Vera Slutskaia

(real name Berta Bronislavovna Slutskaia). Born Sept. 5 (17), 1874, in Minsk; died Oct. 30 (Nov. 12), 1917, near Tsarskoe Selo, now Pushkin, Leningrad Oblast. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1902.

Slutskaia came from a family of meshchane (middle-class urban dwellers) and was a dentist by profession. She joined the revolutionary movement in 1898 and in 1901 became a member of the Bund. A participant in the Revolution of 1905-07 in Minsk and St. Petersburg, she was a member of the military organization of the RSDLP. She served as a delegate to the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP (1907) and later engaged in party work in St. Petersburg.

From 1909 to 1912, Slutskaia lived in emigration in Germany and Switzerland. In 1913 she resumed party work in St. Petersburg. She was arrested several times and in 1914 was exiled. After the February Revolution of 1917 she became a member of the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP(B), a party organizer among women workers, and secretary of the party’s Vasile ostrovskii Island district committee. Slutskaia was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). She took part in the October armed uprising in Petrograd. During the suppression of the counterrevolutionary Kerensky-Krasnov rebellion of 1917, she was killed while transporting medicine to Red Guard units.