Rozova, (Rosova) Anna Semenovna (1902- after 1968)

Anna Rozova was born in 1902 in Buinsk, in Simbirsk province in Russia, into a working class family. She became a member of Komsomol, the youth organisation of the Communist Party, and worked as a nurse at the Voykov sanatorium in Yalta. Her brother Andrei, was active in anarchist circles from 1917 and as a result was arrested on several occasions by the Soviet authorities. Anna herself became disillusioned in the policies and behaviour of the Bolsheviks.

In February 1923, she moved to Moscow and announced her resignation from the Communist Party at a Komsomol meeting, and that she was joining the anarchists. As a result, she was immediately arrested on February 28th and sentenced on June 28th of the same year to 2 years of imprisonment in the special purpose camp, on the Solovetsky islands in the White Sea. In protest, she went on a hunger strike that lasted 43 days! Despite this, she served her full sentence, because the OGPU secret police wanted to make an example of her for defecting from the Communist Party to the anarchist movement.

Anna was then exiled for three years to Kem, on the mainland opposite the Solovetsky islands, on October 19th, 1925.

She was again arrested on November 18th, 1926 by the Ulyanovsk OGPU, for corresponding with anarchist acquaintances and for being in possession of anti-Soviet poems. She was sentenced on February 4th, 1927 to three years in a labour camp, once again the Solovetsky camp, this time with her small child. Under an amnesty, this was reduced by a quarter and she was released early on 22nd October, 1928, and exiled to the Kansk district in Siberia for three years. In January 1930 she was released from exile with a 3-year residence restriction and sent to Svobodny in the Amur Region.

She was again arrested for attempting to escape from exile and imprisoned for three years in a prison camp on 20th April 1931. She served her time in the Ivanovo political isolator, and then in February to June, 1934 once again at the Solovetsky camp.

This was her final sentence, and in the late 1960s she lived in Ulyanovsk.

She is mentioned in the memoirs of Natalia Khramtsova. After Natalia’s father, the intellectual and chess champion Sergei Pavlovich Khramstov died on 1st March 1968, Anna Rozova told her that she would have been imprisoned again if not for his testimony.

Nick Heath

Sources:
Based primarily on biographical information on Anna and her brother Andrey, written by Anatoly Dubovik and Sergey Ovsyannikov, kindly provided by Malcolm Archibald. Inadvertently left out of original posting, for which I apologise to these two writers.

The Twentieth Century of Natalia Khramtsova by Gennady Demochkin, 2022.

Photo: Thanks to Kate Sharpley Library