Vera Figner: Memoirs of
a Revolutionist
Introduction
by Richard Stites, Northern Illinois University Press, 1991, 314 pages, no
index
I
assumed by purchasing a first edition (1927) that I could forgo the predictable editorial bias which unnecessarily abounds in the introductions of reprint biographies. Amazon listed the book as a first edition
when it is a reprint done in 1991, but it’s just as well because I learned the
first edition would have cost well over $100. I’m still satisfied because I’ve
always been curious about one of Russia’s most notorious early revolutionaries
who peaked in 1881 with the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Released in 1904
after spending 21 years in the Peter and Paul Fortress and Schlüsselburg
Fortress, she lived to the ripe old age of 90.
Richard
Stites appears to be a kindred spirit of Figner’s: “Vera Figner’s path to
radicalism was very slow and by no means predetermined by something in her
character”; she harbored a “Christian vision of heaven”; she exhibited an “early
and sincere Christianity”; she was “driven into revolt.” On the other hand, Figner
wears the Christian cloak too comfortably. She reminisced about: “my childhood
Christian traditions”; her love for humanity and mankind; Christ’s
“self-sacrificing love”; saintliness; spiritual qualities; altruism; “my spirit”; “my
soul”; “a place sanctified”. She even
uses “verily”and rehashes the old leftist heresy that Christ was the first
revolutionary who was, theoretically, on the same level as any bomb thrower.
Stites must
have fallen for all this either because he believed her or was a Leftist
himself, but there is a chink in Figner’s saintly armor. She said the Gospels, “. . . did not satisfy
my mood” and “. . . I read words, phrases, but without comprehending their
meaning and significance. . . .” At
last, she confessed: “But I, too, had my God, my religion: the religion of
liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Could this have been another installment of
the fashionable Social Gospel engulfing Europe?
If so, Figner’s version, as a member of the Executive Committee of the
People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya), is instructive. Its by-laws forbade love and
friendship and dethroned marriage. The
end justifies the means in the Kingdom of Man.
Her exploits center around dynamite and nitroglycerin, stabbing, the
revolver, and blowing up people. Words
like extermination, assassination, terror, and annihilation are used liberally.
And
why does Vera Figner wear the Christian cloak when she was a Jew? The word is not found in the book much less
any coverage of Jewish disproportional involvement in People’s Will, in its
Executive Committee, or even in Russian terrorism in general that preceded the
assassination of Alexander II. The list
is long: Sofia Ginsburg, Vera Zasulich, Paul Axelrod, Leo Deutsch, Mark
Natanson, Sofia Perovskaya, Gregory Goldenberg, Gesya Helfman. The roots of Russian anti-Semitism are deep
and it would be instructive to explore their reactionary origins.
Implicit
in the Figner story is her deception and the elevation of Saint-Simonism, a heresy affecting both Jew and Gentile that popularized Socialism and led to Communism which killed
over 100 million people.Vera Figner was the forerunner and model for the new
Social Gospel which went on to justify the antics of America’s 1960s SDS,
Weathermen, militant civil rights leaders, and continues to animate our hoards
of anti-Christian Progressives.
