"Why do you have such big teeth?"
The story of Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, the "grandmother of the Russian Revolution"
Author: Sergey Tashevsky
"It's twilight, the summer of 1917. A group of men are sitting outside a hut on a village street, talking about the 'grandmother of the Russian revolution,' Breshko-Breshkovskaya. The owner of the hut narrates in a measured voice:
"I've been hearing about this old woman for ages. A clairvoyant, that's true. They say she predicted all these things fifty years ago. But God forbid, she's so terrifying: fat, grumpy, with small, piercing eyes—I saw her portrait in a feuilleton… They kept her chained in prison for forty-two years, but they couldn't kill her, they never left her day or night, and they didn't even keep an eye on her…"
This is from the recording Ivan Bunin's lecture "The Great Datura", which he read in Odessa in 1919. There's no doubt that the writer himself regarded Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya (who was already over 70 by then) as one of the monsters who dragged Russia into the revolutionary abyss. And perhaps he was right. Because it was Breshko-Breshkovskaya who proved too much for the tsarist secret police. "They didn't kill her, they didn't keep her in check." But she, "terrible, angry," outlived them all and died in Prague in 1934, at 90, "of sound mind and memory." Although—what constitutes sound mind? Everyone has their own opinion on that matter. To Bunin, like the peasant in his lecture notes, Breshkovskaya seemed a mad revolutionary fury, obsessed with the idea of overthrowing the autocracy. And yes. What happened, happened.
It all began innocently enough, though the family names and toponymy suggest a somewhat bleak beginning. Ekaterina was born on January 25, 1844, into the noble family of Konstantin Verigo and Olga, née Goremykina, in the Mglin district of the Chernigov province. They, of course, had an estate there.
The town of Mglin, located on the steep bank of the Sudynka River, got its name from the dense forests surrounding it, but after endless raids by Tatars and neighboring princes, it finally found its purpose as a trading river port. When Katya went to school, the town had a population of 10. Mglin had never seen anything like this before or since. It was in the 60s, like many other small Russian riverside trading towns, that it lost the game of "Russian railway roulette." The railroad was built far away, and all goods were now transported by it, not by water. From that moment on, true to its name, the Mglin district became a godforsaken place. So it was simply impossible to do anything other than fight for the people's rights.
It's easy to calculate that Catherine's final year of high school coincided with the beginning of Alexander II's reforms, which emancipated the serfs in 1861. At that time, politics was a fascination for everyone, and her father, a retired lieutenant, was one of the foremost liberals in the Mglin district. He not only read books and subscribed to newspapers but also built a school for his peasants, where Catherine soon began teaching. From the foreign and domestic publications she secretly pilfered from her father, she had already discovered "socialist" ideas at the age of 17 and became so captivated by them that she decided to dedicate her life to the liberation of the people. This slightly alarmed her father, and, trying to keep his daughter from traveling to St. Petersburg, where freethinking was in full bloom, he tried to distract her by suggesting that she serve the people "somewhere closer."
But the estate was small. About 50 or 60 serfs (now "former"). So they were granted such freedom that they had no time to plow. Besides the school, her father, to indulge his daughter, built a library for the peasants, opened a "loan-free" bank, and almost started building a commune with his former servants for Catherine's sake (this also happened in Russia). And it must be said that for a time, this was quite enough for her. At 24, she even married the son of neighboring landowners, a pale and unprepossessing law student who had returned from St. Petersburg with "progressive ideas." That's how she got the surname Breshko-Breshkovskaya. The groom's parents had a larger estate, with about 150 peasants, so it was possible to "serve the people" there as well.
An idyll was in the offing.
However, it ultimately didn't work out. Her husband suddenly turned out to be less progressive, and his parents downright tyrants. After a series of disagreements, Ekaterina went to Kyiv, where she quickly met far more interesting people, such as Pavel Axelrod, a future member of "Land and Freedom." With his help, she established "direct contact" with several revolutionary groups, communes, and circles. These were mainly "populists." There were plenty of them in Kyiv at the time, and the police still turned a blind eye to them. They were mostly young people who had read Chernyshevsky's "What Is to Be Done" and tried to impersonate his heroes. But there were also more serious people in St. Petersburg, where the plot of another, as yet unwritten book, Dostoevsky's "Demons," was unfolding. In 1871, the trial of the "Nechayites" took place, causing a sensation throughout Russia. And Catherine, impressed by their "exploits," firmly resolved not only to "go to the people" but also to immediately take up illegal work. After the dull life in Mglin district, the ideas of terror and rebellion seemed as invigorating to her as a cup of morning coffee.
In St. Petersburg, she joined the Tchaikovsky Narodnik circle, and soon her "visits to the people" took on truly epic proportions. Dressed as a wanderer, Catherine traveled through villages, pretending to be a nun (calling on the peasants to revolt against the "satanic force" of the landowners and authorities), a soldier's widow, or a simple peasant. People, of course, had little faith in her. She had the hands of a pianist, and had never known a prayer longer than the "Our Father." But her inner energy astounded her interlocutors, and word of this fiery revolutionary spread like wildfire. Her acquaintance with the young Peter Kropotkin, with whom she became very close in 1873, added fuel to this fire.
And as historians writeOne can only guess how close their relationship was, which lasted just under a year. But it is known that on February 8, 1874, Catherine gave birth to a son in St. Petersburg. She named the boy Nikolai, registered him in her husband's name, and persuaded her brother, V.K. Verigo, and his wife to raise the child.
That's it.
They never saw each other again until their death, even though they were sometimes very close to each other... However, more on that later.
Meanwhile, Catherine set off to "sow the seeds of revolution" in the Podolsk province, where she made a mistake. In one of the huts where she asked to spend the night, peasants accidentally saw the maps she used to navigate in the "illiterate" soldier's bag and immediately reported it to the district police officer. The careless agitator was seized, taken to St. Petersburg, and placed in a pretrial detention center, where she spent three years.
Only gradually did the authorities begin to realize that such agitators were prowling the villages in great numbers. Over the course of three years, another 192 were rounded up. And in 1878, the famous "Trial of the 193" took place in the capital, with Breshkovskaya being the only woman there. Thus, she became the first political convict in Russian history: she was "sentenced" to three years in the notorious Kara penal servitude. And this was no joke.
But it was no joke—it was for men. At first, the warden of the penal colony didn't even know what to do with the woman. She was a noblewoman, after all! She couldn't be placed in men's cells. But there wasn't a women's prison in all of Transbaikalia. So the warden had to make room for her and give her a room in his own house. Breshkovskaya lived there for a year and tormented the warden so much with her revolutionary sermons that he finally got her transferred from the penal colony to exile in Barguzin. But then Alexander II was assassinated in St. Petersburg, and Breshkovskaya decided she urgently needed to get to the capital. Regicide—and without her! So she and two other exiles staged an escape and made it quite far, over 500 kilometers.
The fugitives were caught only a couple of weeks later (again, as usual, they were "handed in" by peasants), and Breshkovskaya's sentence was "renewed." They added another four years. A separate prison was now built for female political prisoners (their numbers were growing in Transbaikalia), and Ekaterina was sent there. She served another two years, and then was sent to a settlement in Selenginsk, where, it is said, she continued to plot her escape, but now she was under increased surveillance. So, there was nothing to be done; she had to serve her sentence.
Over the years, Breshkovskaya became something of a "penalty curiosity," the longest-living political exile in Siberia. In 1891, at her own request, she was assigned to the peasant class and received a passport granting her the right to reside throughout Siberia. Of all the Siberians, Catherine chose Irkutsk and lived there until 1896, working as a journalist for the newspaper "Vostochnoye Obozreniye" (Eastern Review) in true peasant fashion. Then Nicholas II ascended the throne, the Khodynka War and the amnesty occurred, and Breshkovskaya departed for St. Petersburg, where she hadn't been (except for her time in the fortress) for 20 years.
There, a new, younger generation of "nihilists" and conspirators awaited her, for whom Catherine, with her stints in prison, escapes, articles, and courtroom speeches, had already become a legend. But Breshkovskaya wasn't about to rest on her laurels. She briefly studied the situation, familiarized herself with Marx's newfangled ideas (without much relish—she called his followers "Marxites"), and almost immediately went underground, deciding to found and promote her own political party. A party of terror. Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov later recalled:Word spread abroad, to the emigrants: "Grandmother" was hovering across Russia like the holy spirit of revolution, calling the youth to serve the people, the peasants and workers to fight for their labor interests, and the veterans of past movements to return to the thorny path of revolution. "Shame on you, old man!" she said to one of those who had calmed down. "For this way you will die in disgrace—not as a fighter, but on a soft bed, like a pampered coward, a vile dog's death.".
Yes, she was already approaching 60—quite a grandmother. But it seems that with the years she was only just acquiring a taste for revolutionary struggle. By 1903, Breshkovskaya had already led the militant organization of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), which Savinkov later joined, and she oversaw the preparation of the terrorist attacks that rocked Russia one after another. It seems she herself never shot or blew anyone up (she was old, after all). But she did plan and inspire. Naturally, they were looking for her—and in 1904, she was finally forced to flee abroad, where Kropotkin had long been waiting for her. They say the meeting between the two revolutionary elders was very touching…
But the revolutionary events in Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya's life were just beginning. And they were now moving at kaleidoscopic speed. At the first signs of the 1905 revolution, she abandoned everything and rushed to Russia, where in 1907 the notorious provocateur Azef "turned her in" to the secret police. This time (to be on the safe side), she was immediately shackled and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for three years. At her trial, which took place only in 1910, she slammed the judges: "What am I doing? Preaching revolutionary socialism. We have nothing more to discuss. I was free—I did my job without you; now it's your turn—do your job without me." And they did. Her sentence was indefinite exile to Siberia, to the city of Kirensk on the Lena River.
Of course, Breshkovskaya wouldn't be Breshkovskaya if she hadn't tried to escape. And she did—in 1913, at nearly 70 years old. She was caught and thrown into Irkutsk prison, from where she also attempted to escape. Again, she failed, but the name of the obstinate prisoner thundered throughout Russia. To consign it to oblivion, Breshkovskaya was exiled to Minusinsk—but even there she was treated like a celebrity. And in February 1917, when a telegram about the revolution arrived in the city, the entire Minusinsk City Duma came to congratulate Breshkovskaya on the victory over tsarism. She was provided with a special train car and sent off to the capital in a triumphant ceremony.
In Petrograd, a triumphant welcome was prepared for Catherine. Reporters, they say, waited three days for her train. Kerensky himself arrived, delivered a fiery speech (that's when the phrase "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution" finally entered newspaper circulation), embraced, and kissed her. "Flowers, music, and congratulations flashed by upon my arrival; Alexander Fyodorovich put me in his car and drove me to the Tauride Palace, where all the leaders of the February Revolution were meeting. We exchanged fraternal greetings and then headed to the Minister of Justice's apartment," Catherine herself recalled of those days of her triumph. She was housed in the Winter Palace.
And from Siberian penal servitude
The "granny" is going to Petrograd,
To see all-Russian
Democracy's parade.
It's coming... cries of jubilation.
Kerensky himself is right there.
And to the palace for living
They're leading the old fool..."
— Purishkevich wrote the next day in a poetic feuilleton.
Well, fool or not, she was the one who first thought that the "revolution's honeymoon," as she later called it, was being overshadowed by some shadow. And she quickly found that shadow.
"How many times did I tell Kerensky: 'Take Lenin!' But he didn't want to. He wanted everything according to the law. Was that even possible back then?" — she wrote with sincere bewilderment. — "Is it really possible to control people like that? Look at the mushrooms growing—some are good, and then there are toadstools. The toadstools should be thrown away. Aren't there bad, evil people? They should be put on barges with corks, taken out to sea, and the corks popped. Otherwise, nothing can be done. They're like wild animals, like snakes—they can and should be exterminated. It's a terrible thing, but necessary and inevitable."
But she, of course, expressed these ideas to the wrong person. The hated Lenin would have found them quite appealing. During the Civil War, so-called "death barges" became a fairly common practice. For the sake of objectivity, and not just Bolshevik objectivity.
But Breshkovskaya herself was already far away by then. From the first days of October, she had gone into deep opposition to the Bolsheviks. In 1918, she traveled via Siberia and Vladivostok (creating various committees along the way and calling for the Bolsheviks to be drowned in blood) to the United States to persuade the Americans to intensify their intervention. Then she moved to Europe. And there she remained. First, she lived in Paris, then moved to a small Czech mountain town, where she organized the "Carpatho-Russian Labor Party." Toward the end of her life, only Kerensky, who visited from Paris from time to time, regularly communicated with her.
She died six months after her 90th birthday, in 1934, and it's not as if she was forgotten by all—though the USSR didn't commemorate the Bolsheviks' enemy, her death was reported in newspapers in both Europe and America. Czechoslovak President Tomáš Masaryk himself sent a wreath for the funeral. A crowd gathered, and Kerensky delivered a heartfelt speech, as he knew how. Everyone who could came. Except her son.
Meanwhile, he was living in Paris at the time, where he had also fled from the Bolsheviks. But Nikolai Nikolaevich Breshko-Breshkovsky, a detective writer and journalist, hated everything connected with his mother: revolutions, liberal ideas, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Socialists, and the Communists. He hated them so much that when German troops entered Paris, he hastened to move to Germany, where he became an employee of the Third Reich's Propaganda Ministry. He worked long and fruitfully in Goebbels's department, devoting, as he wrote in his diaries, "all his strength to the fight against world Jewry and the Communists." As if to say, "toadstools must be thrown out." But this work was cut short in 1943 by a British bomb.
Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya is buried in a cemetery in the town of Horni Počernice, and her nearly crumbling tombstone clearly bears the inscription: "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution." She never denied this connection.
