Élisabeth Dmitrieff

Elisabeth Dmitrieff (born Elizaveta Lukinichna Kusheleva, , also known as Elizaveta Tomanovskaya; 1 November 1850 – probably between 1916 and 1918) was a Russian revolutionary and feminist activist. The illegitimate daughter of a Russian aristocrat and a German nurse, she had a comfortable upbringing but was marginalized within the Russian aristocracy due to the circumstances of her birth, leading to her interest in Marxism and the radical ideas of Nikolay Chernyshevsky. She entered into a marriage of convenience with Mikhail Tomanovski, a colonel who had retired early due to illness, in order to access her inheritance, which she used to fund revolutionary causes such as the Russian-language journal ''Narodnoye delo''. Her money and married status allowed her to leave Russia and study in Geneva, where she participated in founding the Geneva section of the International Workingmen's Association. Sent by the Geneva section as an envoy to London, she became close to Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny.

When the revolutionary Paris Commune was declared following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Marx sent Dmitrieff to Paris as a representative of the International. There, she became one of the most important women's leaders of the Commune, founding the Women's Union to Defend Paris and Care for the Wounded, which demanded rights for working women and organized co-operative textile workshops in the city. During " bloody week", when French government forces retook the city, Dmitrieff fought and was wounded in defense of the Commune. She and Leó Frankel, whom she had worked with during the Commune and rescued in the fighting, hid in Paris for several weeks before escaping to Geneva.

Depressed by the defeat of the Commune and the failure of other revolutionaries to come to its aid, she returned to Russia in October 1871. There, she struggled to re-enter activist politics, since the radical circles of the 1870s were less sympathetic to her feminist socialism than those of the 1860s, and because she was forced to hide her communard past due to being pursued by the French, Swiss, and Russian police. She fell in love with the manager of her aging first husband's estate, Ivan Mikhailovich Davydovski, and had two children with him after she was widowed in 1873. Davydovski would become a key defendant in a sensational mass trial, accused of being a ringleader of the "Jacks of Hearts" criminal conspiracy, and was convicted for fraud and murder. Dmitrieff married him to follow him into exile in Siberia. She passed the last years of her life in obscurity, and the date of her death is uncertain.

Although historiography of the Paris Commune has tended to focus on Louise Michel, Dmitrieff's life has inspired a number of biographies. A public square carries her name in Paris, and a museum is dedicated to her in Volok, her village of birth, where she is remembered as a heroine of the revolutionary movement.

Childhood

Elizaveta Lukinichna Kusheleva was born 1 November 1850, in Volok, a village in Toropets in the Pskov Governorate. Her father was Luka Ivanovich Kushelev (28 October 1793 - 1859) a ''pomeshchik'' (помещик, noble landowner) whose father, Ivan Ivanovich Kushelev, had been a senator under the reign of Paul I and active privy councillor under Alexander I. Kushelev received the education of a young aristocrat and joined the Cadet Corps, participating in the Napoleonic Wars. His first wife, Anna Dmitriyevna (born Bakhmetiyeva), was the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman and a maid; she was a rich heiress ennobled by the emperor. The couple fought often; Kushelev beat his wife and even kidnapped their three daughters, and despite an attempt at mediation the couple separated in 1832.

In 1848, Kushelev inherited the family estate after the death of his brother Nikolai. During his illness, Nikolai was treated by a 26 year old German Lutheran nurse, Carolina Dorothea Troskevich. Troskevich was part of the ''mechtchanstvo'', the urban petty bourgeoisie, and came to Volok from Courland, where she had registered as sister of charity in the Lutheran evangelical order at Hasenpoth. She became Kushelev's mistress.

Dmitrieff was the third of four surviving children of Kushelev and Troskevich: elder siblings Sophia and Alexander and a younger brother, Vladimir. Kushelev, mindful of his status as an aristocrat, did not want to risk dispossessing the three daughters from his first marriage and refused to recognize Elisabeth and her siblings. Kushelev's first wife died of cholera, and he would eventually marry Troskevich in 1856, after she intervened to save him when his serfs revolted. He was 63; Troskevich was 35. She converted to Russian Orthodoxy and adopted the name Natalia Yegorovna.

Even after the three daughters from his first marriage had died, Kushelev did not legitimize the children of his second marriage. His will granted them the status of "wards", permitting inheritance of his fortune but not his noble title. The children were further marginalized in the Russian aristocracy by their mother's status as a foreigner. Her status as an illegitimate child and her rejection by the Russian aristocracy were probably the origin of Dmitrieff's sensitivity to inequalities, whether serfdom in the countryside or poverty in Saint Petersburg.

Education

Dmitrieff enjoyed privileges due to her father's position in the Russian aristocracy, but her combined status as both a bastard and a girl prevented her and her sister from enrolling in school, while their brothers faced no such impediment. However, she was educated by private tutors, among whom were veterans of the revolutions of 1848 and composer Modest Mussorgsky, possibly a distant cousin of Dmitrieff, who came to Volok in 1862 to treat his depression and spent his time with fellow artists of The Five.

Dmitrieff read works in English, German, and French from her father's library, as well as magazines her mother subscribed to. Dmitrieff's father possessed a library which gathered the new ideas of his time, and, paradoxically for an authoritarian man who was violent toward his serfs, he liked surrounding himself with people with progressive ideas. The Kushelevs often visited the Zielony estate, which frequently hosted radicals and other controversial figures, such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky. After Kushelev's death, Dmitrieff's mother continued to welcome revolutionary guests. The family spent summers at Volok, returning in the fall to Saint Petersburg, where they lived in No. 12 on Vasilyevsky Island, opposite the cadet corps where Kushelev, and then his sons, studied. In the house next door lived Sofya Kovalevskaya and Anne Jaclard, the latter whom Dmitrieff befriended. Additionally, this quarter housed privileged revolutionaries, notably including Dobrolyubov, Dostoevsky, Nechayev, Pisarev, Tkachev, Lavrov, and most importantly Chernyshevsky. Dmitrieff's younger brother frequently visited members of the first Land and Liberty. In 1863, Mussorgsky joined a Saint Petersburg community frequented by the writer Turgenev, the poet Shevchenko, and the historian Kostomarov, and Dmitrieff's mother brought her there. Dmitrieff drew close to student groups in favor of the emancipation of women and serfs.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel ''What Is to Be Done?'' would become one of Dmitrieff's most important influences. In 1865, Aleksey Kuropatkin, a friend of her brother Alexander, brought it to discuss with him, but she was the one who took an avid interest in it. In the book, Nikolay Chernyshevsky proposes a radical questioning of social conventions and the prevailing way of life, notably marriage and inheritance. The novel recounts the story of Vera Pavlovna, a young emancipated woman who lives in a community with other young people and advocates a system of cooperatives to emancipate workers. She founds a cooperative of seamstresses, an urban obshchina, which serves as a model for similar initiatives throughout Russia. Chernyshevsky invites the reader to stop dreaming and start adopting the daily practices of an ideal socialist.

It was through this book and, probably, the magazine ''Russkoye Slovo'', that Dmitrieff became interested in the ideas of Karl Marx. She was determined to build a bridge between Marx's economic theories and Chernyshevsky's ideas on the emancipatory capacity of the Russian village commune model. She had seen first-hand her father's notorious cruelty toward his serfs, and the families of the estate, serfs and lords, lived close to each other and were familiar with each other's living conditions. Dmitrieff developed through her reading a critical analysis of gender and class hierarchies, and envisaged using her fortune to construct a cooperative mill—an artel—which would serve the peasants of Volok.

Dmitrieff was determined to attend university, but women could not attend university at that time in Russia. Inspired by Vera Pavlovna in Chernyshevsky's novel, she decided to enter a marriage of convenience to emancipate herself from her family and obtain her inheritance. In 1867, she married the colonel Mikhail Tomanovski, who had been forced into retirement by an illness, and was an advocate for women's emancipation. After the marriage, she donated 50,000 rubles to revolutionary organizations.

Early activism

Geneva: ''Narodnoye delo'' and the Workers' International

Dmitrieff and her husband travelled around Europe, arriving in spring 1868 in Geneva, a popular destination for revolutionaries and Russian exiles. Here, she re-encountered Anne Jaclard and met Ekaterina and Victor Barteneva and Nikolai Utin, with whom she would become close friends. She eventually returned to Russia with her husband, then returned to Geneva in 1869 without him.

In the years that followed, she would no longer give any news to her family, and called herself "citizen Élise". She sometimes went to Basel and Zurich. In Geneva, meetings took place between the international socialist movements and the Russian revolutionaries. In that city, Dmitrieff met the French socialists Eugène Varlin and Benoît Malon, who, like her, would participate in the Paris Commune in 1871.

She financed and co-edited the Russian-language journal ''Narodnoye delo'' ("''The Cause of the People''"), which was founded in Geneva by Nikolai Utin and other exiled revolutionaries in 1868. The circle involved in the writing of the newspaper included Zoya Obolenskaya