Iakimova, Anna

(married name, Dikovskaia; pseudonym, Baska). Born June 12 (24), 1856, in the village of Tum’iumuchashcha, Urzhum District, Viatka Province; died June 12, 1942, in Novosibirsk. Russian revolutionary.

The daughter of a country priest, Iakimova graduated from an eparchial school in Viatka in 1872 and subsequently completed a one-year pedagogical course. In 1873 she became a teacher in the village of Kameshnitskii in Viatka Province, where she carried on revolutionary propaganda among the peasants. Iakimova was arrested on May 12, 1875, but was acquitted in the Trial of the 193. She joined the Narodnik (Populist) group Freedom or Death in 1879 and later served on the executive committee of the People’s Will.

Iakimova took part in a number of attempts on the life of Emperor Alexander II. Arrested in Kiev on April 21, 1881, she was sentenced to death in the Trial of the 20. The sentence was commuted to hard labor for life. She served part of her term at the Kara Penal Colony and the Akatui Prison, and in 1899 became a penal settler. After escaping in 1904, she joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and took part in the Revolution of 1905–07. From 1907 to 1917 she was in exile in Chita.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Iakimova lived in Moscow, where she was a member of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles and contributed to the society’s journal Katorgaissylka.