Yelizaveta Nikolayevna Kovalskaya (; June 17 (29), 1849 or 1851 – 1943) was a Russian revolutionary, narodnik, and founding member of
Black Repartition
Black Repartition (; also known as Black Partition) was a revolutionary populist organization in Russia in the early 1880s.
Black Repartition (BR) was established in August-September 1879 after the split of Zemlya i volya (Land and Liberty). The ...
.
Early life
Kovalskaya was born near
Kharkiv
Kharkiv ( uk, wikt:Харків, Ха́рків, ), also known as Kharkov (russian: Харькoв, ), is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine.serf, who belonged to her father, Colonel Solntsev. When she was aged about seven, she confronted her father, having just learnt that "there were landowners and peasant serfs in the world, that landowners could sell people, that my father could separate my mother and me by selling her to one neighbouring landowner and me to another - but my mother could not sell my father." He agreed to free them both, and had them registered as free citizens, and arranged for her to be privately educated. When he unexpectedly died, he left his large estate to his illegitimate daughter. She used her new wealth to organise free higher education courses for women, and hired a lecturer named Yakov Kovalsky, whom she married but later divorced, until a police officer came and threatened to arrest them both unless they stopped.
Revolutionary life
Kovalskaya went on to join the ''Kharkov society'' for the promotion of literacy. She was inspired by the women's movement in the 1860s and so she was always interested in feminist and socialist views. Impressed by the work of Robert Owen, she used one of her inherited houses as a college for young women seeking education.
In 1869, she met
Sophia Perovskaya
Sophia Lvovna Perovskaya (russian: Со́фья Льво́вна Перо́вская; – ) was a Russian Empire revolutionary and a member of the revolutionary organization ''Narodnaya Volya''. She helped orchestrate the assassination of ...
and began attending her women's meeting, both joining
Zemlya i volya
Land and Liberty (russian: Земля и воля, Zemlya i volya Zemlia i volia; also sometimes translated Land and Freedom) was a Russian clandestine revolutionary organization in the period 1861–1864, and was re-established as a politica ...
(The Land and Liberty).
When
Zemlya i volya
Land and Liberty (russian: Земля и воля, Zemlya i volya Zemlia i volia; also sometimes translated Land and Freedom) was a Russian clandestine revolutionary organization in the period 1861–1864, and was re-established as a politica ...
split in 1879, Kovalskaya joined the
Black Repartition
Black Repartition (; also known as Black Partition) was a revolutionary populist organization in Russia in the early 1880s.
Black Repartition (BR) was established in August-September 1879 after the split of Zemlya i volya (Land and Liberty). The ...
, while her colleague Perovskaya joined
Narodnaya Volya
Narodnaya Volya ( rus, Наро́дная во́ля, p=nɐˈrodnəjə ˈvolʲə, t=People's Will) was a late 19th-century revolutionary political organization in the Russian Empire which conducted assassinations of government officials in an att ...
(''The Peoples Will''). Black Repartition rejected terrorism, while Narodnaya Volya felt that terrorist acts were an appropriate method in forcing reforms. Kovalskaya worked with Black Repartition to support a socialist propaganda campaign among workers and peasants.
In 1880, together with Nikolai Schedrin, she took part in organizing the Worker's Union of Southern Russia in Kiev. Although only involved in propaganda work, she was arrested in 1881, found guilty of being a member of an illegal organization and sentenced to an open-ended
katorga
Katorga ( rus, ка́торга, p=ˈkatərɡə; from medieval and modern Greek: ''katergon, κάτεργον'', " galley") was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (see Katorga labor in the Soviet Union). Prisone ...
in 1881. In 1882, Kovalskaya was transferred to the
Kara katorga
Kara katorga (Russian: Карийская каторга, Kariyskaya katorga) was the name for a set of katorga prisons of extremely high security located along the Kara River in Transbaikalia (a tributary of the Shilka River, flowing into it at ...
. During the next twenty years, she went through several
hunger strikes
A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke a feeling of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most ...
and made two unsuccessful prison escapes as well as knifed a prison guard. She and Sofya Bogomolets escaped together in February 1882, but were recaptured after about two weeks. According to the American journalist George Kennan, who visited Siberia in the 1880s and interviewed political exiles, a warden named Colonel Soloviev had the two women stripped naked in his presence, then told their male comrades that they were "not much to look at." Back in prison, Bogolomets protested by ripping up floorboards and was put in a straitjacket. Kovalskaya, who tried to prevent the wardens from binding her, was put in handcuffs. Shchedrin, who was in the same prison, punched Soloviev in the face, for which he was sentenced to death, though the sentence was commuted, and he was chained to a wheelbarrow. In , she refused to stand up when the Governor General of the
Amur
The Amur (russian: река́ Аму́р, ), or Heilong Jiang (, "Black Dragon River", ), is the world's tenth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeastern China ( Inner Manchuria). The Amur proper is long, ...
region entered her cell. As a punishment, she was stripped naked by males soldiers, forced to wear the convict clothes of a common criminal, and taken 70 miles by stream in a small boat from Ust-Kara to a new place of deportation, Stretinsk. This set off a prolonged protest by other female political prisoners in Ust-Kara, which began with a sixteen day hunger strike and culminated in the flogging of a prisoner,
Nadezhda Sigida
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Sigida (russian: Наде́жда Константи́новна Сиги́да), née Malaxiano () (1862–1889), was a Russian revolutionary, heroine of the Kara katorga tragedy of 1889.
Background
Nadezhda Malaxiano wa ...
, and the deaths of five prisoners, who poisoned themselves in protest went on a sixteen day hunger strike in protest.
She was finally released in 1903, moving to
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
.
In 1918, Kovalskaya became a research worker at Petrograd Historical Revolutionary Archive and member of the editorial board of the ''Katorga and Exile'' magazine.
She had been married twice and there was never any mention of having children.