March 3, 2014
Hartnett, director of Russian area studies at Villanova University, profiles the eventful but largely forgotten life of “assassin turned octogenarian” Vera Nikolaevna Figner, onetime leader of Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), the late-19th-century Russian populist terrorist organization. Although she was born into the nobility and became a student of medical science in Zurich, Figner was radicalized in response to the pernicious repression of the Romanov czars, whose secret police were “powerful and arbitrary.” Figner and her fellow revolutionaries, claiming their right “to interfere in politics in a state bereft of political rights,” murdered Czar Alexander II in 1881 , an act that led to Figner languishing for two decades in bleak Shlisselburg Fortress—known as the Russian Bastille—before her sentence was commuted to exile. Hartnett clearly depicts her subject’s gradual transformation from a severe ideologue into a revered martyr whose “suffering became enshrined,” and the book revivifies a legendary socialist whose violent extremism evolved into humanitarianism on behalf of political prisoners and exiles sentenced to hard labor. Although Hartnett’s pronounced feminist approach to the material occasionally diverts it from history into gender studies, it remains likely to engage those interested in the Russian revolution and biography.