Maria (Masha) Kolenkina

Maria (Masha) Alexandrovna Kolenkina, Russian socialist revolutionary from a merchant family in Temzhuk, a small town on the Sea of Azov. While studying to midwife in Kiev in the early 1870s she became part of the populist movement in Russia. She was one of those populists that went "to the people" in 1874 to propagandize and later belonged to Bakunist socialists known as the Southern Rebels (Iuzhnye Buntari) in Kiev and after that was associated with the Land and Liberty movement in Saint Petersburg.^[1]

Together with Vera Zasulich she planned what was in posterity seen as the first modern terrorist deed, to assassinate two Russian government officials on January 24, 1878. However, her attempt to assassinate Vladislav Zhelekhovskii, the prosecutor in the Trial of the 193 failed while Zasulich succeeded in injuring the Governor of St Petersburg Fyodor Trepov. Kolenkina was after a gun fight with the Russian gendarmes arrested on October 11, 1878 and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor and internal exile to Siberia.^[2]

Bibliography

• Jay Bergman. Vera Zasulich: A Biography, Stanford University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-8047-1156-9, 261p.
• EK Breshko-Breshkovskai͡a͡, L Hutchinson, Hidden springs of the Russian revolution: personal memoirs of Katerina Breshkovskaia, Stanford University Press, 1931.
• Ana Siljak. Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World, St. Martin's Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-312-36399-4, 370p.
• Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar, eds. Barbara A. Engel, Clifford N. Rosenthal, Routledge, 1975, reprinted in 1992, ISBN 0-415-90715-2, pp. 61–62.
• Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution. A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (1960). Weidenfeld and Nicolson. London.

Notes

1. ^ Ana Siljak, Ana Siljak. Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World, 154-55.
2. ^ Ana Siljak. Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World, 2, 10-11, 301; Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 571.