Breshko-Breshkovskaia, Ekaterina Konstantinovna

Born Jan. 22 (Feb. 3), 1844, in Saratov; died Sept. 12, 1934, near Prague. One of the organizers and leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Breshko-Breshkovskaia began to be active in the populist movement in 1873. Between 1874 and 1896 she was in forced labor camps and in exile. In 1899, along with G. Gershuni, she founded the Workers’ Party for the Political Liberation of Russia, which merged with the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1902. In 1903 she emigrated to Switzerland and in 1904 to the USA. She returned to Russia in 1905 and worked in socialist revolutionary organizations. She was repeatedly elected to the Socialist Revolutionary central committee. In 1907 she was again arrested and deported for settlement in Siberia; she returned to Petrograd after the February Revolution of 1917. Breshko-Breshkovskaia vigorously supported the bourgeois Provisional Government. She was hostile to the October Revolution of 1917 and took a stand against Soviet power. She emigrated to the USA in 1919, moved to Czechoslovakia in 1924, and then lived in France.