Revolutionary, Terrorist, and Muse: Mariia Alekseevna Prokof’eva, 1883–1913

Abstract

This article uses a variety of published and archival sources to reconstruct the life of Mariia Alekseevna Prokof’eva (1883-1913), a member of the Combat Organization (i.e. terrorist wing) of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Largely overshadowed by her relationships with more famous male revolutionaries, including the terrorist-litterateur Boris Savinkov and, in particular, Egor Sozonov (the celebrated assassin of Viacheslav von Pleve in 1904), Prokof'eva’s revolutionary career has, to date, been overlooked almost entirely by historians. As this article shows, however, her biography serves as an exemplary microhistory of the origins, ascendancy and (after 1905) degeneration of Russian revolutionary terrorism, while shedding light on several interrelated (and still underexplored) issues: the role played by women in the Russian revolutionary movement generally and the terrorist subculture in particular, the moral and psychological profile of revolutionary terrorists, and the curious attraction such figures held for leading representatives of Russia’s literary and philosophical avantgarde.

Recent studies of the Russian revolutionary movement, and especially of the terrorist campaigns waged against the tsarist regime by the People’s Will organization (1878-81) and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (c. 1901-11), have devoted much attention to the role played by women.¹ Rooted in the struggle of the intelligentsia against the state, the Russian left differed significantly from its overwhelmingly male and proletarian European counterpart in terms of gender politics: women took leading roles on party committees, in terrorist cells, and as organizers, activists, and propagandists. Their practical contribution was matched by their impact in the cultural sphere. As one scholar has recently noted, Russian revolutionary women inspired fascination both at home and abroad around the turn of the nineteenth century for ‘their seemingly impossible combination of gender contradictions: brave and gentle, ruthless and self-sacrificing, murderous and saintly’.² By interweaving the key characteristics of the revolutionary underground myth (self-renunciation, devotion to the cause, and the willing embrace of suffering and martyrdom) with the appearance of modesty, chastity, and moral purity dictated by contemporary gender norms, female terrorists such as Vera Zasulich and Mariia Spiridonova emerged as leading proponents of what Susan Morrissey has termed the ‘moral economy’ of revolutionary violence, becoming symbolic of (and in the eyes of many contemporaries, legitimizing) the struggle against autocracy.³

This article examines the case of one woman who in her lifetime commanded great esteem in revolutionary circles, yet today is all but forgotten. As a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party’s Combat Organization (boevaia organizatsiia), Mariia Alekseevna Prokof’eva (1883-1913) took part in multiple terrorist conspiracies, stood trial for plotting to murder Tsar Nicholas II, endured Siberian exile and later emigration, and was on close personal terms with several of the most famous revolutionary leaders of the time. For her contemporaries, Prokof’eva’s personal attributes – physical beauty combined with an aura of spiritual profundity and moral seriousness – proved no less beguiling than the dramatic facts of her biography. Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, one of the founding members of the SR Party known to posterity as the ‘little grandmother of the Russian Revolution’, would later name her as one of four representatives of the younger generation (i.e. those who became involved in politics directly before and during the revolution of 1905) who possessed in greatest abundance the moral qualities of the revolutionary intelligentsia.⁴ The Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius considered her a ‘flower of humanity’ whose personality and appearance evoked the image of divine harmony.⁵ Following her death from tuberculosis at the age of just 30, an obituary that appeared in an SR newspaper described Prokof’eva as a faithful servant of the revolution and ‘selflessly devoted to the people’s freedom’. ‘We draw solace from the fact’, the author wrote, ‘that this marvellous Russian girl, pure of heart and lofty of soul, lived among us and fought alongside us.’⁶

Despite this apparent magnetism, Prokof’eva’s revolutionary career has evaded scholarly attention. Unlike her more famous contemporaries such as Spiridonova or Mariia Shkol’nik, Prokof’eva committed no famous act of terror, and left neither memoirs nor any other kind of written testament. As a result, she is nowadays known only to specialists as a minor character in the outsized biographies of more famous male revolutionaries, including the notorious terrorist-litterateur Boris Savinkov and, above all, Egor Sozonov, the assassin of Interior Minister Viacheslav von Pleve in 1904, with whom she was romantically involved. In both contemporary sources and more recent studies Prokof’eva is represented as Sozonov’s wide-eyed fiancé who ‘counted down the days and hours’ during his years in prison and exile, then ‘took to her bed, faded away and died’ of a broken heart after his suicide in 1910.⁷ Such a treatment, of course, scarcely does her justice.

The first half of this article reconstructs the facts of Prokof’eva’s biography as fully as possible on the basis of published and hitherto unexamined archival sources. The second half challenges the mythologized image of Prokof’eva outlined above and seeks to recover her subjecthood through a close reading of her correspondence with Sozonov, which was published in the 1930s but, to date, has received no more than a passing mention in the literature.⁸ By treating Prokof’eva’s life as a microhistory of the Russian revolutionary movement in the early twentieth century, the article furthers our understanding of several understudied and contentious issues, including the moral and psychological profile of revolutionary terrorists – a topic that has generated no little controversy in the literature⁹ – and the curious attraction such figures held for members of Russia’s Silver Age avantgarde. It also reveals, on a methodological level, something of the challenges involved in writing the histories of revolutionary women, whose voices are often marginalized in the sources.

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Mariia Prokof’eva was born on 25 March 1883 in the town of Ufa in the southern Urals, the eldest of three children in a prosperous family of Old Believer merchants.¹⁰ Her mother died when she was young and she was raised by her father, a merchant of the second guild. A plain-spoken and physically imposing man externally typical of his social estate, Aleksei Kirillovich Prokof’ev was by all accounts an indulgent father who allowed his children a great deal of freedom.¹¹ He also belonged to that part of the Old Believer community that still harboured, several centuries after the Nikonian reforms, a certain hostility towards the tsarist regime. Later in life, he would become an active supporter of the revolutionary movement.¹² Thanks to her father’s affluence and social connections, Mariia received a first-rate education for what was available to young women in Russia at the time, first as a student of the selective and highly regarded Mariinskaia women’s gymnasium in Ufa (1895-1902), and then as an auditor (slushatel’nitsa) of the Lesgaft women’s courses in St Petersburg from 1902.¹³

In the summer of 1898, aged fifteen, Prokof’eva was introduced to Egor Sozonov, four years her elder (born 1879) and the second son of another Ufa Old Believer merchant family with whom the Prokof’evs were socially connected.¹⁴ Their meeting would decisively influence her life. The two quickly became close, but their budding romance was interrupted when Sozonov left to enrol in the medical faculty of Moscow University that autumn. At university, Sozonov, despite being the product of a strictly religious and monarchist upbringing, was inexorably drawn into the radical student movement of the time. Two years later, in 1901, he was expelled for his involvement in student protests.¹⁵ Upon his return home, his mother later recalled, Sozonov changed beyond recognition, becoming ‘extremely interested in revolutionary literature, associating with socialists and political exiles and dedicating himself entirely to his new cause’.¹⁶ Around this time, he renewed his acquaintance with Prokof’eva. It was through him that she initially became involved in revolutionary activism, first in Ufa and, from 1902, in St Petersburg.¹⁷

The revolutionary organization to which Sozonov and Prokof’eva gravitated was the Ural Union of Social Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries (Ural’skii soiuz sotsial-demokratov i sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov). One of numerous neo-populist groups that predated the official formation of the SR Party in 1902, the Union was founded in June 1901 by Breshkovskaia and Grigorii Gershuni, and boasted committees in Ufa, Zlatoust, Ekaterinburg, Perm’, and Viatka. Comprised mostly of urban intelligentsia, it represented a marriage of convenience between SRs and moderate Social Democrats of the ‘economist’ persuasion, and was therefore somewhat inchoate ideologically.¹⁸ Claiming to ‘proceed from the principles of scientific socialism’, it emphasized the need for workers’ self-emancipation (in contrast to the Leninist line) and called for political freedom, an assembly of the land (zemskii sobor) and an eight-hour working day.¹⁹ Also of interest, given that several of the Union’s members would later join the SR Combat Organization, is the ambivalent stance it adopted on the question of terror, rejecting assassinations as a means of political struggle while reserving the right to carry out one-off reprisals against tyrannical government officials. This position was somewhat at odds with that adopted by the SR leadership, which viewed terror simultaneously as a sort of retributive justice and as ‘propaganda of the deed’ that raised the political consciousness of the working masses.²⁰ The head of the Union’s Ufa committee was Vasilii Leonovich, a minor nobleman of Polish descent who had been involved in revolutionary activities since the 1890s and would go on to serve as a member of both the SR Central Committee and one of the party’s most notorious terrorist groups, the Northern Combat Flying Squad (Severnyi letuchii boevoi otriad).²¹ An experienced conspirator and charismatic leader, Leonovich exerted considerable influence on those around him. Sozonov would later describe him as a ‘friend and mentor’ and credit him with much of his moral and political development.²² Leonovich, in turn, remembered both Sozonov and Prokof’eva with affection in later years. In 1913, he wrote the obituary for Prokof’eva that appeared in the party newspaper Znamia truda (Banner of Labour).

Prokof’eva's initiation into revolutionary action proper came in April 1903, when government troops acting under orders from Ufa governor-general N. M. Bogdanovich opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of striking factory workers in the town of Zlatoust (some 200 miles east of Ufa), killing 69 and wounding several hundred more. The massacre, which came less than a year after the violent suppression of large-scale peasant revolts in Ukraine and preceded the notorious Kishinev pogroms of 1903 by mere weeks, prompted outrage. In response, the SRs plotted to kill Bogdanovich, and on 6 May 1903, Egor Dulebov – an Ufa railwayman recruited to the Union by Sozonov two years earlier – approached the governor in a local park, produced a revolver, and fired six shots, killing him instantly.²³ Although it is known that Prokof’eva, who weeks earlier had interrupted her university studies (ostensibly for personal reasons) and returned to Ufa,²⁴ took part in this conspiracy, details of her involvement are scarce. She was apparently keen to carry out the assassination herself, but, in line with the SRs’ unofficial policy at the time of assigning women to secondary roles in terrorist operations, was instead tasked with smuggling Gershuni (the head of the Combat Organization who had arrived from overseas to supervise the assassination, and one of the most wanted men in Russia) out of Ufa under the noses of the police.²⁵ This she successfully accomplished, albeit to little avail. Weeks later, Gershuni was arrested in Kyiv, an event that came as a major blow to the SR leadership and which paved the way for the ascendancy of the notorious double agent Evno Azef, who replaced Gershuni as head of the Combat Organization.

Despite Gershuni’s ostensible involvement, it would appear that the initiative behind this plot came not from the SR leadership, but from the Ufa SRs themselves.²⁶ In this respect, the assassination of Bogdanovich might be seen as a sign of things to come from 1906 onwards, when the party leadership in effect ceded control of terrorist operations to local committees. Yet the events of April-May 1903 had far more immediate consequences, not least the radicalizing effect they produced on some of those involved. Having been arrested the previous year, Sozonov was in prison at the time of the Zlatoust massacre and therefore played no part in Bogdanovich’s killing. As he would later acknowledge, however, it was Zlatoust above all which convinced him that violent attacks against the state were justified.²⁷ In the winter of 1903, he escaped from exile in Siberia, went overseas, and enlisted in the Combat Organization. Several months later, on 15 July 1904, he entered the annals of revolutionary history when he assassinated Interior Minister V. K. Pleve in a bomb attack outside St Petersburg’s Varshavskii train station. Just over a week later, Prokof’eva disappeared from Ufa, having been alerted by the SRs as to the identity of Pleve’s assassin, which at the time was still unknown to the Okhrana. On 31 July, when the police, having finally ascertained Sozonov’s identity and thereby identified Prokof’eva as a likely co-conspirator, arrived to search her family home, they found no trace of her.²⁸ From this point onwards she lived underground and was wanted by the authorities, with instructions telegraphed to gendarme commands across the empire that she be placed under ‘the most thorough surveillance’ if located.²⁹ Despite this, she succeeded in evading detection and capture until early the following year.

After leaving Ufa, Prokof’eva headed south to the Caucasus, where, during the autumn and winter of 1904-05, she helped to establish an SR committee in Baku, acting, among other things, as their emissary to the party leadership in emigration.³⁰ A bustling metropolis based economically on oil and the railways, Baku was as far removed from the SRs’ peasant heartlands socially and economically as it was geographically. In a bid to adapt to local conditions, the SRs sought to exploit ethnic tensions between the Armenian and Azeri populations (the major threat to social stability in the region at the time) by plotting to kill the city’s governor, M. N. Nakashidze, a nobleman of Georgian extraction who had incurred the hatred of the Armenian population by tacitly supporting Azeri pogroms. This plot never came to fruition, since Prokof’eva and the other members of the committee were arrested in February 1905. Upon searching her flat, which served as the group’s headquarters, the police discovered ‘forged passport stamps, masses of revolutionary literature and a proclamation stating that Governor Nakashidze had been killed by order of the Combat Organization’.³¹ After this arrest (her first), Prokof’eva spent several months in prison, but was later amnestied by the imperial manifesto of October 1905. After her release, she returned to Ufa and lived ‘legally’ for a time but, in practice, continued to do party work, some of it scarcely less dangerous than the terrorist plots in which she had hitherto been involved. One mission she undertook is worth recounting here both for its biographical significance, inasmuch as it shows her to have been already by this time an important party activist, and for what it reveals about the compromises revolutionaries were obliged to reach between the necessities of political work and their personal interests, a topic to which this article will later return.

Several years earlier, in the summer of 1903, Prokof’eva had obtained a meeting with Sozonov in an Ufa prison by posing as his fiancé. Since the two had indeed been romantically involved years earlier, this was not a complete fabrication, but nonetheless provided a convenient cover that enabled her to act as an intermediary between Sozonov and the local SR organization. The ruse provided her with access to Sozonov that the party leadership remained keen to exploit, all the more so from 1906 onwards when he was transferred from the Shlissel’burg fortress to Akatui, a prison in Eastern Siberia that formed part of the Nerchinsk hard labour (katorga) complex and which, at the time, was home to many of the highest-profile political prisoners in Russia, including Gershuni, Petr Karpovich (the assassin of Bogolepov in 1901) and Mariia Spiridonova, the ‘blessed Virgin Mary of the SRs’ whose assassination of a Tambov security official and subsequent mistreatment in prison had made her a national celebrity months earlier. That autumn, Prokof’eva duly travelled to Akatui at the behest of the Central Committee, again posing as Sozonov’s fiancé (a status that, under the prison regulations of the time, allowed her to come and go from the prison virtually without restrictions) to make arrangements for Gershuni’s escape. Spiridonova, who mentions this episode in her memoirs, was one of many struck as much by Prokof’eva’s physical appearance – her ‘huge, radiant grey-green eyes, stern expression [and] pale, thin, translucent face’ – as by her moral qualities: she was, as Spiridonova wrote, ‘utterly gentle, spiritually radiant and, at the same time, stern and serious’.³²

Prokof’eva’s mission was a success. In October 1906, Gershuni was smuggled out of Akatui concealed, somewhat improbably, in a barrel of sauerkraut and escaped from Siberia, managing another year of intense political activity before succumbing to tuberculosis early in 1908. The service Prokof’eva rendered to the party leadership in facilitating his escape paid dividends for her two months later, when, upon her return to Russia, she was accepted into the newly-formed SR Central Combat Detachment (Tsentral’nyi Boevoi Otriad). Led initially by Boris Savinkov’s protégé Lev Zil’berberg and, from February 1907, by Boris Nikitenko, a renegade officer of the Black Sea Fleet, this group was one of several intended to replace the original Combat Organization, disbanded earlier that same winter.³³ Yet inasmuch as this represented for Prokof’eva the fulfilment of a personal ambition, it also entailed severe personal consequences for her and, more immediately, for her family.

Like other members of the Prokof’ev clan, the elder of Mariia’s two brothers, Nikolai, had long been sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. In February 1905, he had been expelled from the Ufa gymnasium for hosting a student meeting (skhodka) in his flat, and subsequently imprisoned for two months pending investigation of what the police somewhat euphemistically termed his ‘unreliability’ (neblagonadezhnost’). The harsh treatment he endured in prison, which included a period of solitary confinement, broke him physically and mentally, and by the winter of 1906 he had decided to go abroad for treatment. On 24 December, before leaving Russia, he made an unscheduled and unexplained visit to St Petersburg, a decision that his father would later attribute to ‘mere curiosity’ but which was evidently taken, in reality, to rendezvous with his sister, whose terrorist cell was then operating in the city and with whom, to judge from an eyewitness account, he seems to have met shortly after his arrival.³⁴ Shortly after this meeting, on the night of 26 December, suspicions were aroused when a gunshot, apparently from a mishandled pistol, was heard from Nikolai’s room in the Grand Hotel at 18–20 Gogol (now Malaia Morskaia) Street, leading to an armed standoff involving the police and soldiers from the nearby garrison that lasted several hours. Eventually Nikolai shot himself, apparently after burning various documents in his possession.

Neither contemporary published sources nor the archival evidence consulted in preparing this article provide any definitive explanation for this curious and tragic episode. In remarks quoted in the press, a ‘positively dumbfounded’ Aleksei Prokof’ev, who arrived from Ufa to help the Okhrana with their enquiries, sought to explain his son’s behaviour by claiming that he had been mentally unstable and terrified of the police, but offered no insight as to why he was armed at the time.³⁵ This explanation contrasts sharply with the view taken by the Ufa gendarmes, who reported to the Interior Ministry early in 1907 that Nikolai’s treatment in prison had left him ‘deeply embittered’ and a ‘sworn enemy of the authorities’ who would ‘willingly accept any mission of a terrorist nature’.³⁶ Such an assessment seems exaggerated, since the available sources provide no evidence that Nikolai was ever a member of the Combat Organization or any other terrorist group. It is nonetheless plausible that a secondary, if not the primary, aim of his planned trip abroad was to contact the party’s émigré leadership on behalf of his sister's terror cell.

The heavy-handed police response described above may in part have been occasioned by the assassination, just days earlier, of V. F. von der Launitz, the military governor (gradonachal’nik) of St Petersburg – an assassination carried out by a member of Prokof’eva’s cell. After the killing of Launitz, the group began to focus its attention on higher-profile targets, among them Petr Stolypin and Nicholas II himself. Acting on information from both Azef and a member of the Tsar's security detail whom the conspirators had tried unsuccessfully to recruit, the Okhrana were fully aware of the group’s plans and, on 31 March 1907, carried out a series of arrests. The members of the cell and their alleged co-conspirators were held for several months in solitary confinement in the Trubetskoi bastion of the Peter-Paul Fortress; in August, some eighteen defendants were arraigned before the court of the St Petersburg Military District, charged with conspiracy to commit tsaricide and with belonging to a criminal organization.³⁷ The trial, which took place behind closed doors and was heard by a panel of military judges drawn from regular units with a view to avoiding accusations of ‘praetorianism’, lasted over a week (7-15 August). The defence counsel was provided by a group of young lawyers specializing in political cases (molodaia advokatura), chief among them Vasilii Maklakov, a leading Kadet politican who would later act for the defence in the 1913 Beilis case.³⁸

Prokof’eva made a powerful impression on those few who witnessed the trial. Named in the indictment as one of five ringleaders, she faced the death penalty and, apparently believing this outcome a foregone conclusion, refused – alone among the defendants – to give evidence, speak in her own defence, or even enter a plea. As one eyewitness later recalled:

She sat almost completely motionless in the front row of the dock, fixing her deep, brooding (vdumchivye) eyes on some point in the distance, her thoughts, by all appearances, a million miles from the court proceedings which seemed not to interest her in the slightest and represented for her no more than a pointless, empty formality. Despite her youth, one sensed in her … great conviction, sincerity and devotion to her ideals.³⁹

In passing, it is of some interest that this description bears a striking resemblance to (and may, perhaps, have inspired) the character of Musia in Leonid Andreev’s novella The Seven Who Were Hanged (Rasskaz o semi poveshennykh), written the following year.⁴⁰ Unlike her fictional counterpart, however, Prokof’eva – against all expectations – would ultimately escape the gallows.

All pathos aside, it should be noted that Prokof’eva's conduct during her trial actually differed significantly from the behavioural script to which most revolutionaries adhered before the tsarist courts, which involved actively, rather than passively, denying the legitimacy of the proceedings and lengthy, defiant proclamations of socialist ideals.⁴¹ Such as it was, the task of defending her fell to her lawyer, A. S. Zarudnyi (later Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government of 1917) and to her father, who was summoned as a character witness. In his testimony, Aleksei Prokof’ev took issue first and foremost with the wording of the indictment, which publicly identified his daughter as Sozonov's fiancé, the result of her repeated visits to him in prison under this guise. Insisting that this was merely a cover story adopted for conspiratorial purposes, he complained that his family, due to their association with the Sozonovs, had ‘suffered greatly from the repressions of the authorities’, which had led both Mariia and Nikolai to become involved in revolutionary activity. He nonetheless maintained that neither had ever belonged to a political party.⁴² This explanation may have had some effect on the judges, but not on the Okhrana, who remained suspicious of Prokof’ev’s own ties to the SRs and would later seek, albeit unsuccessfully, to take action against him.⁴³

In his closing statement, Zarudnyi went further, delivering an impassioned speech in which he likened Prokof’eva to an Orthodox altar lamp (lampada) ‘radiating peaceful light all around her’ and painted a Christ-like portrait of her moral virtues and ‘unlimited kindness’. ‘If she is convicted’, he concluded, ‘you will see in her eyes neither hatred nor malice, but forgiveness for those who condemned her; if she is acquitted, her eyes will be filled with gratitude and respect for your sense of justice.’⁴⁴ This attempt to juxtapose Prokof’eva's feminine virtues with the barbarous (and implicitly masculinized) autocratic state was in many respects typical of courtroom speeches defending female terrorists at the time.⁴⁵ The respect in which it perhaps most differed was in Zarudnyi's use of religious imagery, which, in view of Prokof’eva’s Old Believer family background, is itself of interest: he was neither the first nor the last observer to discern in her the aura of saintliness that surrounded many revolutionaries in the final decades of the Tsarist regime.⁴⁶

On 16 August, the sentences were handed down. Three of the accused, including the leader of the cell, Boris Nikitenko, were sentenced to death. The remaining fifteen defendants were sentenced to hard labour and, in Prokof’eva’s case, Siberian exile for life. The ‘plot against the Tsar’, as it became known, provoked a scandal among the SRs when the Central Committee issued a statement disavowing all knowledge of the conspiracy and suggesting that the whole affair was the result of provocation, a move that some party members interpreted as a sign of their leadership's cowardice.⁴⁷ In retrospect, it is clear that this statement was in fact among the first indications of the SRs’ growing suspicion that they had within their ranks a double agent and, indeed, was closer to the truth than even they suspected, since as would later become clear it was Azef who provided not only the initial information that led to the arrest of the plotters, but the crucial testimony accepted by the judges as proof that the accused were not (as they had claimed) merely sympathetic to the SR programme, but party members acting on direct orders from the leadership.⁴⁸ This may help to explain why, when Azef’s treachery was exposed in December 1908, Prokof’eva was one of just three members of the SR foreign organization to vote for his immediate execution without any further investigation or due process. The majority remained unable to accept proof of Azef’s guilt. Their vacillation played a decisive role in his escaping the party’s vengeance.⁴⁹

Prokof’eva did not stay long in Siberia. In March 1908 she escaped to Paris, at the time the major centre of the Russian revolutionary emigration. Shortly after her arrival, she renewed her acquaintance with Sozonov’s old comrade-in-arms Boris Savinkov, whom she had briefly met in Baku four years earlier.⁵⁰ Azef’s former second-in-command in the SR Combat Organization and the leader of the terrorist cell responsible for the killings of Pleve and the Grand Duke Sergei, Savinkov had since retired (albeit temporarily) from revolutionary activity after reaching the conclusion that the SR assassination campaign of 1901–05 had run its natural course. At the time of their reunion, he was living an indolent life as an émigré, dividing his time between Paris and the small Riviera town of Beaulieu-sur-Mer and mainly engaging in literary activity. Although initially not close, the two were drawn together in large part by their shared affection for Sozonov and other mutual acquaintances (notably Zil’berberg and Nikitenko, both of whom had helped engineer Savinkov’s daring escape from a military prison in Sevastopol two years earlier).⁵¹ In due course Prokof’eva would become an intimate friend, a near-constant member of Savinkov's entourage and (according to one account) his literary collaborator. Savinkov, in turn, would accept Prokof’eva as a member of his new terror cell – the final iteration of the SR Combat Organization – when he returned to revolutionary activity in 1909, and would later care for her during her final illness.

During this period Savinkov introduced Prokof’eva to various members of the Russian literary avant-garde then living in emigration. Among these the most important were the novelist and critic Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, the poet Zinaida Gippius (Merezhkovskii's wife), and Dmitrii Filosofov, an essayist who lived with them for many years and collaborated with them on several of their more notable philosophical works. The Merezhkovskiis lived in Paris’s fashionable 16th arrondissement at 15 Avenue Théophile Gautier, just two minutes’ walk from Savinkov's own apartment at 32 Rue Lafontaine. After Prokof’eva attended one of their soirées on 10 March, shortly after her escape from Siberia, Gippius wrote in her diary:

Spent the evening with the ‘killers’ … Savinkov, Dora Brilliant's husband, the widow of Launitz's assassin, Sergei Nikolaevich [Moiseenko], Evgeniia Ivanovna [Zil’berberg], a few others, and Sozonov’s fiancé – ‘the purest image of the purest grace’ (chisteishei prelesti chisteishii obrazets), a fugitive from Siberia … She’s utterly enchanting, with the face and figure of one of the martyrs of the first centuries.⁵²

To some extent the Merezhkovskiis’ attraction to Prokof’eva (as to the other members of the Combat Organization to whom Savinkov introduced them) reflected the thrill of socializing with dangerous terrorists. It also reflected their political and intellectual trajectory at the time. From around 1905, they co-authored a series of pamphlets and essays in which they sought to reinterpret much of the Russian literary and intellectual tradition in eschatological terms and, moreover, to promote a ‘revolutionary Christianity’ of their own conception, arguing that the revolutionary assault on the tsarist regime (which stemmed, in their view, from a synthesis of the intelligentsia's unacknowledged religious idealism with the rebelliousness of the peasantry first expressed in the church schism of the mid-1600s) would, in due course, usher in the kingdom of God on earth.⁵³ Both on this intellectual level and as literary mentors they exerted an important if somewhat fleeting influence on Savinkov, whom they met in 1907 and quickly identified as a leading proponent of their religious-revolutionary dialectic. They seem to have done likewise with Prokof’eva, who, no less than Savinkov himself, embodied their idea of what Russian revolutionaries ought to be on a spiritual and intellectual level. In 1914, a year after Prokof’eva’s death, Gippius described her as ‘a magnificent figure, with such depth to her soul … beautiful and precious in her gradualism, her faith in the path of spiritual progress (voskhozhdenie), her inner struggles’.⁵⁴

For her part, Prokof’eva seems to have adopted, if not uncritically, some of the Merezhkovskiis’ ideas, which she defended in a series of letters to an apparently bemused Sozonov in 1908. Although she did not share their metaphysics (i.e. the mystical belief in the transfiguration of the world following the collapse of tsarism), she found many of their ideas ‘comprehensible, relatable and worthy of respect’.⁵⁵ In particular, she agreed with Merezhkovskii’s observation that members of the Russian intelligentsia tended to regard the very idea of revolution in a somewhat mystical or religious way that did not conflict with their secular political concerns.⁵⁶ Sozonov's automatic rejection of this idea, she argued, was the result of his devotion to the Populist intellectuals of the late nineteenth century (Lavrov, Mikhailovskii, and others) for whom such a duality was impossible, since the powers of reason, in their view, had to be demonstrably triumphant over those of the spirit.

Ironically, Prokof’eva continued, Sozonov himself embodied the precise ‘hidden religiosity’ the existence of which he denied, since his worldview was determined:

… by a deep and powerful sense of your link to some sort of living unity [i.e. the revolutionary collective] of which you feel yourself a part. Your relationship to this ‘whole’ is religious in nature, whether you call it God, the world or what … This feeling of yours doesn’t come from science. One can understand the interconnectedness of all worldly things a thousand times better than you and still not feel it in the way you do.⁵⁷

In a subsequent letter, she continued:

All of us, when we try to characterise the soul of the Russian intelligentsia, use the words ‘religious’, ‘sacred’, ‘ascetic’ (podvizhnicheskii) and so on. And in our situation these are not mere phrases, but the deepest and purest truth. When I contemplate life and the cause of the Russian intelligentsia, both intellectually and spiritually it seems to me much more a case of ‘serving an unknown God’ (sluzhenie nevedomomu bogu) than any kind of ‘struggle for individuality’ … In my view, the fact that Christ was always with the Russian intelligentsia precisely explains why it has never believed in Christ.⁵⁸

Such views, although a long way from those held by most Russian revolutionaries, were not altogether uncommon within the SR Combat Organization, a group that attracted more than its share of Christian idealists who seem to have believed, in the words of a character in one of Savinkov’s novels, that one should kill ‘so that love sanctifies the world’.⁵⁹

A significant proportion of Prokof’eva’s correspondence with Sozonov around this time was devoted to moral and philosophical deliberations of this sort. Their published letters, which date from late 1907 (shortly after her exile to Siberia) until early 1909, touch, among other topics, on revolutionary ethics, religious questions, and the relationship between society and the individual. One Russian scholar, having examined their correspondence in detail, concluded that the letters show Sozonov to have been a ‘well educated, intellectually developed and morally sensitive’ individual who took a keen interest in ‘all matters confronting Russian society at the time’,⁶⁰ a judgement equally applicable to Prokof’eva, whose contributions clearly demonstrate the moral and intellectual qualities with which her friends and comrades often credited her. This being said, one nonetheless senses between the two of them – ironically in light of their four-year age gap – a degree of generational conflict. From her indulgent attitude to Merezhkovskii’s religious ideas and attacks on the monolithic rationalism and utilitarianism of previous decades (‘Why is affirming that science will solve all problems’, she asked Sozonov, ‘any more scientific than denying that this is so?’),⁶¹ it is clear that Prokof’eva embodied the tendency towards self-criticism, intellectual exploration, and openness to the Silver Age cultural agenda that became increasingly noticeable among parts of the revolutionary intelligentsia after 1905.⁶² She, in turn, saw Sozonov as a ‘rigorist’ who had inherited his moral and spiritual values wholesale from the revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century. This characterization, to which Sozonov objected,⁶³ was not quite fair. Rather he was, to borrow Prince Myshkin’s term, a ‘man of two or three ideas at once’, torn between the ‘unwavering’ revolutionary virtues to which he aspired and the spirit of his own age.⁶⁴ In one revealing letter dated 25 September 1908, he wrote:

The rigorists of the 1870s often forgot that a good society can only take shape on the basis of good and forcefully expressed individuality (lichnost’). We, as their heirs, are prone to forgetting this too, not because we're eager to play the role of post-horses whipped on by the coachman, but because of the circumstances in which we work: in conspiratorial circles (kruzhkovshchina), the underground, martyrdom … Life often demands of us the virtues of a soldier, among which the most useful is not having to use one’s brain (ne rassuzhdat’) … Today [i.e. after 1905] the struggle is not so much an external as an internal one: we have an external enemy, but our internal interests have somehow sidelined him.⁶⁵

The psychological tensions within Sozonov were perhaps most acute on the question of violence, an especially thorny issue at the time–in short, who was permitted to kill whom in the name of what. In his memoirs, Savinkov provided a rather one-sided portrait of Sozonov as a fanatical revolutionary, a ‘true son of the People’s Will’ who experienced only ‘pride and joy’ from his participation in the terror.⁶⁶ Vera Figner, one of the leaders of that organization (whose knowledge of Sozonov came primarily from her friendship with Savinkov) concluded on this basis that among the terrorists of the younger generation he was the most similar to her own, inasmuch as his motives for killing were ‘public’ ones (i.e. the question of individual morality did not enter into the equation).⁶⁷ In his letters to Prokof’eva, Sozonov did indeed defend the terrorists’ moral prerogative (‘What would the world be’, he asked, ‘if I renounce the right to say: this is good, and this is not? The world would lose its beauty and goodness and revert to primordial chaos’).⁶⁸ At the same time, multiple sources attest that he was, in fact, haunted by the memory of Pleve’s killing, acknowledging that he had committed ‘the greatest sin possible for a man’.⁶⁹ Indeed, his repeated suicide attempts in prison, although ostensibly an act of protest against the cruel prison regime, suggest that he came to accept the view, held by many of his comrades, that only the terrorist’s death could morally atone for the act of violence they committed.

To understand Sozonov’s conflicted feelings over the moral legitimacy of violence, we should note that the terrorists of the early twentieth century were, in their psychological makeup and moral outlook, quite different to their predecessors (i.e. the Populists of the 1870-80s). Whereas the Populists had been straightforwardly rationalist and utilitarian in their worldview, the younger generation were preoccupied to a far greater degree by the question of whether it was ever permissible to kill in the name of an idea. Almost without exception, the memoirs and biographies of SR terrorists feature lengthy deliberations on the ethics of violence and reveal a fixation on acts of martyrdom, self-sacrifice and the moral purity of the terrorist.⁷⁰ For Figner, this focus on individual morality represented ‘something new in the psychology of the terrorist’: for her own generation, she wrote, such introspection would have been seen as mere self-indulgence, a distraction from the revolutionary programme.⁷¹

Scholars who have commented on this tendency among the revolutionaries of the 1905 generation have advanced several possible explanations for it, from the influence of recent developments in German philosophy to the expanding scale and evolving nature of political violence during this period.⁷² To these (doubtless important) factors one should add that Sozonov, Kaliaev, and others had grown up, like all Russian intelligentsia of the time, under the moral influence of Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky.⁷³ In deciding to engage in active struggle against the state, they consciously rejected Tolstoy’s philosophy of non-violence; at the same time, however, they remained equally conscious of Dostoevsky’s warnings that atheistic socialism and the utilitarian tendency to make virtues of necessity led inexorably to moral degeneracy. Precisely this dilemma lies at the heart of Savinkov’s 1909 debut novel The Pale Horse (Kon’ blednyi), a fictionalized retelling of the plot against the Grand Duke Sergei narrated from the standpoint of an amoral and existentially-bored terrorist, Zhorzh.⁷⁴ As Zhorzh’s second-in-command and interlocutor, the born-again Christian Vania, puts it:

To kill is a great sin. But remember: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his soul for his friends’. Not one’s life, but one’s soul. Understand this: he must accept his own torment; he must resolve to do everything out of love for the sake of love … Otherwise, it’s Smerdiakov once again, that is, the path to Smerdiakov.⁷⁵

In this context, it was of crucial importance to work out a set of sound philosophical principles as a basis for revolutionary action, and it was with this problem that Prokof’eva’s letters to Sozonov were above all concerned.

After her escape from Siberia in 1908, Prokof’eva appears to have experienced an acute crisis of revolutionary faith, writing to Sozonov that she was ‘bogged down in contradictions’ around her involvement in the terror.⁷⁶ Precisely what these contradictions were she did not divulge, but it is likely that she was afflicted by the same sense of despondency that was common to many on the Russian left after the defeats of 1905. As a result, throughout 1908-09, she devoted significant energies to critical self-examination. A consistent feature of her thinking in this regard, clearly implied in all that she wrote to Sozonov, was that revolutionaries ought to arrive at a set of moral and philosophical principles before acting. This search for a philosophical basis of revolution likely explains her interest in the Merezhkovskiis’ ideas and led her to re-read, among other things, most of Dostoevsky’s major works, including his anti-revolutionary tract Demons (Besy, 1871-72). ‘I want to argue with [Dostoevsky]’, she confessed to Sozonov, ‘but when I do, it doesn’t feel like I’m arguing with the enemy, but rather with my own flesh and blood, a close friend from whom I’m always learning something new.’⁷⁷ It is likely, indeed, that what Prokof’eva took from Dostoevsky was to some degree influenced by the Merezhkovskiis, who in 1906 had declared the great novelist the ‘prophet of the Russian Revolution’ (prorok russkoi revoliutsii) in a pamphlet of the same name.⁷⁸ Sozonov, for his part, appears to have found Prokof’eva’s intellectual explorations troubling, decrying her new ideas as ‘individualism’ and complaining that she had ‘placed a question mark over every aspect of [his] philosophy’.⁷⁹

Whether Prokof’eva ever resolved these dilemmas to her own satisfaction remains unclear, since despite her evident desire, sustained over the course of several years, to commit a terrorist act, she never actually did so. There are nonetheless grounds to conclude that by the end of her life she had lost faith in terror both morally and as a means of political struggle. Savinkov would later divulge that his second novel What Never Happened (To, chego ne bylo, 1912), received by both contemporary critics and by later scholarship as a repudiation of terrorism,⁸⁰ was ‘all but co-written with M. A. Prokof’eva and, in any case, approved by her’.⁸¹ Unfortunately the available sources shed no further light on precisely what Prokof’eva contributed to What Never Happened, although it seems unlikely, given that the composition of the novel coincided closely with her final illness, that she was directly involved in the writing process. More probable is that Savinkov developed the major themes of the novel during the long periods of time he spent virtually alone with her in 1910–11 amidst the final collapse of the Combat Organization. Either way, one may conclude that the sense of disillusionment with both the terrorists’ cult of individual heroism and the SR Party as a whole that pervades What Never Happened reflected Prokof’eva’s state of mind as much as it did Savinkov’s.⁸²

Prokof’eva’s correspondence with Sozonov also makes for compelling reading on a personal level, not least because of the mutual anxieties it reveals about a relationship so often romanticized in the sources. From the beginning, their relations were marked by a certain inequality, since Sozonov was the older of the two and thus became a revolutionary first. As a result, Prokof’eva seems to have felt – at least at times – inferior to and overawed by him. In this sense, her decision to follow him underground (so to speak) reflected not just her social and political views, but the conviction – one first set out in the radical literature of the nineteenth century and shared with many of her generation – that romantic relationships had to be based on genuine equality between the sexes. As she put it:

I wasn’t your friend, because we were too unequal for a genuine friendship of equals. I wasn’t your comrade, because we lived separate lives and I wasn’t a part of yours; I wasn’t your wife or your fiancé. And since I was none of these things I felt neither entitled to your love nor sure of it … At the same time, and undoubtedly because of all this, there arose in me a passionate desire to get a grip of myself, to study, to work, in general to live my own life and not through you … My actions seem absurd from the outside but were in themselves logical: I ran away from you in order to become close to you.⁸³

The dilemma that she confronted in her teenage years was, of course, shared by numerous Russian women of the time: a choice between two different models of gender emancipation, with one path leading through education and civil society and the other to the revolutionary collective with its communitarian and activist vision of gender equality. She chose the latter, and, in due course, came to feel that she had, indeed, matured as a result. ‘Before I had no thoughts of my own’, she wrote to Sozonov, ‘since I had no life of my own. But now it might be different’.⁸⁴

Their respective decisions to devote their lives to the revolutionary cause came, inevitably, at a personal cost. After Sozonov’s arrest in 1902 the two saw one another in person only twice, both times in prison. Tellingly, it was only in 1907, nearly a decade after their first meeting, that Sozonov started to address Prokof’eva with the familiar pronoun (ty).⁸⁵ On this note, it must be stressed that despite almost all sources – even the memoirs of those who knew them both well, such as Savinkov – describing Prokof’eva as ‘Sozonov’s fiancé’, their letters contain no real evidence that this was ever the case except in an extremely notional sense. Despite their evident devotion to one another, their relationship was always mediated by the expectation that professional revolutionaries’ private interests, if they had any, should run second to the needs of the collective. Apparently in deference to this principle, their meetings in prison were devoid of physical or emotional intimacy. Spiridonova writes that they scarcely spent any time alone together during Prokof’eva’s 1906 visit to Akatui, while another inmate recalled that Sozonov treated Prokof’eva as if she were ‘merely a good friend’.⁸⁶ It was around a year after this encounter that they began to write to one another regularly. Before long, however, Sozonov began to feel that he was a burden to her and that the personal obligation she felt to support him emotionally by writing him letters was a distraction from her revolutionary work and began urging Prokof’eva to move on with her life without him.⁸⁷ Seen from this perspective, Sozonov’s prison suicide in 1910, which took place just weeks before he was due to be released and was seemingly motivated by a desire to protect his fellow inmates from the abuses of the prison authorities, would appear to represent an explicit case of a revolutionary sacrificing their hopes of personal happiness in the name of the common cause.

Despite the lofty principles to which Sozonov and Prokof’eva devoted themselves, some of the difficulties they experienced as a couple were, inevitably, very normal ones. Sozonov’s anxieties about their relationship were exacerbated by his regular bouts of depression, which worsened considerably during his stints in communal prison cells (obshchie kamery), a form of incarceration he appears to have found more psychologically taxing than even solitary confinement, and after Azef’s exposure as a traitor over the winter of 1908-9. His struggles with mental health caused him to write Prokof’eva a long series of rambling letters in which he fixated on what he (probably incorrectly) perceived as irresolvable philosophical differences between them and veered from expressions of undying love to something approaching bitterness. A different source of tension between them (at least from Prokof’eva’s perspective) came in the form of none other than Spiridonova, who, at the time in question, was serving a hard labour term at the Mal’tsev women’s prison in Eastern Siberia, just a few miles from the Gornyi Zerentui prison where Sozonov was incarcerated from late 1907. She and Sozonov wrote to one another often from their prison cells, and this seems to have provided him with a degree of emotional fulfilment that he did not get from Prokof’eva herself. His frequent references to ‘Marusia’ in his letters to Prokof’eva appear motivated by a superficial desire to get the two women to like one another, but also to hint at his growing feelings for Spiridonova. In 1908, he wrote:

I’m accustomed to sharing my joys and worries with Marusia: do you judge me for this? … I write to her in moments of despair: after [Grigorii] Gershuni’s death, when [you] become ever more distant and inscrutable, when I feel that everything is dying.⁸⁸

In this context, it is understandable that Prokof’eva did not entirely share Sozonov’s high appraisal of Spiridonova’s character, replying tersely that on the one occasion the two had met in person [i.e. in 1906], they ‘did not see eye to eye.’⁸⁹

It is possible to summarize the major events of Prokof’eva's final years quite briefly. As already noted, she joined Savinkov’s new ‘battle group’ in 1909. This final iteration of the Combat Organization was tasked with assassinating the tsar and Stolypin, and the no less ambitious task of rehabilitating the image of SR terrorism after the Azef scandal. Although intended to be provocateur-proof, the group was infiltrated from the start and achieved little. Savinkov officially disbanded the group early in 1911 after the Central Committee finally turned against terror as a means of struggle, although in reality it had ceased all meaningful activity months earlier.⁹⁰ The failure of the SRs’ final terrorist enterprise, along with news of Sozonov’s death in November 1910, undoubtedly came as a blow to Prokof’eva. By this time, however, she was already ill with the tuberculosis she had contracted in Siberia two years earlier, and which would eventually kill her.

After the final disbandment of the Combat Organization, Savinkov and his common law wife, Evgeniia Somova (neé Zil’berberg), took Prokof’eva in. For the last two years of her life, she became a permanent member of their household as her health declined. Apparently in the interests of her wellbeing, Savinkov and his entourage spent most of that time on the Riviera, living variously at Théoule-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur and later at San Remo across the Italian border. While in Italy Prokof’eva was treated by Rozaliia Plekhanova, the wife of Georgii Plekhanov and a trained doctor.⁹¹ During this period the Merezhkovskiis visited when they could. After a visit in April 1913, Gippius, who in her memoirs left a touching portrait of Prokof’eva bedbound and very sick, wrote to Savinkov to tell him how fortunate he was to have had ‘the company of such a beautiful and meaningful (znachitel’nyi) flower of humanity all these years.’⁹² Another visitor to San Remo was Prokof’eva’s father, who, upon realizing that his daughter was dying, tried to make arrangements – never, in practice, realized – to return her body to Russia in order to bury her in accordance with the Old Rite.⁹³ The following year, Aleksei Kirillovich would repay some of the kindness Savinkov had shown his daughter by funding the publication of a separate edition of What Never Happened, the novel Prokof’eva apparently did much to inspire. When this edition appeared, it bore on its title page a dedication to her.⁹⁴

The myth of Prokof’eva as Sozonov’s wide-eyed lover has deflected attention from her relationship with Savinkov. On closer inspection, however, it is clear that this latter relationship was of equal, if not greater, importance in her life, since she spent considerably more time with Savinkov than with Sozonov and shared with him an intellectual and emotional bond that, while not without its own tensions,⁹⁵ was different to that which emerges from the letters discussed above. Prokof’eva’s intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities made her a natural confidant and foil for Savinkov. Moreover, she represented, through her relationship with Sozonov, a living link to the glory days of the SR Combat Organization, with which so much of Savinkov’s identity both as a revolutionary and a writer was bound up. All this gave her a unique status in Savinkov’s life, and there can be little doubt that he was, in his own way, devoted to Prokof’eva: he spent long hours alone with her during her final illness, visited her grave every day after her death, and would later acknowledge her loss as having affected him deeply.⁹⁶ One of Savinkov’s biographers has speculated that their relationship (at least prior to Prokof’eva’s illness) was romantic, or sexual, in nature.⁹⁷ This is possible, but there appears to be no solid evidence for it. An equally plausible interpretation is that Prokof’eva was one of several women with whom Savinkov had intense but platonic relationships and upon whom he depended, after the breakup of his first marriage, for emotional support and moral guidance. Indeed, it was the view of Viktor Chernov that Prokof’eva, as a person ‘of the highest moral standing and purity’, was the ‘living conscience’ of Savinkov’s inner circle: it was only after her death, Chernov argued, that Savinkov finally broke with the SRs and began the descent into right-wing militarism that became fully manifest during and after 1917.⁹⁸

Prokof’eva died on 16 June 1913. The diary Savinkov kept during his final imprisonment in 1925 includes a short account of her death:

When Mariia Alekseevna died, I didn’t think she was dying – I thought it was just another coughing fit (pripadok). I stayed up playing chess until 8am, and then went to sleep – it was already daytime. At 10.30 Evgeniia Ivanovna [Zil’berberg] woke me. I went into Mariia Alekseevna’s room: she was still alive, lying there in silence, her eyes shut. I held her hand, she looked at me and weakly squeezed my hand. ‘Thank you, how kind you all are’, she said – and died.⁹⁹

Despite the great esteem that he evidently held for Prokof’eva, Savinkov never produced a literary tribute to her as he did for other beloved comrades such as Kaliaev and Sozonov, and it was partly for this reason that she was largely forgotten in the years that followed. After the revolution, Savinkov was anathametized as a counter-revolutionary, while Sozonov, by contrast, was celebrated as a martyr and hero of the revolutionary underground both by the SRs and (in a sanitized way) by the Bolsheviks. In the martyr-myth that developed around Sozonov after 1917, Prokof’eva featured exclusively as his devoted fiancé who waited patiently for him to come out of prison and died of a broken heart when he did not: thus Spiridonova, for instance, wrote in her memoirs that Prokof’eva ‘counted down the days and hours’ until Sozonov’s release and subsequently ‘took to her bed, faded away and died’.¹⁰⁰ When Prokof’eva’s correspondence with Sozonov was published in an SR émigré journal in the 1930s, her letters to him were initially omitted entirely, and it was only after the editors received complaints from readers that a handful were eventually printed.¹⁰¹ In retrospect, the major features of her character and biography – her youth, beauty, moral purity and premature death – seem to have served throughout her life as an invitation for those around Prokof’eva to read into and inscribe upon her their own ideas. For the SR leadership she was a model of feminine revolutionary virtue, for the Merezhkovskiis a proponent of their social and religious ideals, and so on. Thus, her image as constructed by others was that of a tragic heroine, and was readily appropriated to bolster the pathos of the Sozonov myth. Such, of course, was the fate of many women revolutionaries whom history (or rather those who wrote it) chose for some time to forget, and whose stories are only now being recovered.

In this respect, one might conclude that her biography has a wider symbolic significance, for in studying the history of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party one is inevitably struck by a paradox. Of all parts of the Russian left prior to 1917 they remain, having been all but struck from the historical record under the Soviet regime, the least well understood and the most under-researched. At the same time, no part of the Russian revolutionary movement generated so many magnetic personalities or heroic biographies whose lives seem in retrospect somehow to capture the drama of that period. Perhaps no single individual illustrates this paradox better than Mariia Prokof’eva, whose biography, had she been a Bolshevik, would surely have been written before now.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Sally Boniece, Alison Rowley, George Gilbert, Elizabeth Harrison, and to two anonymous readers for Revolutionary Russia, for their insightful and generous comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Phillips

Ben Phillips is Lecturer in Modern Russian History at the University of Exeter.

Notes

1 See, among others, Engel and Rosenthal, Five Sisters; Engel, Mothers and Daughters; Knight, “Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party”; Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case,”; idem, “The ‘Shesterka’ of 1905-06,”; and Rowley, “Russian Revolutionary as American Celebrity.”

2 Siljak, “The Beauteous Terrorist”, pp. 275–91 (276).

3 Morrissey, “The ‘Apparel of Innocence,’” 607-42. On the cultural codes of the revolutionary underground see Mogil’ner, Mifologiia podpol’nogo cheloveka.

4 Breshko-Breshkovskaia, “Russkaia molodezh”. The others Breshkovskaia named were the terrorists Balmashev, Sozonov, and Kaliaev.

5 Gippius to B. V. Savinkov, 23 April 1913 in Goncharova, ed., Pis’ma Merezhkovskikh, 257.

6 V. L. [V. V. Leonovich], “Pamiati M. A. Prokof’evoi,”.

7 Spiridonova, “Iz zhizni na Nerchinskoi katorge,” 115–33 (120). See, most recently, Alexandrov, To Break Russia’s Chains, 208-09.

8 The one historian to engage with this material to date is Gorodnitskii, “Egor Sozonov,” 168-73.

9 Especially important on this point is Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, which seeks to overturn the heroic mythology of the terrorist underground by depicting it as a murky subculture largely defined by criminal impulses and psychological instability. For a contrasting approach, see Budnitskii, Terrorizm v rossiiskom osvoboditelnom dvizhenii, especially 24-27.

10 Unless otherwise indicated, the biographical information on Prokof’eva used here is taken from police files: see Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF) f. 102.232.1761 (DP OO. O docheri kuptsa M. A. Prokof’evoi) and f. 102.202.1239ch3 (DP, 7-e deloproizvodstvo. O Marii Prokof’evoi).

11 GARF f. 102.232.1761, p. 2.

12 For descriptions of Prokof’ev see Gippius, “Dmitrii Merezhkovskii,” Sochineniia, t. 6: 358, and Chernavskii, ‘V boevoi organizatsii,’ 31. On connections between the Old Believers and the revolutionary movement see Pyzhikov, Grani russkogo raskola.

13 Slushatel’nitsa was the formal term for female students in higher education at the time, since women could not be awarded degrees.

14 The date of their first meeting is based on testimony given by Prokof’eva’s father at her 1907 trial. See Markelov, “Pokushenie na tsareubiistvo v 1907 g.,” 133–76 (156).

15 Ispoved’ Sozonova, 42-44. For the wider context see Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution.

16 “E. S. Sozonov po vospominaniiam ego materi,” Koz’min and Rakitnikov, eds., Pis’ma Egora Sozonova k rodnym, 47–50 (49).

17 “Pamiati M. A. Prokof’evoi,” 2.

18 For this reason the Union incurred the wrath of Lenin, who decried its ‘opportunism’ in the pages of Iskra: see Leonov, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov 1905–1907 gg., 30.

19 International Institute of Social History (IISG) PSR archive, file 378 (Ural'skii soiuz SD i SR), p. 1.

20 For the SRs’ official stance on terrorism see Chernov, “Terroristicheskii element v nashei programme,” Partiia sotsialistov-revolutionserov, 78-88.

21 Spiridovich, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, 383.

22 See Pis’ma Egora Sozonova, 371–2 and Ivanovskaia, V boevoi organizatsii, 48-49.

23 Dulebov escaped from the crime scene and, after a short spell in emigration, returned to Russia as a member of the Combat Organization. He participated in the plots against Pleve and the Grand Duke Sergei, but was arrested in early 1905. Held in solitary confinement in the Peter-Paul Fortress, he lost his mind and died in 1908, apparently revealing neither his real name nor his involvement in Bogdanovich's killing to the authorities. See Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista,135-37.

24 GARF f. 102.232.1761, p. 14.

25 “ Pamiati M. A. Prokof’evoi,” 2. Famously, Dora Brilliant, the widow of the unfortunate Aleksei Pokotilov who gained admission to Boris Savinkov's terrorist cell due to her training as a chemist, repeatedly asked to be allowed to throw a bomb, but was refused: see Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 48-49. From around 1905-6, women began to play more active roles in terrorist attacks as an unprecedented wave of revolutionary violence engulfed Russia. See M. Ivich, “Statistika terroristicheskikh aktov, sovershennykh partiei sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov,” Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, 2, 377-89.

26 Nikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 71.

27 Ispoved’ Sozonova, 59-60.

28 GARF f. 102.232.1761, pp. 6-8; Mel’gunov, ed., E. S. Sozonov, 7-8.

29 GARF f. 102.232.1761, p. 11.

30 See Okhrana surveillance reports placing her in Switzerland in ibid., p. 15, 18.

31 GARF f. 102.202.1239 (DP, 7-e deloproizvodstvo. O Marii Prokof’evoi, Vladimire Vol’skom i drugikh lits), p. 27. The failure of this plot did not save Nakashidze’s life: he was killed by an Armenian nationalist three months later.

32 Spiridonova, “Iz zhizni na Nerchinskoi katorge,” 120.

33 Gorodnitskii, Boevaia organizatsiia partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, 133.

34 Novoe vremia, 27 December 1906, 2.

35 Novoe vremia, 12 January 1907, 3-4.

36 GARF f. 102.235.1000 (DP OO. O syne Ufimskogo kuptsa N. A. Prokof’eve), pp. 3, 16.

37 The conditions of their pre-trial detention were apparently such that one suspect declared a hunger strike, demanding to be transferred to hard labour in Siberia on the grounds that this would be preferable. See Gernet, Istoriia tsarskoi tiur’my, 3rd edn., 132–36 (132).

38 Markelov, “Pokushenie na tsareubiistvo,” 142-3.

39 Ibid., 149.

40 Andreyev, Seven Hanged, 12-13.

41 This is indeed precisely what Sozonov did during his trial in 1904. See Troitskii, “Delo Egora Sozonova,” 50–54 and, for the wider context, Troitskii's monograph, Narodnaia volia pered tsarskim sudom.

42 Markelov, “Pokushenie na tsareubiistvo,” 156.

43 The authorities’ suspicions concerning Prokof’ev himself first arose in 1904 and only grew over time: thus an (apparently far-fetched) report compiled by the Ufa gendarmes in 1907 claimed that he was, due to his children's revolutionary connections, ‘popular among the party of the left, who want to get him elected to the State Duma’: see GARF f. 102.235.1000, p. 16. Yet they never gathered sufficient evidence to prosecute him, and an investigation of his political ties in 1912 concluded that he had ‘played no active part’ in the revolutionary movement in recent years. Be this as it may, there is little doubt that Prokof’ev sympathised with the SRs and rendered them a variety of services. Among his business interests was an Ufa bookshop used by the party for disseminating illegal literature. His home served as a safehouse for revolutionaries escaping from Siberian exile, and in general he was a first port of call for SRs passing through Ufa, including members of the Combat Organization. See GARF f. 102.209.731 (DP, 7-e deloproizvodstvo. Po issledovaniiu stepeni politicheskoi neblagonadezhnosti A. K. Prokof’eva, I. M. Sozonova i drugikh lits), pp. 24–25 and Chernavskii, “V boevoi organizatsii,” 31.

44 Markelov, “Pokushenie na tsareubiistvo,” 172-3.

45 His remarks recall most obviously N. V. Teslenko's attempt to spare the life of the ‘oppressed, desecrated and sick’ Mariia Spiridonova at her trial the previous year. See Boniece, “The Spiridonova Case,” 597.

46 Explicitly religious language had of course been used for some time both in party proclamations and in the liberal press to describe revolutionary martyrs (again, Spiridonova is perhaps the key example) but less so in courtroom speeches, which tended to focus on the issue of state ‘arbitrariness’ (proizvol) and the argument that revolutionary violence was a legitimate if regrettable response to despotic rule. See, for example, N. P. Karabchevskii's speeches in defence of Gershuni, Sozonov and others in Rechi: 1882-1914.

47 See remarks by the SR deputy Shirskii in Gosudarstvennaia duma vtorogo sozyva: stenograficheskie otchety (St Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1907), session 34, 7 May 1907, 229.

48 Azef’s testimony was relayed (anonymously) to the judges by the head of the Petersburg Okhrana, A. V. Gerasimov, who had recently inherited his services as an informant. Fearing for his life, Gerasimov feigned a leg injury in order to avoid giving evidence in person and was instead cross-examined in an extraordinary session of the court in the nearby Okhrana headquarters at 12 Naberezhnaia Moika. See Markelov, “Pokushenie na tsareubiistvo,” 157. For Gerasimov’s own recollections of this episode see his memoir, Na lezvii s terroristami,102-07.

49 V. Zenzinov, “Iz nedavnego proshlogo” in Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, 2, 519–25 (519). On the Azef scandal see Geifman, Entangled in Terror.

50 Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 85.

51 On this episode see Alexandrov, To Break Russia’s Chains,143-8.

52 Z. N. Gippius, “Parizhskaia azhanda 1908 goda,”Sochineniia, t. 8: Dnevniki 1893-1919,142. The phrase ‘purest image of the purest grace’ refers to Pushkin's ‘Madonna’ (1830).

53 For overviews of the Merezhkovskiis’ religious ideas around this time see Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought, 82–109 and Goncharova, “Revoliutsionnoe khristovstvo,” in Pis’ma Merezhkovskikh k Borisu Savinkovu, 5-88.

54 “Gippius to Savinkov,” 19 May 1914, Pis’ma Merezhkovskikh k Borisu Savinkovu, 289.

55 “Pis’ma E. S. Sozonova k M. A. Prokof’evoi” (hereafter cited by issue no.), Volia Rossii 10 (1930), 806.

56 The insight that the Russian intelligentsia had some sort of unconscious religious sensibility is often credited to Dostoevskii. In the twentieth century it was popularised by the Merezhkovskiis and by the 1909 symposium Signposts (Vekhi), the contributors to which alternated between condemning the intelligentsia's myopic atheism and, conversely, drawing attention to the religiosity of its worldview. See especially Sergei Bulgakov's contribution, “Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo,” in Vekhi, 23-69.

57 Volia Rossii 10 (1930), 810. Italics original.

58 Volia Rossii 3–4 (1931), 255-6.

59 So says the terrorist Vania in Savinkov, Pale Horse, 108. Vania’s real-world prototype was Ivan Kaliaev, the assassin of the Grand Duke Sergei whose politics were underpinned by ‘a deep and powerful religious sensibility’ and who saw terrorism not simply as ‘the best means of political struggle, but as a moral and perhaps even religious sacrifice’ (Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 37). One thinks also in this connexion of Mariia Benevskaia, who after her arrest went into Siberian exile ‘with her bible and cross in hand’: see Bitsenko, “V Mal’tsevskoi zhenskoi katorzhnoi tiur’me,”195. In a letter to his parents from prison in 1906, Sozonov wrote that ‘when I carried out my task [i.e. killing Pleve], I felt that my conscience, my religion, my gospel and my God all demanded it of me’. See Pis’ma Egora Sozonova k rodnym, 84.

60 Gorodnitskii, “Egor Sozonov,” 169.

61 Volia Rossii 10 (1930), 807.

62 On which see Kelly, “Self-Censorship and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1905-1914,” 193-213.

63 Volia Rossii 3 (1930), p. 242. The implication of this letter is that Prokof’eva either provided or approved the corresponding description of Sozonov that appears in Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 37.

64 The living embodiment of these virtues was E. K. Breshko-Breshkovskaia, the ‘little grandmother’ of the revolution who recruited Sozonov into the SR Party in 1901 and whom he, in turn, idolised. See Ivanovskaia, V boevoi organizatsii, 48-49.

65 Volia Rossii 9 (1930), 744.

66 Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 37, 47.

67 Figner, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 3: Posle Shlissel’burga, 180.

68 Volia Rossii 2 (1930), 155-6.

69 Pis’ma Egora Sozonova k rodnym, 84. See also Spiridonova, “Iz zhizni na Nerchinskoi katorge,” 117-18.

70 Among others, see Savinkov, “Iz vospominanii ob Ivane Kaliaeve,” 120–9 and Zenzinov, Perezhitoe, 271-5.

71 Figner, PSS, 3, pp. 179-80.

72 For discussions see Morrissey, “The Apparel of Innocence,” Kelly, “Self-Censorship and the Russian Intelligentsia,” 200–05 and Daniel Beer, “The Morality of Terror,” 25-46.

73 In his memoirs, Viktor Chernov claimed that Tolstoy’s excommunication from the Orthodox Church represented the beginning of Sozonov’s political awakening. See Chernov, Pered burei, 185.

74 Zhorzh was identified by some contemporary observers with Savinkov himself: see Pis’ma Merezhkovskikh k Borisu Savinkovu, 115.

75 Savinkov, Pale Horse, 10.

76 Volia Rossii 2 (1930), 158.

77 Volia Rossii 10 (1930), 812.

78 Merezhkovskii, “Prorok russkoi revoliutsii: k iubileiu Dostoevskogo,” 120-52.

79 Volia Rossii 7–8 (1930), 643.

80 Vasilii Rozanov, for instance, read What Never Happened as evidence that the revolutionaries had been defeated morally as well as in practice: see Rozanov, “Ropshin i ego novyi roman,” 564-7.

81 Boris Savinkov pered voennoi kollegiei verkhovnogo suda SSSR, Appendix V.

82 On Savinkov and Prokof’eva’s mutual alienation from the SR leadership around this time see Morozov, Boris Savinkov, 265-71.

83 Volia Rossii 3–4 (1931), 261-2.

84 Volia Rossii 10 (1930), 813.

85 Volia Rossii 2 (1930), 143.

86 Spiridonova, “Iz zhizni na Nerchinskoi katorge,” 121; G. Frolov, “O Egore Sozonove,” Pis’ma Egora Sozonova k rodnym, 51–63 (55).

87 Volia Rossii 9 (1930), 738.

88 Volia Rossii 7–8 (1930), 651.

89 Volia Rossii 3–4 (1931), 259.

90 See Morozov, “B. V. Savinkov i boevaia organizatsiia,” 243-318.

91 Pis’ma Merezhkovskikh k Borisu Savinkovu, 252.

92 Gippius to Savinkov, 23 April 1913 in Pis’ma Merezhkovskikh k Borisu Savinkovu, 257.

93 Gippius, “Dmitrii Merezhkovskii,” 358.

94 Pis’ma Merezhkovskikh k Borisu Savinkovu, 262.

95 See Prokof’eva’s scathing comments on Savinkov’s religious views quoted in Goncharova, ‘Revoliutsionnoe khristovstvo’, 30-31.

96 Litvin, ed., Boris Savinkov na Lubianke, 188, 190.

97 Spence, Boris Savinkov, 44.

98 Chernov, “Savinkov v riadakh PSR,” Volia Rossii 14–15 (1924), 154–63 (160).

99 Savinkov na Lubianke, 190.

100 Spiridonova, “Iz zhizni na Nerchinskoi katorge,” 121.

101 Volia Rossii 3–4 (1931), 247.