Ippolit Nikitich Myshkin

Born Jan. 21 (Feb. 3), 1848, in Pskov; died Jan. 26 (Feb. 7), 1885, in Shlissel’burg. Russian revolutionary; Narodnik (Populist).

Myshkin’s father was an army clerk with the rank of noncommissioned officer, and his mother was a serf. Myshkin graduated from a school for soldiers’ sons in Pskov in 1860 and from a school for column leaders in St. Petersburg in 1864. From 1864 to 1868 he served with the rank of noncommissioned officer as a topographer in St. Petersburg and as a government stenographer in Moscow. After leaving military service, Myshkin passed an examination which qualified him as a domestic tutor; he also worked as a stenographer and wrote for periodicals. In 1873, Myshkin acquired a printing shop in Moscow; there, in 1874, he and P. I. Voinaral’skii organized an illegal Narodnik (Populist) press.

Myshkin had to flee the country after the police raided his shop, but in the spring of 1875, he set out for Siberia with the intention of freeing N. G. Chernyshevskii. He was arrested in Viliuisk in July 1875 after offering armed resistance and was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Myshkin was one of the chief defendants in the Trial of the 193, at which, on Nov. 15, 1877, he made a fiery revolutionary speech. He was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. He served part of his sentence in the central hard labor prisons of Novobelgorod and Novoborisoglebsk but in 1881 was sent to Eastern Siberia. In early 1882 he was sentenced to an additional 15 years of hard labor for a speech he made in the Irkutsk prison at the funeral of L. A. Dmokhovskii. Myshkin escaped from the Kara Penal Colony on Apr. 19, 1882, but was arrested again in Vladivostok on May 24 and imprisoned in the Shlissel’burg Fortress. He was court-martialed for his protest against the prison regime and was shot.