A short biography of Russian anarchist Vera Kevrik, harshly persecuted by the Soviet authorities.
“a splendid type of Russian revolutionist”, IWMA Bulletin of Relief Fund no 1 December 1926.
Born into a Jewish working class family, Vera Dukova was active in the anarchist movement in Saratov, Moscow and Smolensk. At some point she married the Polish anarchist Max Kevrik in Saratov and from then on used this surname.
When Max Kevrik moved to Poland in 1920, Vera became the partner of the anarchist Gershon Yoselevich Tarlovsky, who used the name Gerasim Osipovich Tarlovsky within the anarchist movement.
On September 28th, 1922, Gershon was arrested in Moscow on charges of anarchist work, organising underground anarchist activity and harbouring the anarchist Ivan Akhtyrsky in the apartment he shared with Vera. At the time of his arrest, Vera was in the Marinskaya hospital after an appendectomy. She was being looked after by the anarchist underground activist Vera Nevrin alias Glezer alias real name Dora Moiseyevna Stepnaya.
Vera was herself arrested on November 17th, 1922 in Smolensk on charges of “anarchist underground work and attempting to cross the border without permission.” On February 22nd, 1923, by the conclusion of the Secret Department of the GPU she was imprisoned in a corrective labour camp for a term of 2 years. She served her sentence in the “special purpose” camp on the Solovetsky islands in the White Sea. There she contracted malaria, due to the mosquitoes which swarmed there in the summer months, and tuberculosis. On November 17th, she was transferred to the Kemlag transit camp on the coast nearby. She was released in February 1925, and on March 5th, sentenced to three years of exile in the city of Ufa , in the Urals.
On the way to Ufa, in a very poorly state, she was robbed and her coat was stolen. Her exposed condition aggravated her health. She could find no work there, and moved to Biysk in Siberia. Her health declined. Her comrade Aron Baron, also exiled to Biysk, mentions her in a letter he wrote to fellow anarchist Mark Mrachny in Berlin, dated April 12th, 1925, writing that “She’s sick, needs shoes and clothes, and if you can, please send her money.” A sum of money was sent to her by the IWMA in 1926 but this was returned marked “unknown”. All efforts to trace her were to no avail, and it must be assumed that she had died.
Nick Heath
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