“Babushka, the Beloved: Progressive Era Women and the Russian Revolutionary Ekaterina Breshkovskaya”

With the Russian Revolution’s upcoming centennial, my research revisits Russian revolutionaries who captured the American imagination in the decades before the Bolshevik Revolution. This poster presents the story of socialist and anti-tsarist activist Ekaterina Breshkovskaya (1844-1934) who in 1917 was one of the most recognizable representatives of Russian revolution in the world, but whose reputation has faded over the last century. My research, which is taken from my dissertation, examines Breshkovskaya’s close relationship with several American progressive-era women, which included settlement house workers Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Helena Dudley, along with suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell and reformer Isabel Chapin Barrows. These women became devoted to Breshkovskaya after they met the Russian woman in 1904, seeing themselves united across oceans through similar progressive-era goals. Together, these American women worked for the next two decades to make Breshkovskaya a household name in the United States. In this they succeeded; Breshkovskaya was unknown in 1904, but when she returned to the U.S. in 1919 she was known to millions of Americans as Babushka, or the grandmother of Russia’s revolution. Babushka, in the American imagination, embodied the best that the Russian revolutionary parties had to offer—including the goals of democracy, civil liberties, women’s rights, and universal education. My poster will present this story of international collaboration and will employ excerpts from letters between these women along with prominent news stories and photographs to demonstrate how Americans crafted this image of Babushka and simultaneously gave American’s hope for Russia’s revolutionary future.