Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
exile in 1896, she played a key role in the revival
of
POPULISM
under the banners of the newly
formed Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR).
She toured the United States in 1904 on a fund-
raising mission. Back in Russia, she was arrested
in Simbirsk province in 1907 as part of the
repression that followed the 1905 Revolution.
This time she was sentenced to perpetual exile in
Siberia. She returned to Petrograd, a triumphant
survivor of exile, and promptly threw her sup-
port behind Aleksandr
KERENSKY
, who was
emerging as one of the democratic socialist lead-
ers of the Provisional Government. After the
Bolshevik victory in October, she supported the
“democratic counterrevolution” that sought a
middle course between the
BOLSHEVIKS
and the
monarchist army officers behind the White
movement. She left Russia for exile in Czechoslo-
vakia, where she founded Russian-language
schools, before retiring to a farm near Prague.
There she died at the age of 90. Her memoirs
were published in an English translation with the
title
Hidden Springs of the Russian Revolution: Per-
sonal Memoirs of Katerina Brezhkovskaia
(1931).
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of
(1918)
Known in some quarters as the “indecent
peace,” the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the con-
troversial agreement that marked a separate
peace between Soviet Russia and Germany dur-
ing World War I. By this treaty, Russia gave up
huge territories in the west, including the Baltic
provinces and Ukraine, and was obliged to
demobilize the army. The value of the treaty to
Germany, which had hoped to transfer a large
number of troops to the western front, was to a
large extent nullified by the drawn-out negotia-
tions, though the occupation of Ukraine was a
great economic gain for the Germans. Discus-
sions about a peace with Germany caused the
first serious crisis within the ranks of the recently
victorious
BOLSHEVIKS
. The promise of peace had
been one of the main Bolshevik slogans when
they seized power, and
LENIN
rushed to conclude
an agreement that would allow the Bolsheviks
Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia
(Hulton/Archive)
ideas, she carried out educational work among
the peasantry, but when this was labeled sub-
versive in 1871, she abandoned her husband and
family and joined her sister Olga in founding a
socialist commune in Kiev. Organized around
craft workshops, the commune became a center
of debates between followers of
LAVROV
and
BAKUNIN
. Although convinced of the necessity of
terror, she joined the populist “To the People”
crusade in 1874, but was arrested after three
months. One of the defendants in the “Trial of the
193” (January 1878), Breshko-Breshkovskaia
became the first woman to be sentenced to hard
labor in Siberia. She became internationally
famous after the American journalist George F.
Kennan, traveling in Siberia in 1885, wrote an
account of her captivity. Allowed to return from
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