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Durova, Nadezhda Andreevna
(1783-1866)
soldier and writer
Durova was the first woman in the Russian
Empire to hold the rank of officer in the armed
forces, and the only woman until 1917 to hold
the St. George Cross. Born in Kiev, Durova grew
up in a military household; her father was a cap-
tain of hussars. She married in 1801, gave birth
to a son in 1803, but in 1806 ran away from
home and joined a
COSSACK
regiment disguised
as a man. In 1807, she fought at the Battle of
Friedland against Napoleon's armies, where it
emerged that she was a woman.
ALEXANDER I
interviewed her, promoted her to officer rank,
and gave her a commission in the Mariupol
Hussars. In 1811, she was transferred to the
Lithuanian Uhlan Regiment. Durova fought at
BORODINO
, where she suffered shell shock, and
marched westward with Alexander's armies,
serving as an orderly to General
KUTUZOV
. Passed
for promotion in 1815, she submitted her retire-
ment but withdrew it when Napoleon escaped
from Elba. In 1816, she retired from the army
with the rank of staff captain. In retirement and
until the end of her life, she insisted on being
addressed as “Aleksandr Andreevich Aleksan-
drov,” her masculine alias. With Aleksandr
PUSHKIN
's encouragement, her memoirs were first
excerpted in the journal
Sovremennik
(
The Con-
temporary
) in 1836. Received to great acclaim,
from 1837 to 1840, Durova added to her mem-
oirs with less success than in the first install-
ment. In 1840, she abandoned her brief attempt
at a literary career and returned to a long quiet
life on her estate of Elabuga on the foothills of
the Urals. When she died in 1866, she was
buried with full military honors.
civil war and the forerunner of the OGPU and
the KGB. Born into a Polish gentry family, he
joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party in
1895 and soon became a full-time revolutionary.
He met
LENIN
in Stockholm in 1906 and was
elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee.
Repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, and exiled,
Dzerzhinsky spent a total of 11 years in jail before
the
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
liberated him from a
Moscow prison. During the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
,
Dzerzhinsky directed the defense of the Smolny
Institute—the headquarters of the Bolshevik
Party—and the capture of the central post and
telegraph offices. When the Extraordinary Com-
mission for Combating Counter-revolution and
Sabotage (Cheka) was established in 1917,
Dzerzhinsky was appointed as its first director
with a mandate to defend the revolution from its
opponents. In July 1918, the insurgent Left
Socialist Revolutionaries briefly held him pris-
oner but inexplicably released him, a mistake
they quickly came to regret when he launched
the Red Terror after Fanny Kaplan's attempted
assassination of Lenin in August 1918. He
became people's commissar for internal affairs in
March 1919 and hence would integrate the func-
tions of the militia and the political police. The
growing power of the Cheka and its parallels
with the czarist police that had persecuted them
as revolutionaries troubled many Bolshevik lead-
ers, but Dzerzhinsky maintained Lenin's uncon-
ditional support during the civil war. In the
post-civil war period Dzerzhinsky continued as
head of the political police through the several
incarnations and permutations that revealed the
difficulties the
COMMUNIST PARTY
faced in shaping
and controlling the fearful weapon it had cre-
ated. Because of his organizational talents and
tireless dedication to work, Dzerzhinsky was
assigned numerous other tasks in the early years
of the revolution: chair of the committee for uni-
versal labor conscription, chair of the commission
for improving the lot of children, people's com-
missar of transport (1921), and chair of the
Supreme Council of the National Economy
(1924). Although he sided with
STALIN
at impor-
Dzerzhinsky, Feliks Edmundovich
(1877-1926)
revolutionary and Soviet official
Dzerzhinsky is best known for his work as the
first director of the Cheka, the political police
established by the
BOLSHEVIKS
during the Russian
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