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British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2011

Kevin Grant
Kevin Grant*
Affiliation:
History, Hamilton College
*
[email protected]
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Extract

In the spring of 1878 male political prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersburg went on hunger strike to protest against the oppressive conditions in which they were held by the tsarist regime. After three days, news of the strike reached the prisoners' families, who appealed for relief to the director of military police, General N. V. Mezentsev. The director dismissed their pleas and reportedly declared of the hunger strikers, “Let them die; I have already ordered coffins for them all.” It was a volatile period of repression and reprisal in the Russian revolutionary movement. The tsarist regime had cracked down on the revolutionary populists, the narodniki, and the era of terrorism had just begun in St. Petersburg that January, when Vera Zasulich shot and seriously wounded the city's governor. The hunger strikers were among a group of 193 revolutionaries who had been recently tried for treason and sentenced to various forms of punishment, including hard labor and imprisonment in Siberia. In these circumstances the news of Mezentsev's response spread quickly beyond the strikers' families, soon reaching a would-be terrorist and former artillery officer, Sergius Kravchinskii. Kravchinskii killed Mezentsev with a dagger on a city street, then fled Russia and made his way to Great Britain, a haven for Russian revolutionaries since Alexander Herzen had arrived in 1852 and established the first Russian revolutionary press abroad. Kravchinskii likewise wrote against the tsarist regime, under the pen name Sergius Stepniak, and in 1890 he became the editor of a new, London-based periodical, Free Russia. Its first number chronicled a dramatic series of hunger strikes led by female revolutionaries imprisoned at Kara in the Trans-Baikál of eastern Siberia. These strikes had culminated in the death of one woman after she was flogged and in five suicides by female and male political prisoners who, after the death of their comrade, had ended their hunger strikes to eat poison. Having been inspired to terror by his sympathy for revolutionary hunger strikers, Stepniak, like other Russian exiles, believed that the hunger strike would win sympathy and support for Russian revolutionaries in Britain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 113 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

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References

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126 The Times, 5 Oct. 1909.

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