Memory. Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya

On January 25, 1844, Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution" was born.

Personal business

Ekaterina Konstantinovna Breshko-Breshkovskaya (nee Verigo, 1844-1934) was born in the village of Ivanovo Nevelsky district of the Vitebsk province. Her father was a large landowner. Most of the childhood spent on the estate of the Lugovets of the Chernihiv province. I received home education, then graduated from the gymnasium. In 1868 she married the landowner N.P. Breshko-Breshkovsky.

Since the 1860s, she began to conduct campaign and educational work on the estate of his father. She worked for ten years in a peasant school created by her, organized loan and conservation cash desks, artel, and mutual assistance society. As a result, she was accused of anti-government agitation, since 1870, police supervision, school and peasant cash desks were installed behind the Breshko-Breshkovsky family.

In 1873, Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya left her family so that, as she wrote in autobiography, "to work for the benefit of the people dear to me." She moved to Kyiv, where she entered the circle of people's Narodniks, in the fall of that year she went to St. Petersburg. She was arrested in 1874, on the 193rd process was sentenced to deprivation of the noble rank and five years in hard labor with subsequent reference.

In 1878, she was taken to Kari Kutorg in Transbaikalia, where she became the first woman-political officer. At the end of the hardware period, the Chitkan volost was sent to exile. Together with three comrades, she tried to run, but was caught and sentenced to four years in hard labor, again hit the Kara River. Since 1885, in the settlement in Selenginsk, then - in Irkutsk. In 1896 it was amnestied on the occasion of the coronation of Nicholas II.

After returning from exile, she lived in Chernigov and Minsk. I established connections with the new circles of the Narodniks. At the end of 1897, he was among the creators in the working party of the political liberation of Russia in Minsk. The party was mainly engaged in the delivery from abroad to Minsk and the further distribution of illegal literature across the country. In April 1900, the Minsk party of the party was defeated by the police. Breshko-Breshkovskaya managed to avoid arrest, but now she was in an illegal position. In 1901, she was among the founders of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (Socialist-Revolutionaries), uniting several previously existing populist and socialist groups. In 1903, after the defeat of many organizations, she was forced to go to Switzerland. Then she went to the United States, where she took up raising funds for a revolutionary struggle.

In 1905 she returned to Russia. Was issued by Azef and arrested. For almost three years she was in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Since 1910, I was sent to the Irkutsk province. I tried to run, but was detained and sentenced to 16 months of a single imprisonment. After the end of the conclusion, I was again sent to exile in Yakutia. Was released after the February Revolution of 1917. Together with other former political prisoners, she returned to Petrograd with a triumph.

She became one of the leaders of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries, participated in the work of the State meeting in Moscow in August 1917. Supported the Provisional Government and Alexander Kerensky. She refused to join the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, where she was elected by the party congress, since Kerensky was not elected among the members of the Central Committee. She called Kerensky "a citizen, her decisive and courageous word and image of actions saved Russia." She was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly.

The October Revolution did not accept. In 1918, she participated in the work of the Committee of members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) in Samara. In September, she participated in the Ufa state meeting. At the end of the same year, she left Russia, going from Vladivostok to Japan and further to the United States.

Since 1920 she lived in Paris, then in Prague. For the past few years, she spent because of a deteriorated health in the village of Praisli-Glace in the vicinity of Prague.

Catherine Breshko-Breshkovskaya died on September 12, 1934.

Ekaterina Konstantinovna Breshko-Breshkovskaya. 1914 Bibliothèque National de France

What is famous

One of the founders of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries and the combat organization of this party, engaged in terrorist activities. Personally engaged in the creation of local Socialist Revolutionaries in Poltava, Saratov and other cities. During the emigration of 1903 - 1905, she entered the party leadership and was actively engaged in the preparation of propagandists and attracting new members. In 1904, she took part in the work of the Amsterdam Congress of the Second International. Breshko-Breshkovskaya took a special position in the leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries, believing that it was not necessary to engage in “central terror”, more actively working with peasants and expand “agrarian terror”, that is, arson of estates, murder of landowners, and so on. It was believed that peasant unrest in the south of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century were largely the result of the work of the Socialist -Revolutionary organizations. She prepared proclamations that called on the peasants to a decisive struggle with weapons in their hands against landowners and tsarist authorities for the immediate transition of the whole land to the property of the people and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.

What you need to know about

The fate of Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya after emigration from Soviet Russia is known much worse. Meanwhile, she, at the age of seventy years, did not refuse social activity. In Czechoslovakia, she participated in the organization of the Carpath Russian Labor Party in Uzhgorod, which advocated the expansion of the autonomy of sub -Carpathian Rus', the introduction of the Russian language in state institutions and in education, as well as for political reforms of a socialist orientation. She founded three free student dormitories in Uzhgorod and Mukachev for Russian -speaking youth.

Direct speech

Breshkovskaya was at that time for 30 years, and maybe even more. Next to me, Lurie, Grisha, she seemed a particularly solid, serious, real veteran. Remembering my attitude to Katya Breshkovskaya at this time, I cannot define him otherwise than the word "reverence." There was something exceptional in Breshkovskaya, characteristic of her alone, which forced me-and not me alone-to bow to her. These were not any new ideas, not special talents, but its huge, lively, passionate love for the people. Love, all -consuming, immense love, and not a feeling of abstract duty, were the engine of her whole life. She knew how to love not only every person from a common people, but all the people, like a huge team.
I remember I talked about Katya ...:
- I don’t know how she can ... I understand love for individual individuals. But in relation to the people, in general, I feel deep compassion and an ardent desire, so that he can rather achieve freedom and well -being; I hate a system that doomes it to suffering, and those who guard this system. But I love that I actually are those new forms of human relations that make up our ideal and which will only give a person to achieve spiritual and moral perfection. But Katya is directly and simply, with all my heart, loves the people as it is.
From the memoirs of Pavel Axelrod

For some reason, I was “lucky” to my grandmother in the 17th year. Whenever I made a report at the party meeting, by the end of my speech, Breshkovskaya appeared in the hall, she was met, of course, with a thunder of applause, interrupting my presentation. After listening to the final part of the report, the grandmother made her speech, starting her from the polemic not only with the “previous speaker”, but also with all the other tricky lawyers and non-legalists who, in her conviction, do not see what is and see what does not exist. Despite the fact that I often turned out to be a target of grandmother’s attacks, I have with her, and especially my grandmother and my wife, “cherry”, as she called her, established the kindest relationship.
It was impossible not to relate to the grandmother with admiration - and not only for her revolutionary courage and selfless devotion to serving the people, but also as a person.
Mark Vishnyak "Tow to the past"

Katerina Breshkovskaya has never been adapted to a leading role in the center of a large political organization. Here she was uneasy. It was not a theorist, not a strategist, and not a tactician, but a preacher, an apostle, convinced by a word and, even more, an effective example. Young souls always stretched to her, because she believed in them and forced them to become higher than themselves. She generously rendered a moral loan to everyone, but from everyone demanded that the word be a full -fledged business. And since it itself was whole, as if it were cut down from one piece of granite, the radiance of such moral authority and high prestige, which is given to a few chosen natures ... ”radiated from her ...”.
Victor Chernov "in front of the storm. Memories"

Her life was legendary. Having married a very young woman to marry, she threw a family-a family of her parents and her own, left her aunt her infant (turned over time into a famous, very prolific, vulgar and mediocre novelist HH Breshko-Breshkovsky) and went into a revolution. She came from the noble noble landlord in Ukraine (Verigo), but turned into a peasant woman - she lived among the peasants and preached a revolution to them.
She was arrested, sat in difficult conditions in prison for a long time, participated in the 193rd process, Suslan was to Siberia, tried to flee from there, was again arrested and sent to hard labor. Prison, exile, escape, again prison, hard labor, Siberia, again escape and prison and hard labor - 22 years of life passed in this. Only in 1901 she was returned from Siberia, but, returning to Russia, now again plunged into revolutionary work.
Breshkovskaya was one of the founders of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. She lived for two years under various names in Russia, traveling from one end to the other and everywhere, like an apostle, preaching the work of her whole life, creating revolutionary circles from peasant youth and students, from students, from students. The youth poured her to her as a beloved mother, as a grandmother. And wherever she drove, she left behind the organization ...
She had a simple peasant face, in a peasant-“horns”-a handkerchief tied on her head, cheerful eyes. - "Fu, sat down!" - she exclaimed, and, to my greatest surprise, putting her hands on her sides, walked all over the room, stuck with her feet, as in Russian Panzas. It was a grandmother ... She had simplicity and directness, which immediately washed off all conventions, all partitions. I felt that she had the right to know everything, has the right to ask any question, but at the same time I felt that she would understand everything. However, then she must have not understood me, because later they told me that she was unhappy with me with a conversation with me. “Nothing good will come of it,” she said about me. Many years later, when we met with my grandmother again and when I already had years of revolutionary work, prison and exile behind me, she herself admitted to me in a harsh sentence that she then issued to me. “I'm glad,” she concluded her confession, “that then I was mistaken in you”
Vladimir Zenzinov "experienced"

Six facts about Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya

• Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya left her son when he was not even a year, but met him after the amnesty of 1898, when he turned twenty-two. He called her "aunt Katya."
• Nikolai Breshko-Breshkovsky became a journalist and writer, during the First World War he became famous as the author of adventure novels.
• In the memoirs of Pavel Milyukov there is an amazing episode, which describes the dance of Peter Kropotkin and Ekaterina Breshki-Breshkovskaya: “We had to see how Breshkovskaya’s grandmother flirtly waved, Pavoy, dancing around her cavalier, and Kropotkin sledged by Gogol.”
• In June 1917, the film directed by Boris Svetlov "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, or a martyr for freedom" was shot.
• In the summer of 1917, Breshko-Breshkovskaya urged to abandon all his strength to the defense of the country. She sent a greeting to the 1st Women's Military Congress and supported the initiative of Maria Bochkareva to create women's battalions. She wrote: “May your undertaking be blessed ... It’s true with you, with you, the blessing of your great homeland with you, off the doubt - boldly forward!”
• There is a legend according to which, Breshko-Breshkovskaya was among the defenders of the Winter Palace on October 25, 1917 and left with the last retreating. In fact, she was not in St. Petersburg that day.

Materials about Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya

Article about Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya on Russian Wikipedia
Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya in the project "Chronos"