The Defiant Life of Vera Figner

A “riveting” biography of a Russian noblewoman turned revolutionary terrorist and accomplice in the assassination of a tsar ( The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review ). Born in 1852 in the last years of serfdom, Vera Figner came of age as Imperial Russian society was being rocked by the massive upheaval that culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. At first a champion of populist causes and women’s higher education, which she herself pursued as a medical student in Zurich, Figner later became a