Hesya Helfman

Hesya Mirovna (Meerovna) HelfmanTemplate:Notetag (Template:Langx; Template:Langx; 1855Template:Notetag — Template:OldStyleDate) was a Belarusian-Jewish revolutionary member of Narodnaya Volya, who was implicated in the assassination of Alexander II of Russia. Escaping execution as she was pregnant at the time, she died in the aftermath of childbirth in prison.

Biography

Early life

Helfman was born into a religious Jewish family, in Mozyr, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. She received no schooling, and had a husband picked for her by her father while she was a teenager. She ran away from home in 1868, before the wedding could take place. She lived with a local Christian friend, then moved to Kiev, where she worked as a seamstress and began training to be a midwife.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite journal</ref>

Revolutionary activities

In the early 1870s, Helfman was an active member of several revolutionary clubs in Kiev where she met, among others, Leo Deutsch and her future husband Template:Interlanguage link multi. Helfman was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at the Template:Ill during the 1877 Template:Ill, and on 14 March 1879 was sent into exile to the province Novgorod.

She escaped a few months later and joined Narodnaya Volya in Saint Petersburg, probably following her husband who was a member of the organization's executive committee. In 1881 Helfman was part of the Narodnaya Volya group that assassinated Alexander II, albeit not in a front-line position; she was assigned to run a conspiratorial flat, where she lived with another member of the group, Nikolai Sablin,<ref name=Maxwell>Template:Cite book</ref> as an unsuspicious apparent married couple. When the police raided their apartment, two days after the deadly attack on the tsar, Sablin shot himself while she was captured.

Death

File:Pervomartovcy2.jpg

Hesya Helfman (third from left) on trial

File:Kolodkevich2.jpg

Nikolay Kolodkevich,
Hesya Helfman's husband

During the Pervomartovtsy trial in March 1881, Helfman refused to admit her guilt,<ref>The Times. London. 7 April 1881. p. 5.</ref> but was nonetheless sentenced to death by hanging for her alleged part in the assassination of the tsar.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> A few hours after being convicted, she made a statement that "in view of the ... sentence I have received, I consider it my moral duty to declare that I am in the fourth month of pregnancy". Her husband Nikolay Kolodkevich had also been arrested in January 1881.Template:R According to contemporary law, execution of pregnant women was banned as the unborn child was considered innocent. Therefore, Helfman's execution was officially postponed until forty days after childbirth, and in the meantime she would stay in the harsh Peter and Paul Fortress prison.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Three months later, thanks to the campaign against her execution by Socialists in Western EuropeTemplate:Notetag and in the foreign press, Helfman's sentence was commuted to an indefinite period of katorga (forced labor). She was transferred back to the remand prison where she had been held before. On 5 July (NS), whilst still in the Peter and Paul Fortress and by permission of the Minister of the Interior, Count Ignatiev, she was granted an interview (which lasted almost an hour and a half) with a journalist from the newspaper Golos who was accompanied by her defence counsel at her trial, a lawyer named Goerke.<ref>The Times. London. 7 July 1881. p. 5.</ref> During the course of this interview, she complained about the lack of "proper medical and female attendance".

Helfman gave birth in detention in October 1881. Upon the request of the Department of Police, her childbirth was assisted by a gynaecologist who was also employed by the Imperial court, something unprecedented. She had a severe maternal complication, as her perineum was torn. It was rumoured that the gynaecologist had refused the prison doctor's suggestion to sew the wound together; in any case, it never healed. She remained delirious during some of the postnatal period. By 24 November, she had developed peritonitis, which became acute on 17 January 1882. She nevertheless nursed her daughter from her birth in October until 25 January, when the baby was taken away from her, placed in an orphanage and registered as a child of unknown parents. According to the subsequent medical report, the peritonitis became general and caused fever on the same day. Six days later, Helfman died. Her child died of an unknown disease shortly thereafter.<ref name="Kravets">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Tsarist authorities had rejected the request of Kolodkevich's parents for the legal custody of the baby.<ref name="Kravets" /> Kolodkevich died in prison in 1884.Template:R

Legacy

The importance of Helfman's role in the assassination was undetermined, and her Jewish origins were stressed during the pogroms that followed the assassination.<ref>Jewish Chronicle, 6 May 1881; quoted in Benjamin Blech, Eyewitness to Jewish History.</ref><ref name=":0" /> Another conspirator, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, was also rumoured to be Jewish, though there seems to have been no basis for this.

Revolutionary Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky dedicated a chapter of his Underground Russia (1883) to Helfman, the only one dedicated to a person he had not met personally.<ref name=stepnyak>Template:Cite book</ref> Writes Stepnyak:

There are unknown heroines, obscure toilers, who offer up everything upon the altar of their cause, without asking anything for themselves. They assume the most ungrateful parts; sacrifice themselves for the merest trifles; for lending their names to the correspondence of others; for sheltering a man, often unknown to them; for delivering a parcel without knowing what it contains. Poets do not dedicate verses to them; history will not inscribe their names upon its records; a grateful posterity will not remember them. Without their labour, however, the party could not exist; every struggle would become impossible.

Yet the wave of history carries away one of these toilers from the obscure concealment in which she expected to pass her life, and bears her on high upon its sparkling crest, to a universal celebrity. Then all regard this countenance, which is so modest, and discern in it the indications of a force of mind, of an abnegation, of a courage, which excite astonishment among the boldest.

Such is precisely the story of Jessy Helfman.{{#if:|

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Bibliography

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