Died 31 October 1926, Irkutsk, Russia | ||
Maria (Masha) Alexandrovna Kolenkina was a Russian socialist revolutionary from a merchant family in Temryuk, a small town on the Sea of Azov. While studying to be a midwife in Kiev in the early 1870s, she became part of the populist movement in Russia. She went "to the people" in 1874 to propagandise and later belonged to Bakunist socialists known as the Southern Rebels (Iuzhnye Buntari) in Kiev. She was subsequently associated with the Land and Liberty movement in Saint Petersburg.
Together with Vera Zasulich she planned what was in posterity seen as the first modern terrorist deed, to assassinate two Russian government officials on January 24, 1878. Her attempt to assassinate Vladislav Zhelekhovskii, the prosecutor in the Trial of the 193, failed, while Zasulich succeeded in injuring the governor of St. Petersburg, Fyodor Trepov. After a gun fight, the Russian gendarmes arrested Kolenkina on October 11, 1878, and she was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor and internal exile to Siberia.