Shishko, Leonid

(pseudonyms include P. B., P. Batin, and Blagoveshchenskii). Born May 19 (31), 1852, in Podol’sk; died Jan. 20, 1910, in Paris. Russian revolutionary, publicist, and historian.

The son of a forester, Shishko graduated from the Mikhail Artillery School in St. Petersburg in 1871, and in 1871 and the first part of 1872 he studied at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute. In 1872 he joined the Chaikovskii circle in St. Petersburg and began conducting propaganda among the military cadets (iunkera) and working people. Shishko took part in the “going to the people” movement and was the author of the pamphlet Something, Brothers, which contained a revolutionary proclamation. Shishko was arrested in Moscow on Aug. 14,1874, and was sentenced at the Trial of the 193 to nine years’ hard labor. He escaped from exile in 1890, however, and fled abroad.

Shishko helped establish the Foundation of the Free Russian Press. He joined the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1902 and became a member of the party committee abroad and the editorial board of the newspaper Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia. He translated A. Thun’s History of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia, which was the first work on the subject. Shishko’s own writings on the agrarian issue and the history of the social movement in Russia are typical of Narodnik (Populist) historiography.