Vera Zasulich - Menshevik Leader

Menshevik Leader

The Iskra editors were successful in convening a pro-Iskra Second Congress of the RSDLP in Brussels and London in 1903. However, Iskra supporters unexpectedly split during the Congress and formed two factions, Lenin's Bolsheviks and Martov's Mensheviks, Zasulich siding with the latter. She returned to Russia after the 1905 Revolution, but her interest in revolutionary politics waned. She supported the Russian war effort during World War I and opposed the October Revolution of 1917. She died in Petrograd on May 8, 1919.

In his book Lenin, Leon Trotsky, who was friendly with Zasulich in London in 1900, wrote:

Sasulich was a curious person and a curiously attractive one. She wrote very slowly and suffered actual tortures of creation... "Vera Ivanovna does not write, she puts mosaic together, Vladimir Ilyich said to me at that time", And in fact she put down each sentence separately, walked up and down the room slowly, shuffled about in her slippers, smoked constantly hand-made cigarettes and threw the stubs and half-smoked cigarettes in every direction on all the window seats and tables, and scattered ashes over her jacket, hands, manuscripts, tea in the glass, and incidentally her visitor. She remained to the end the old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. Sasulich's articles show that she had adopted to a remarkable degree the theoretic elements of Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the '70s remained untouched in her until her death.