27 Facts About Elena Stasova

Elena Stasova worked as a teacher during her youth and came to embrace revolutionary politics.

Elena Stasova continued her revolutionary activities in Russia, Switzerland and Finland despite frequent threats of imprisonment and deportation.

Elena Stasova was named secretary and alternate member of the Central Committee, but by 1920 she had been fully frozen out of Soviet power.

Elena Stasova was born in Saint Petersburg in 1873, the youngest of five children, in an eminent noble family.

Elena Stasova was educated at home until the age of 13, and then at the prestigious Tagantsev private school for girls.

Elena Stasova joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party at the time of its establishment in 1898, her main contribution being to use her parents' house to store illegal socialist literature.

Elena Stasova set up in private practice, and was defence counsel in numerous political trials, including the trial of Dmitry Karakozov, the first of the revolutionaries to attempt to assassinate Alexander II, the Trial of the 50, which was the first political trial to be held in public in Russia, and at Russia's largest political trial, the Trial of the 193.

Elena Stasova was arrested in 1880, by order of the Tsar, and banished from St Petersburg for a time.

Elena Stasova served as the conduit for Lenin's newspaper, Iskra, in St Petersburg, until her arrest in January 1904, which forced her to leave the capital and hide in Minsk.

Elena Stasova taught new members how to encode and decode.

In spring 1904, Elena Stasova was appointed secretary of the Northern Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee.

Elena Stasova was released on bail in December 1904, and returned to St Petersburg, where she took over as secretary of the city Bolshevik organisation, and later as secretary of the Central Committee.

Elena Stasova emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland in August 1905, to run the Bolshevik organisation abroad while Lenin was in Russia for the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Elena Stasova returned to St Petersburg in January 1906 and then moved to Finland to organise arms smuggling, and to assist in organising the Congress in Stockholm that was supposed to unify the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the RSDRP.

In January 1912, Elena Stasova was elected as an alternate member of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee.

Elena Stasova was then secretary to the party's Russian bureau.

Elena Stasova was allowed to return to St Petersburg in autumn 1916, and was arrested there and held in a police station overnight in February 1917, but released in the morning because of the outbreak of the February Revolution.

Elena Stasova was returned as an alternate member of the Bolshevik Central Committee by the 6th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1917.

Elena Stasova was the only woman elected to full membership on the CC by the 7th Congress of 1918 and the 8th Congress of 1919.

Elena Stasova was appointed Comintern representative to the Communist Party of Germany in May 1921, where she used the pseudonym "Hertha".

Elena Stasova remained in Germany through 1926, where she played a leading role in the German affiliate of the International Red Aid organization, Die Rote Hilfe.

Elena Stasova served as a member of the Central Control Commission of the Russian Communist Party from 1930 to 1934 and in 1935 the 7th World Congress of the Comintern named her a member of the International Control Commission.

Elena Stasova was dismissed from her post on MOPR five days later, on 16 November 1937.

Elena Stasova continued in this role until 1946, when she retired.

Elena Stasova wrote later that the words "slipped out" and that it was "a grave political mistake" on her part.

Elena Stasova made very few public appearances after retiring, but in 1961, she was one of four Old Bolsheviks who signed an appeal to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the posthumous rehabilitation of Nikolai Bukharin.

Elena Stasova died on 31 December 1966 at Moscow and was laid in an urn by the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.