Short biographies of the Russian anarchists Tatiana Efimova and MIkhail Kupriyanov.
Tatiana Alexeievna Efimova was born in Kazan, in Tatarstan, in 1904. She worked as a doctor at a health centre of a plywood factory. She lived in Zelenodolsk, 24 miles from Kazan.
As an active anarchist, she was arrested on March 6th, 1936, and charged with being a member of an anarchist group, producing leaflets, and preparing an escape from a political prison of her husband Kupriyanov, who was sent to Solovki. This refers to the Solovki gulag on the White Sea, and to Mikhail Ilyich Kupriyanov. Mikhail was born in 1905 in Alatyr, in Chuvashia. He had worked as a metal turner, and when arrested on March 28th, 1930, was in his third year at a teacher training college. He was charged with “counter-revolutionary activities” as a “leader of an anarchist circle”. He was sentenced to 3 years of exile in Eastern Siberia on February 8th 1931. He was again arrested in 1934 in Kazan for being a "leader of counter-revolutionary groups in Moscow and Kazan". He was sentenced to 8 years in a labour camp.
For her part, Tatiana was sentenced to 3 years imprisonment for counter-revolutionary activity on May 25th, 1936. She was one of the first prisoners at the Dudinka penal camp in summer 1936. Dudinka was part of the dreaded Norilsk gulag complex, where political prisoners were forced to do hard labour.
There she worked as a doctor, willingly treating patients, especially women. She fell in love with another prisoner, the camp accountant. Unfortunately, a love triangle developed, and she was stabbed by the nurse Yaroslavtseva, another prisoner, in an act of jealousy. Fortunately, the wound was slight. However, in summer 1937, she was hospitalised for heart problems.
In June, 1937, she went on hunger strike. She died of heart failure on July 9th, 1937 as a result of the hunger strike.
As to Mikhail, imprisoned at Solovki, he went on hunger strike repeatedly. On October 9th, 1937, he was sentenced to death by the Leningrad NKVD and shot at Sandarmokh on November 3rd of that year.
Nick Heath
Sources:
https://imwerden.de/pdf/sandormokh_1937_solovetsky_etap_1997__ocr.pdf
https://visz.nlr.ru/person/book/t6/12/250
https://www.solovki.ca/passional/passional_6.php
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