Elizabeth Dmitrieva biography

Questions of history. The people rejoiced, filled with pride in their chosen ones, whose names had just been made under approving exclamations of thousands with the singing of Marseelusa on the streets of the national guards were held. The atmosphere in the city was truly festive. The proletariat of the whole world, the revolutionaries of all countries enthusiastically welcomed the victory of the French workers.

Among those who passionately wanted to help the Paris communes, there was a young Russian woman at that time she was about 20 years old Elizabeth Dmitrieva. The illegitimate daughter of the landowner L. Kushelev, she was well acquainted with the heavy life of the Russian peasantry, who was under the landowner oppression. Pictures of violence, bullying the serfs on the father’s estate for the whole life are captured in the memory of Elizabeth Lukinichny.

She turned to books to find answers to questions that tormented her about justice, about happiness and universal prosperity. Gradually, the circle of her reading was formed by the works of Russian revolutionaries-democrats Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Belinsky. Elizaveta Lukinichna met with the works of K. Marx, and in the city and now Dmitriev in Paris, in the thick of revolutionary events.

Here she headed the female organization of the assistance of the revolution - the Union of Women. We established in all areas and in the premises of the mayor's rooms women's committees and, in addition, the Central Committee. All this in order to establish the union of women to protect Paris and the help of the wounded ”1,” Dmitrieva reported to London about her activities in April of the year.

The Union of Women then united Parisians. Communards served camp kitchens, worked in hospitals, sewed uniforms for the National Guard. In critical days for the commune, Parisian women united in a combat battalion, which heroically fought in the barricades. K. Marx and V. Nature endowed Dmitriev with excellent oratory data with admiration about the outstanding role of communities.

They knew Elizabeth Lukinichn in an early youth noted that even then she possessed a “noble way of thoughts and the ability to speak figuratively and ardently”, and in the following years of revolutionary activity, thanks to the “ability to speak fiery speeches,” 3. Despite the disease, she performed in Parisian clubs every evening. Her fiery speeches inspired Kommunarov to fight enemies.

In Paris, Dmitrieva carried out an extremely responsible and important assignment: she was the messenger of the General Council of the I International. Under the leadership of K. Marx, all sections of the I International conducted truly titanic work on promoting the ideas of the commune and protecting it from slander reaction. The information came from Paris, surrounded by the troops of French reactionaries and foreign interventionists.

Postal service was interrupted, newspapers came from case to case, the police delayed the letter. And the Marxists in London were looking forward to the news to help at least somehow fighting communal. And then the General Council of the I International decided to send a coherent to Paris. The choice fell on Dmitriev. In the General Council, she was known as a devoted friend of K.

Marx, seeking to promote the spread of Marxism among workers. Being among the active figures of the Russian section of the International in Geneva, she waged the fight against the Bakunists. Her ability to polemize, resourcefulness and conviction helped Marx's supporters to rafting and more successfully exposing the enemies of the International. Dmitrieva showed great interest in the revolutionary events taking place in France.

In Geneva, she met some future figures of the commune. Arriving in London, on behalf of the Russian section of the I International, “Eliza citizen”, as they called her in the circle of comrades, participated in the movement of representatives of English democracy for recognition of the French Republic4. In the days of the commune, "Citizen of Eliza" became known as Elizabeth Dmitrieva.

This signature was listed in letters sent to her to the Secretary General of the I International, and stood on posters released on behalf of the Union of Women of Paris. The same name was imprinted on the pages of Kommunarov’s memoirs and went down in the history of the Paris Commune. It was the pseudonym of Elizabeth Lukinichna, hiding her true name from the royal spies in Paris and allowed her to safely return to her homeland.

So, the coherent I International Elizabeth Dmitrieva began to execute the responsible mission assigned to it. First of all, she resumed contacts with members of the French sections of the International. Elizaveta Dmitrieva informed in detail the General Council of the state of the commune, about her events and further plans. At that time, even in the Council of the Commune, not everyone understood the social essence and the national content of the matter of the commune.

Dmitrieva saw her radical difference from the previous proletarian movements in that she resolutely set herself a goal forever "end the old world." Dmitrieva was alien to the fluctuations of some ideologists of the commune, inclined to recognize the limited, purely municipal nature of the commune.The revolutionary was worried that the Kommunars were slow with the solution of a number of important issues.

She was concerned about the lack of complete consistency of actions between the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Council of the Commune. Noting the successful defense of the forts, Dmitrieva at the same time called the miscalculations and errors made, in her opinion, by the communities; emphasized the lack of offensive tactics in the commune and indecisive suppression of all conversations about reconciliation with Versailles.

In the manifesto of the Central Committee of the Union of Women, E. Dmitrieva, along with her heroic French associates, expressed an angry protest against the proclamation of the wives of the bourgeois, who appealed to the “generosity” of Versailles and asked him for the world at all costs5. Consistently Marxist is the position of E. Dmitrieva and in relation to the peasantry6.

Like the member of the Council of the Commune Benois Malon, she considered it necessary to attract labor peasantry to the side of the commune. In Soviet historical literature, it has already been expressed that E. Dmitrieva and B. Malon took part in the organization of articles on peasant topics for the newspaper La Commune. The work of E. Dmitrieva in the Union of Women is a vivid evidence of her fidelity to the ideas of Marxism and the creative application of its principles.

The influence of K. Marx's views affected the nature of the organization of the Union, reflected on its charter, compiled by E. Dmitrieva, and in the construction of the Union based on the principle of democratic centralism. Even the enemy of the commune wrote that “the Union of Women, who had an influential bureau in each district and led exclusively by Dmitrieva, worked for the International” 7.

Elizabeth Dmitrieva dreamed of turning an alliance into a wide proletarian organization with a consistently Marxist program. This idea is a great success. In general, the international program visits our assembly from three to four thousand people, ”E. Dmitrieva reported the General Council of the I International8. Elizabeth Dmitrieva until the end of the existence of the commune held courageously and steadily.

In the memoirs of the events of G., the contemporaries of the commune, her slender figure, surrounded by a red scarf, and a beautiful, spiritualized face were remembered. She seemed to contemporaries the personification of a revolutionary impulse and determination to fight to the last drop of blood. The heroic Parisian commune fell, paying the thousands of lives for the first experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But the trace of Elizabeth Dmitrieva for the police reports disappeared. Not a participant in the commune returned to Russia again, but a rich lady, the daughter of the landowner Kushev, the former wife of the retired colonel Tomanovsky. Few were devoted to the fact that this marriage was fictitious, which allowed Elizabeth Lukinichna to dispose of their inheritance in favor of the work of the revolutionary struggle.

The tsarist government started a process against her second husband I. Davydovsky, who was engaged in illegal revolutionary activity. After the trial, Elizabeth Lukinichna followed her husband to Siberia. The Soviet journalist P. Cherednichenko recently began to clarify the biography of Dmitrieva and in the archival funds found the materials of the court over I.

Davydovsky, which allowed him to come to the conclusion that the lawsuit was fabricated by specific information about the Siberian period of life of Elizabeth Lukinichny. It is known that her family members worked a lot, that Dmitrieva did not cease to be interested in the events of political life. There are evidence, although not reliable enough, that there was an underground printing house in the Davydovsky house.

Equally important is the clarification of the dates of the life of Elizabeth Dmitrieva. Turning to the genealogy books of the Russian nobility, I. Signik-Vetrov called the time of her birth of May. However, it remains unknown whether Elizaveta Lukinichna survived until the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The search for unknown pages of the biography of Dmitrieva continues.

Some new materials about E. Dmitrieva were sent to Moscow from France to the museum of K. Marx and F. in particular, to two previously known photo portraits E.