Vera Figner

Vera Figner
Vera Figner circa 1880
Born	(1852-07-07)July 7, 1852 Kazan Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	June 15, 1942(1942-06-15) (aged 89) Moscow, Soviet Union

Vera Nikolayevna Figner Filippova (Russian: Ве́ра Никола́евна Фи́гнер Фили́ппова, 1852-1942) was a revolutionary political activist born in Kazan Governorate, Russian Empire, into a noble family of ethnic German and Russian descent.

A leader of the clandestine Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) group, which advocated the use of terror to achieve a revolutionary overthrow of the government, Figner was a participant in planning the successful assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Figner was later arrested and spent 20 months in solitary confinement prior to trial, at which she was sentenced to death. The sentence was subsequently commuted and Figner was imprisoned in the Shlisselburg fortress for 20 years before being sent into internal exile.

Figner gained international fame in large part because of the widely translated memoir of her experiences. She was treated as a heroic icon of revolutionary sacrifice after the February Revolution in 1917 and was a popular public speaker during that year. Figner later became prominent in the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles in the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1935.

Figner managed to survive the Great Terror of 1937 and died of natural causes in Moscow in 1942 at the age of 89.

Vera Figner was born July 7 (June 25 O.S.), 1852, the oldest of six children of Nikolai Alexandrovich Figner and his wife, the former Ekaterina Khristoforovna Kuprianova, both members of the hereditary Russian nobility. The family owned well over 1,000 acres of land, worked by serfs existing in a state of semi-slavery until the Emancipation of 1861. Her father served in the state forestry service, resigning that post to become a local administrative functionary called a "peace mediator" in the years after emancipation. She was the sister of Lidija Figner.