Elena Stasova

Elena Dmitriyevna Stasova (Russian: Елена Дмитриевна Стасова; 15 October [O.S. 3 October] 1873 – 31 December 1966) was a Russian Soviet revolutionary, Old Bolshevik and an early leader of the organisation that would go on to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Stasova was born to an eminent aristocratic family in Saint Petersburg. She worked as a teacher during her youth and came to embrace revolutionary politics. In 1898, she joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) at the time of its establishment. Following the RSDLP ideological split in 1903, Stasova joined Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction. She continued her revolutionary activities in Russia, Switzerland and Finland despite frequent threats of imprisonment and deportation. In 1913, she was exiled to Siberia, but returned to Saint Petersburg shortly before the February Revolution. She was named secretary and alternate member of the Central Committee, but by 1920 she had been fully frozen out of Soviet power. Afterwards, Stasova was a Comintern representative to Germany until 1927, when she returned to Russia and took on a leadership position in the International Red Aid (MOPR). From 1938 to 1946, she found work as an editor of the magazine International Literature. Stasova died in 1966 at the age of 93.

Elena Stasova was born in Saint Petersburg in 1873, the youngest of five children, in an eminent noble family. Her father was the state attorney Dmitry Stasov, while her aunt was the feminist activist Nadezhda Stasova. She was educated at home until the age of 13, and then at the prestigious Tagantsev private school for girls. Stasova described her political awakening as being tied to a realization that other people "made it possible for us, the intelligentsia, to live the way we did." At the age of about 20 she began teaching in evening classes and Sunday schools in Ligovo, which brought her into contact with female political activists such as Nadezhda Krupskaya, future wife of Vladimir Lenin. She joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDLP) at the time of its establishment in 1898, her main contribution being to use her parents' house to store illegal socialist literature.

Her grandfather, Vasili Stasov, had been architect to Emperors of all the Russias Alexander I and Nicholas I. Her uncle was art critic Vladimir Stasov. Her father, Dmitry (1828–1918), was the most eminent liberal Russian lawyer of his generation. As a young man, he had a promising career working for the Senate, and a Herald at the coronation of Alexander II – but was barred for life from government service after he was arrested during a student demonstration. He set up in private practice, and was defence counsel in numerous political trials, including the trial of Dmitry Karakozov, the first of the revolutionaries to attempt to assassinate Alexander II, the Trial of the 50, which was the first political trial to be held in public in Russia, and at Russia's largest political trial, the Trial of the 193. He was arrested in 1880, by order of the Tsar, and banished from St Petersburg for a time. Later, he was President of the Russian Council of Lawyers. A keen pianist, he also co-founded the St Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein. Elena's aunt was the feminist Nadezhda Stasova, and her older sister was the writer Varvara Komarova-Stasova.

When the RSDLP split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, Stasova cast her lot with Lenin and the Bolsheviks as a professional revolutionary. Over the next two years Stasova adopted the pseudonyms "Absolute" and "Thick". Other pseudonyms which Stasova used during the underground period included "Delta", "Heron", "Knol", and "Varvara Ivanovna". She served as the conduit for Lenin's newspaper, Iskra, in St. Petersburg, until her arrest in January 1904, which forced her to leave the capital and hide in Minsk. For the rest of that year she traveled to several cities, acting as a specialist in "technical matters", such as creating false passports, organising escape routes, and making contact with sympathisers in the Russian army. She also taught new members how to encode and decode. In spring 1904, Stasova was appointed secretary of the Northern Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee. In June, she was assigned to take over the Southern Bureau, based in Odessa, but was arrested and held in Taganka Prison for six months. She was released on bail in December 1904, and returned to St Petersburg, where she took over as secretary of the city Bolshevik organisation, and later as secretary of the Central Committee.

Stasova emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland in August 1905, to run the Bolshevik organisation abroad while Lenin was in Russia for the Russian Revolution of 1905. She returned to St Petersburg in January 1906 and then moved to Finland to organise arms smuggling, and to assist in organising the Congress in Stockholm that was supposed to unify the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the RSDLP. Arrested in July 1906, after her return to St Petersburg, she was banned for the second time from living in the capital. In 1907, she settled in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia.

In January 1912, Stasova was elected as an alternate member of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee. She was then secretary to the party's Russian bureau. Arrested on her return to Tiflis, in May 1912, she was tried in May 1913, with Suren Spandaryan and others, and sentenced to deportation to Siberia. She was allowed to return to St Petersburg in autumn 1916, and was arrested there and held in a police station overnight in February 1917, but released in the morning because of the outbreak of the February Revolution.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Stasova became the Technical Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party — a position which she retained through the October Revolution, finally standing down in March 1920. She was also appointed an alternate member of the Bolshevik Central Committee by the 6th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1917, and became the only woman elected to full membership of the Central Committee by the 7th Congress of 1918 and the 8th Congress of 1919. However, the 9th Congress of 1920 dropped her both from the Central Committee and from the party secretariat.