A short biography of Russian anarchist communist Elena Pisarevskaya, hounded by the Soviet authorities throughout the course of her life.
Elena Pisarevskaya was born on December 25th, 1902. She became a student at the Medical Faculty of the First Moscow State University in the 1920s and became an anarchist in 1922.
She took an active part in anarchist activities, particularly in propaganda work among students, and from 1923 worked in the legal All-Russian Black Cross and in the Pan-Russian Federation of Anarchist Communists. She collected money and food and clothing for prisoners and sheltered anarchists who had escaped from the Bolshevik prisons. She continued her studies, working at the University of Science and Technology.
She was again arrested in October 1923 together with other members of the Black Cross. She was accused of harbouring the anarchists David Kogan and Ivan Akhtyrsky. As well as the left SR MM Weger. She was sentenced to exile in central Asia for 2 years, which she served in Tashkent.
There, she joined the group of exiled anarchists. She carried on correspondence with other anarchists, and on several occasions went on hunger strike. AS a result, she was transferred in November 1924 to Kokand in Uzbekistan, and then to Fergana. At the end of her sentence she was sentenced to restriction of residence for 3 years.
Between November 1925 and November 1928 she lived in Tver. At the end of this sentence, she moved to Voronezh in 1929. She studied at the medical faculty there and, after graduation, worked as a doctor. She married V. Struzhynsky. From 1935 she lived in Kuibyshev, to where Struzhynsky had been deported, and worked as a doctor. After the death of her husband in 1938, she worked as a tuberculosis specialist in various sanatoriums and hospitals in the Moscow region.
Until recently, it was thought that she had been arrested on October 28th, 1937 and shot by firing squad on December 5th of that year, but this proved to be inaccurate.
She was arrested again in Moscow in 1938, but released soon after. During World War II she worked in military hospitals, as captain of medical services. For this she was awarded the medal "For valiant work in the Great Patriotic War".
In 1949 she lived in Krasnoarmeysk in the Moscow region, and worked as an x-ray doctor of the city hospital. She was again arrested on September 26th, 1949. She was sentenced as a “socially dangerous element” on 24th December , 1949 and exiled to the Jambul region of Kazakhstan for 10 years. It appears she died no earlier than 1956.
She was “rehabilitated” by the Soviet authorities on 24th April, 1956.
Nick Heath
Sources :
G.P. Maximov, The Guillotine at Work
Facebook page History of anarchism in the territory of the former Russian Empire and the USSR:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2990629131201367?locale=te_IN
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