Mikhail Petrovich Shebalin

Born May 27 (June 8), 1857, in the village of Novoselki, Kazan Province; died Feb. 24, 1937, in Moscow. Russian revolutionary; member of the People’s Will organization.

Shebalin came from a noble family. He graduated from the mathematics faculty of the University of St. Petersburg in 1882. In the fall of that year he joined the People’s Will, and in 1883 he organized underground “traveling printshops” in St. Petersburg and Kiev. Shebalin printed the first two issues of Listki “Narodnoivoli”. He reestablished the Kiev organization of the People’s Will and merged it with the Youth Party of the People’s Will. Shebalin was arrested in Kiev on Mar. 4, 1884. He was sentenced in the Trial of the 12, held in the Kiev Military District Court on Nov. 1–9, 1884, to 12 years of penal servitude; he served the sentence in the Shlissel’burg Fortress.

Shebalin subsequently lived in exile in Yakutsk Oblast until 1906, when he returned to European Russia and took part in the social movement. From 1909 to 1911 he was in exile in Arkhangelsk Province. He was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party from 1911 until 1918. In February 1922, Shebalin became head of the P. A. Kropotkin Museum in Moscow and a member of the All-Union Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles.