Mariia Aleksandrovna Malykh

Born Aug. 10 (22), 1879, in Irkutsk; died Aug. 9, 1967, in Leningrad. Publisher of Marxist literature in prerevolutionary Russia.

Malykh studied in St. Petersburg in the courses of P. F. Lesgaft and subsequently at the University of Zürich. She joined the Karl Marx Social Democratic circle in Riga. Malykh helped publish and disseminate illegal revolutionary publications in Russia. The Mariia Malykh Publishing House, founded in St. Petersburg in 1901, issued cheap, popular sociopolitical pamphlets and democratically oriented fiction.

During the Revolution of 1905-07 the Malykh Publishing House, with the active support of the Bolsheviks, became one of the most important publishers of Marxist literature, issuing many works by K. Marx, F. Engels, A. Bebel, P. Lafargue, W. Liebknecht, K. Kautsky, and G. V. Plekhanov. Works published in numbers large for that time included V. I. Lenin’s To the Village Poor (60,000 copies), N. K. Krupskaia’s The Woman Worker (20,000 copies), and the Program of the RSDLP.

For her revolutionary publishing activity Malykh was persecuted by the tsarist authorities, and her publications were confiscated several times. In 1909 she was sentenced to a term in prison. Malykh emigrated to Switzerland. From 1911 to 1913 she published the atheist journal Avant-garde in Zurich. Malykh returned to Russia in 1914. After the October Revolution of 1917 she worked in a number of Soviet publishing houses.