fortresses, he emerged from amnesty in 1905 a transformed figure, devoting himself to the popularization of science, pioneering Russian aviation, and becoming an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1932.