Vera Zasulich

Vera Zasulich is presented as a Russian revolutionary whose 1878 shooting of police chief Trepov made her an emblem of women’s resistance. Simone de Beauvoir places her in two connected arguments: the growth of revolutionary action among Russian women and the narrower, often indirect forms of agency available to women excluded from the institutions that shape public life.

Revolutionary Background

At the end of the nineteenth century, the feminist movement in Russia began among women students of the intelligentsia. According to Beauvoir, these women were less attached to pursuing their personal cause than to revolutionary action more broadly. They went to the people and used nihilistic methods against the Okhrana, the state security police. In this account, Zasulich’s shooting of Trepov in 1878 belongs to that climate of militant opposition.

The episode is one point in a longer movement from individual acts of resistance to collective political participation. During the Russo-Japanese War, women replaced men in many areas of work, and their political consciousness grew. The Russian Union for Women’s Rights demanded equality between the sexes, while a women’s rights group formed in the first Duma, though it had little power. Beauvoir distinguishes these efforts from the emancipation of women workers, which she associates with revolution.

Resistance and Political Agency

Beauvoir also names Zasulich among women who intervene in history through assassination. She places her alongside Judith and Charlotte Corday, contrasting such acts with women’s limited access to positive political construction. In this analysis, revolt and refusal could be permitted where women’s participation in building institutions, directing policy, or controlling economic and technological life was not. The act therefore signifies resistance, but does not by itself confer the power to shape the world that Beauvoir identifies as the measure of historical agency.

This distinction is sharpened by Beauvoir’s account of the March 8, 1917, women’s demonstration in St. Petersburg. Women demanding bread, peace, and the return of their husbands helped trigger the Russian Revolution, but Beauvoir calls the demonstration a signal rather than the revolution’s sole cause. She thus connects Zasulich’s individual act to a broader pattern: women could initiate or intensify upheaval, yet the consequences depended on collective forces and political decisions beyond any one woman’s control.

Place in the Historical Argument

Zasulich’s brief appearance carries the tension between visible defiance and structural constraint. She is remembered for an action that directly challenged state authority, but Beauvoir does not treat exceptional acts as proof that women generally held the reins of history. Instead, she uses Zasulich as evidence of women’s capacity to resist, while arguing that the social conditions of women as a group often obstructed sustained, recognized participation in public power.

The contrast between the shooting in 1878 and the mass demonstration of 1917 also gives the example a wider historical arc: solitary militant action precedes a moment when women appear in the streets as a political force. Zasulich remains an individual instance within that history, not a substitute for the collective transformations that Beauvoir sees as necessary for women’s emancipation.