Vera Figner is one of the outstanding figures of the old Russian revolutionary movement. Born in 1852 into a prosperous noble family, she was educated at the exclusive Smolny Institute, married a young lawyer of the same circle as herself, then - at the age of twenty - suddenly decided to study medicine abroad, and so by quick stages found herself in the revolutionary ranks. "From my twenty-fourth year my life was linked exclusively with the destinies of the Russian revolutionary movement." She was among the founders of the "Land and Freedom" group, to whom practically the whole of Russian political rebellion can be traced; she spent her time partly as a midwife in the depths of the country and partly as an active conspirator. Soon the latter function absorbed all her energies; and she became a prime mover in the terroristic enterprises which culminated in the assassinations of the Tsar Alexander II. and various unpopular officials. No events had so focused the attention of the world on Russian conditions, though it is probable that the outrages rather hindered than hastened the political emancipation of the people. The psychology of the Terrorists, however, may be gauged from Vera Figner's own words (she is referring to the attempt of a young Terrorist, Halturin, to blow up the Winter Palace):-
"A terrible explosion occurred at the moment when the Imperial family entered the dining-room. On the floor directly over the basement, where the bodyguard of the Finland regiment was quartered, fifty soldiers were mutilated and killed. . . . But the Royal family remained unhurt. Directly after this the dictatorship of Loris-Melikov was declared. He was greeted by the shot of Molodetsky, who died on the scaffold three or four days later with the smile of a hero. Society, at any rate its more intelligent element, greeted our activity with great enthusiasm, and offered us sympathetic aid and ardent approval."
The last sentence demonstrates effectively how far removed these Terrorists were from any objective comprehension of public opinion.
The assassination of Alexander II. was the supreme achievement of Vera Figner's group. They took a shop on a street often used by the Tsar's carriage and dug a mine under the road. To escape suspicion they pretended to conduct a dairy business, transferring the excavated earth in butter barrels. On the chosen day, however, the Tsar took another route; but on his return journey a bomb was flung at his carriage by one of the Terrorists. He was unharmed, but, alighting to aid an injured guard, was blown to pieces by another bomb. For this outrage Sophie Perovskaya and several others of the group were executed, but Vera Figner at first escaped capture. She soon became the only member of the Terrorist committee left on Russian soil. Before long she was betrayed to the police by a colleague who had entered their service; and she was condemned to death in 1884. This sentence was soon commuted to hard labour for life; and Vera Figner was incarcerated in the fortress of Schlusselburg, where she remained for twenty years. In 1904 she was released from this prison and exiled to Siberia.
The half of the book which deals with her confinement in the fortress is a most interesting document. There were few of her fellow-prisoners who sustained that dreadful punishment as staunchly as she. Some killed themselves; some struck prison officials in order to be executed, rather than face any longer the horrors of their life; most of those who survived had become mentally deranged. But Vera Figner seems to have been saved by the very narrowness of her nature; a woman of one idea, she was sustained always by the thought that she still served the cause of the revolution. Despite all the tortures - moral rather than physical - of the prison she studied continually, adding to her medical training a knowledge of botany, geology, paleontology, mineralogy, and, above all, of gardening. A single attempt at a hunger strike failed of its purpose, since, though she never wavered in her determination to die by this means, the threat of two of her companions to commit suicide if she died made her abandon it. She and her fellow-prisoners became so expert at mounting plants for herbariums that specimens of their work were officially exhibited at the Paris Exhibition, although, of course, without mention of the circumstances in which it was done. Her greatest prison grief came thus;-
"In thirteen years the ties of relationship had weakened, memories grew dim, feelings towards relatives changed, had become distorted. When I learned that my favourite uncle had died, I felt merely regret. It is difficult to admit what a cold, purely rational regret that was. But when the little bird that lived in the cell with me had a convulsion and died, I experienced a great and genuine sorrow. The bird was tame, it sat on my shoulder, pecked at berries from my hands. I could cover its soft warm body with the palm of my hand; it chirped on my table and happily splashed water in all directions when it bathed in the basin of the water pipe. When it died I cried for a whole fortnight. I could not look without weeping at the peg where it had usually perched to sleep. In order to stop this flow of tears, I had to ask the inspector to transfer me to another cell for a time."
The book ends abruptly with her release from Schlusselburg and her meeting with her mother, brother, and sisters, after twenty years. Since Dostoevsky's description of his experiences in Siberia, there have been few such remarkable documents of prison life as this. Vera Figner writes without making any deliberate appeal to the reader's sympathy. Indeed her cold-blooded attitude towards political assassination creates a feeling of repulsion which chills sympathy. But this is doubtless what she herself wishes to happen, and her remarkable book is a real contribution to the study of human nature.
