25 Facts About Vera Figner

Vera Figner was arrested and spent 20 months in solitary confinement prior to trial, at which she was sentenced to death.

The sentence was commuted and Vera Figner was imprisoned in the Shlisselburg Fortress for 20 years before being sent into internal exile.

Vera Figner gained international fame in large part because of the widely translated memoir of her experiences.

Vera Figner was treated as a heroic icon of revolutionary sacrifice after the February Revolution in 1917 and was a popular public speaker during that year.

Vera Figner's father served in the state forestry service, resigning that post to become a local administrative functionary called a "peace mediator" in the years after emancipation.

Vera Figner was the sister of Lidija Figner and of the famous Russian tenor Nikolai Figner.

In 1863, at the age of eleven, Vera Figner was sent to the Rodionovsky Institute for Noble Girls in the city of Kazan, which she attended for the next six years.

Vera Figner proved to be an excellent student, taking a particular interest in history and literature, and received the prize given to the top academic performer upon her graduation in 1869.

Vera Figner desired to study medicine, which was not permitted in Russia following the closure to women of the St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy in the early 1860s.

In 1873, Vera Figner joined the Fritsche circle, which was composed of thirteen young Russian radical women, some of whom would become important members of the All-Russian Social Revolutionary Organization.

Vera Figner had trouble reconciling her new political view of herself as a parasitic member of the gentry with her previous view of herself as a good, innocent, person.

Vera Figner returned to Russia that year without getting her degree, but found herself unable to help the circle and so got a license as a paramedic and divorced her husband, where she became active with other revolutionary intellectuals in the Zemlya i Volya organization.

Vera Figner took part in the Kazan demonstration in St Petersburg in 1876.

Vera Figner aligned herself with the latter, terrorist wing, becoming a member of the group's executive committee, which in a proclamation later in 1879 called for the execution of Tsar Alexander II for crimes committed against the people of the Russian Empire.

Vera Figner participated in planning the assassination of the Tsar, including a failed attempt in 1880 in Odessa and the successful effort on March 1,1881, in St Petersburg.

Originally based in Odessa, Vera Figner later moved to Kharkov, where she was ultimately betrayed by fellow Executive Committee member Sergey Degayev, who turned police informer in order to lessen his punishment after his December 20,1882 arrest.

On February 10,1883, Vera Figner, characterized by police as "one of the most dangerous of the Central Committee of terrorists," was herself arrested at her Kharkov apartment.

In 1884 Vera Figner was sentenced to death, during the Trial of the Fourteen.

Vera Figner was instead imprisoned for 20 years in the fortress at Schlusselburg.

In 1904, Vera Figner was sent into internal exile to the Arkhangelsk guberniya, then Kazan guberniya, and finally Nizhny Novgorod.

Vera Figner spoke in European cities, collected money, published a brochure on Russian prisons translated into many languages.

In 1907 Vera Figner joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but left the organization in 1909 after the Azef scandal.

Vera Figner continued documenting her experiences with In Penal Servitude, which expanded on her time in prison, followed by After Penal Servitude, where she reflected on her life after release.

In 1932, Vera Figner's collected works were published in the Soviet Union by the publishing house of the Society of the Former Political Prisoners and Exiles in seven volumes.

Vera Figner was 89 years old at the time of her death.