ZASULICH, VERA IVANOVNA

born July 27 [Aug. 8, New Style], 1849, Mikhaylovka, Russia died May 8, 1919, Petrograd [now St. Petersburg] Russian revolutionary who shot and wounded General Fyodor F. Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg, and who was acquitted by the jury in a much-publicized trial (1878). The daughter of a nobleman, Zasulich became a revolutionary in 1868, spending many of the succeeding years in prison, in hiding, or in exile. In 1883 she was a founding member of the first Russian Marxist organization, the Liberation of Labour, and corresponded with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Having joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, she sided with the Menshevik faction when the party split in 1903 and became a leader of those Marxists who favoured legal political activities over underground tactics after 1908. She opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.