Natalya Armfeldt

Natalya Alexandrovna Armfeldt (Наталья Алексаӊдровӊа Армѳельдт) (1850-1887) was one of the first Russian revolutionaries to resort to political violence in opposition to the Tsar's regime. She was sentenced to hard labour and deported to Siberia, where she contracted tuberculosis.

Biography

Family

Natalya Armfeldt's father was Professor Alexander Armfeldt (1839-1897), one of Russia's leading specialists in cattle breeding. He arranged for her to study mathematics at Heidelburg University.[1]

Political

Natalya Armfeldt abandoned her studies in 1874, to join the movement among idealistic Russian students and graduates to leave the cities and 'go to the people' to learn about and try to improve the lives of the peasants. She joined an illegal socialist group in Moscow, and set out to a village in Orel province, but was arrested and deported back to Moscow. In 1875, she was exiled by administrative order to Kostroma. When her term of exile ended, in 1877, she settled illegally in Ukraine, and joined the Kiev buntari, or 'Southern Rebels', but was arrested with three other members of the group on 11 February 1879, after a gun battle with Kiev police in which a gendarme was killed and two of the rebels, Ivan Ivichevich and his brother, were fatally wounded. She was tried, with 13 other buntari and sentenced to 14 years and ten months hard labour.

Exile

Natalya Armfeldt was deported to the Kara katorga in eastern Siberia, close to the Chinese border, where she was among dozens of political prisoners forced to work in privately owned mines, in harsh conditions. She fell ill with tuberculosis. In 1883, she and two other prisoners were offered pardons if they would renounce their views and admit their 'errors'. She refused the offer. [2] In 1884, her mother, Anna Armfeldt appealed for help from Leo Tolstoy (the author of War and Peace) to get permission to settle in Kara to look after her daughter. Tolstoy wrote to his aunt, Alexandrine, who was well connected at the court of the Tsar Alexander III, asking her to take up the case, but permission was not granted.[3]. But in 1885, she was released from work in the mines, but confined to political exile in the Kara district.[4]

Anna Armfeldt then approached the American explorer George Kennan, who had a commission to survey Siberia, and persuaded him to smuggle a manuscript copy of Tolstoy's banned Confession to her daughter.[5] Kennan carried out the assignment early in November 1885, giving the authorities the slip in order to visit the 'miserable' cabin where she lived. She asked him to return that evening, by which time she had assembled a group of political exiles, who shared their stories with Kennan. This meeting inspired Kennan's classic study, Siberia and the Exile System, which first alerted opinion abroad to the ill-treatment of Russia's political prisoners.[6]

She died of tuberculosis in exile in 1887.

References

  1. ↑ Shmidt, O. Yu (chief editor) N.I.Bukharin; et al. (1926). Большая советская энциклопедия volume 3. Moscow: Акционерное общество “советская энциклопедия„. pp. 404–5.
  2. ↑ Shmidt, O. Yu; et al. Большая советская энциклопедия volume 3. p. 405.
  3. ↑ Bartlett, Rosamund (2010). Tolstoy, a Russian Life. London: Profile Books. pp. 312–13. ISBN 978 1 84668 138 7.
  4. ↑ Shmidt, O.Yu.; et al. Большая советская энциклопедия volume 3. p. 405.
  5. ↑ Bartlett, Rosamund. Tolstoy. p. 350.
  6. ↑ Kennan, George (1891). Siberia and the Exile System. New York: The Century Co.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.