NADYESHDA SIGIDA
MARIA KOVALEVSKAYA
NADYESHDA SMIRNITSKAYA
SOPHIA BOGOMOLETZ
To face page 266
Her friend Anna Korba[[101]] I had also known in Petersburg in 1879; she had then just returned from the seat of war in Turkey, where she had been nursing the wounded. She belonged to a German family named Meinhardt, naturalised in Russia, numerous members of which had filled high official positions, and she herself married a foreigner. She had been extremely active in philanthropic work, and was adored by the people of the provincial town where she lived; but she learned by bitter experience how futile, under the existing political conditions, were all attempts to effect even the smallest reforms by merely quiet educative means, and she joined the terrorist society Naròdnaia Vòlya in the beginning of the eighties. It was just then that the desperate struggle of that party against the Tsar’s despotic government had reached its height. Anna Korba saw her friends and comrades arrested by the dozen, sent to the scaffold, or buried alive in prison. The “white terror” raged. In 1882 the chief of the secret police, Soudyèhkin, had succeeded in capturing most of the Terrorists who still remained at large after the assault on Alexander II., and Anna Korba took up the task of continuing the struggle in company with the last remnants of the fighters. A secret laboratory for the manufacture of dynamite bombs was set up in Petersburg; this was discovered by Soudyèhkin, and in June, 1882, Anna Korba was arrested, together with Gratchènsky, the officer Butzèvitch, and the married couple Prybylyev. Next spring she was tried with sixteen others, and sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude.