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Zarudny, Alexander Sergeyevich (1864-1934)
Petrograd Lawyer. Minister of Justice in the July Coalition Provisional Government. Issued orders for arrest of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev.
Zasulich, Vera J. (1851-1919)
Russian socialist; as a young student joined the Narodniki. In 1880 she emigrated and from then onwards worked with Plekhanov. Together with him she was one of the founders of the first Marxist group in the Russian workers' movement (the Emancipation of Labour group – 1885) which began the struggle against the Narodniki for the creation of a proletarian revolutionary party. Zasulich was commissioned by the Emancipation of Labour group to translate a number of Marx's works into Russian. With Lenin and Plekhanov she was a member of the editorial board of Iskra. After the split in the Russian Social-Democratic Party she soon went over to the Mensheviks. During WWI she was a social chauvinist. She held a hostile attitude to the Soviet government.
The first important attempt was that made by the student Vera Zasulich, who shot at General Trepov in 1878. A monster trial had just taken place, in which 193 defendants accused of revolutionary activities had appeared before the judges of St Petersburg. Out of 770 arrested, seventy had died in prison during the preliminary investigation, which had taken several years. The trial, which was a complete farce, ended with ninety-four acquittals, thirty-six deportations and one sentence of ten years' hard labour. Meanwhile, Trepov, the St Petersburg Chief of Police, had a student who was in prison beaten with sticks. `The punishment was quite legal,' he explained afterwards. `After all, B-, the condemned student, was not of noble blood.' Vera Zasulich was acquitted in her trial. Russian terrorism, as can be seen, came to its fruition in a supercharged atmosphere.
Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution