Hesya Helfman

#1852_births
#1882_deaths
#People_from_Mazyr
#People_from_Mozyrsky_Uyezd
#Belarusian_Jews
#Belarusian_revolutionaries
#Jewish_socialists
#Narodnaya_Volya
#Narodniks
Hesya Mirovna （Meerovna） Helfman （Yiddish: העסיע העלפֿמאַן, Russian: Геся Мировна （Мееровна） Гельфман, romanized: Gesya Mirovna Gelfman） 1855, Mazyr — 1 （N.S. 13） February 1882, Saint Petersburg）, was a Russian revolutionary member of Narodnaya Volya,
who was implicated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Born into a Jewish family, Helfman left home for Kiev at the age of 16 or 17, allegedly to avoid an arranged marriage, where she found employment in a sewing factory.
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 Nikolay Kolodkevich.
Helfman was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at the Litovsky Castle during the 1877 Trial of the Fifty, 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, 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.
Hesya Helfman （third from left） on trial Nikolay Kolodkevich, Hesya Helfman's husband During the Pervomartovtsy trial in March 1881, Helfman refused to admit her guilt,
but was nonetheless sentenced to death by hanging for her alleged part in the assassination of the tsar.
A few hours after being convicted, she made a statement that "in...