Yelizaveta Kovalskaya - Revolutionary Life

Revolutionary Life

Kovalskaya went on to join the Kharkov society for the promotion of literacy. She was inspired by the women's movement in the 1860s and so she was always interested in feminist and socialist views. Impressed by the work of Robert Owen, she used one of her inherited houses as a college for young women seeking education.

In 1869, she met Sophia Perovskaya and began attending her women's meeting, both joining Zemlya i volya (The Land and Liberty).

When Zemlya i volya split in 1879, Kovalskaya joined the Black Repartition, while her colleague Perovskaya joined Narodnaya Volya (The Peoples Will). Black Repartition rejected terrorism, while Narodnaya Volya felt that terrorist acts where an appropriate method in forcing reforms. Kovalskaya worked with Black Repartition to support a socialist propaganda campaign among workers and peasants.

In 1880, together with Nikolai Schedrin, she took part in organizing the Worker's Union of Southern Russia in Kiev. Although only involved in propaganda work, she was arrested in 1881, found guilty of being a member of an illegal organization and sentenced to an open-ended katorga in 1881. In 1882, Kovalskaya was transferred to the Kara katorga. During the next twenty years, she went through several hunger strikes and made two unsuccessful prison escapes as well as knifed a prison guard.

She was finally released in 1903, moving to Geneva and joining the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1903-1917, she was in exile in Switzerland and France.

In 1918, Kovalskaya became a research worker at Petrograd Historical Revolutionary Archive and member of the editorial board of the Katorga and Exile magazine.

She had been married twice and there was never any mention of having children.