Sofia Panina

Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Panina (1871–1956) was Vice Minister of State Welfare and Vice Minister of Education in the Provisional Government following the Russian February Revolution, 1917.

Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Panina was the daughter of Count Vladimir Viktorovich Panin and Anastasiia Sergeevna Panina. Her maternal grandfather, General Sergei Ivanovich Mal'tsov (1801–93), once known as the Russian Andrew Carnegie, was an industrialist whose diverse enterprises once employed over 100,000 workers. Count Viktor Nikitch Panin, her paternal grandfather, was one of Russia's richest serfowners as well as Minister of Justice for over twenty five years. Panina's father died in 1872 when she was not even two years old, leaving her the principal heir of the enormous Panin fortune. Her mother, who served as trustee of her inheritance, remarried in 1882. Her second husband, Ivan Ilich Petrunkevich, was one of the founders of the Russian liberal movement against the autocracy, later co-founder in 1905 of the major liberal party, the Constitutional Democrat Party (Kadets). Petrunkevich had been arrested and sent into internal exile in 1879 for his oppositionist activity, and Anastasia's marriage to him greatly alarmed the Panin family. Sofia Panina's paternal grandmother, Countess Natalia Pavlovna Panina, successfully petitioned Emperor Alexander III to remove eleven-year-old Sofia from her mother's custody, and enrolled her at the Catherine Institute in St Petersburg, one of the elite boarding schools for noble girls. Entering Petersburg society after graduation, Sofia Panina married a wealthy and well-connected young officer, Alexander Polovstov in 1890. By 1896, however, she had divorced him and reverted to her maiden name. They had no children, and she never officially remarried.

In 1891 Sofia Panina met a Petersburg schoolteacher twenty years older than herself, Aleksandra Vasil'evna Peshekhonova, to whose influence she attributed the decisive turn her life took in the 1890s, away from the world of aristocratic high society and toward progressive philanthropy. Panina and Peshekhonova first created a caféteria for poor schoolchildren in a working-class district of Saint Petersburg. They gradually added Sunday popular readings for the children's parents and older siblings, founded a library, and began offering evening courses for adults. In 1903 Panina built one central building to house all of the diverse services she and Peshekhonova had started in the 1890s, known as Ligovsky People's House (Narodnyi Dom), for working-class residents of the same impoverished district on southern outskirts of Saint Petersburg. It pursued a progressive mission to advance popular education, cultural elevation, and rational entertainment for adults and children, as part of her project to support their development as citizens. The building still operates as a community center in Saint Petersburg today, under the name of the Railroad Workers' Palace of Culture. Its evening courses and literary circles provided a meeting-place for working-class men with socialist sympathies, and during the 1905 Revolution, Panina opened Ligovsky People's House to various political groups for meetings and rallies. On 9 May 1906 Vladimir Lenin addressed his first mass meeting in Russia there. Panina also was a co-founder and major financial supporter of the Russian Society for the Protection of Women in 1900, an anti-prostitution organization. In addition to building schools and hospitals on her various estate, she also provided assistance to countless individuals. In 1901 she loaned her Crimean estate, Gaspra, to the novelist Leo Tolstoy, then suffering from a life-threatening illness; Tolstoy and his family lived at her estate for almost a year.

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