A short biography of anarchist Tatiana Lanshina.
Tatiana Lanshina was born in Lodz in Poland, in 1899 into a family of the nobility, which originated in Ekaterinoslav in Ukraine.
She graduated from the natural sciences department of the physics and mathematics faculty of Simferopol University in 1925; until the summer of 1928 she worked as a museum keeper at the biological station of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Sevastopol. Since 1928 she was living in Moscow, and was unemployed.
She now was a member of the Bibliographic Circle of the Kropotkin Museum, and an avowed anarchist.
On 5th November 1929 Tatyana was arrested in Moscow for belonging to an underground anarchist group. For this she received a 3 year sentence from the Soviet authorities, which she served in the the Verkhneuralsk political isolator. On 18th August, 1931 she was released early and exiled to Kazakhstan for 3 years.
She was again arrested in Simferopol in Crimea in November 1934 for belonging to an anarchist group. She was sentenced in 1935 to 3 years in the labour camps. She was again arrested the following year, whilst in the camps.
She was once again arrested in the Minusinsk labour camp on 29th September 1937, for having with fellow anarchist Otto Ottovich Retovsky, and 4 others set up a ‘counter-revolutionary’ anarchist group. For this she was sentenced to death on 11th April 1938, and shot on 4th May of the same year, along with Retovsky, the Bulgarian anarchist Hristo Zarezankov, and the Menshevik I.F. Mordkovich.
Her husband was the anarchist Sergei Sergeyevich Tuzhilkin (born 1909), and himself murdered by the Chekists on July 20th, 1938
Nick Heath
Comments