Defiant Life of Vera Figner, Encounters: Explorations in Folklore and Ethnomusicology

A “riveting” biography of a Russian noblewoman turned revolutionary terrorist and accomplice in the assassination of a tsar (The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review).

Born in 1852 in the last years of serfdom, Vera Figner came of age as Imperial Russian society was being rocked by the massive upheaval that culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. At first a champion of populist causes and women’s higher education, which she herself pursued as a medical student in Zurich, Figner later became a leader of the terrorist party the People’s Will—and was an accomplice in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

Drawing on extensive archival research and careful reading of Figner’s copious memoirs, Lynne Ann Hartnett reveals how Figner survived the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin's Great Purges and died a lionized revolutionary legend as the Nazis bore down on Moscow in 1942.