Arthur William Benni (27 November 1839, Tomaszów-Rawski, Congress Poland – 27 December 1867, Rome,[1] Italy) was a Polish-born English citizen, known in Russia (where his name was spelled Арту′р Ива′нович Бе′нни) as a journalist, Hertzen associate, Socialist activist and women liberation commune-founder.

[2] He served a three months prison sentence as part of the "32 Process",[3] was deported from the country and died in 1867 in Rome hospital, after having been injured, as a member of the Giuseppe Garibaldi's squad.

Arthur Benni's activities and persona caused controversy in Russia where rumours of him being a spy and a 3rd Department agent were being spread, much to his outrage and distress.

[4] Arthur Benni was born 27 November 1839 (1840, according to other sources)[1] to a Jewish-born father and English mother, the fourth child in the family; he had two brothers, Fryderyk Emanuel Hermann (1834–1900) and Karol Abraham Henryk (1843–1916), and two sisters, Amalia Anna (b.

He became friends with some Russian soldiers (simply in defiance of his Polish classmates, who hated them), learned from them of primal ways of collective ownership (obschina, artel) and principles of mutual responsibility which existed in their country and, having formed in his mind his own, an idealistic concept of Russia, decided that was the land where his Socialist ideas could be put into practice.

[1] Full of idealistic aspirations, Benni received the English passport and volunteered to go to Russia to investigate the revolutionary situation there (which was quite ripe, as his new friends were assuring him) and distribute Hertzen's Kolokol's latest issue he were to smuggle there.

Unthwarted, Benni, a load of Kolokol with him, found himself in Saint Petersburg in the summer of 1861,[1] still eager to "serve the great cause of Russian liberation.

Unimpressed, Benni demanded a demonstration of "the revolutionary forces," but only five people came up, some by foot "others by cabs so as to make retreat easier, just in case," as Leskov put it.

[6] For some reason the women's liberation movement activists in Russia preferred to involve their protégés in printing business which naturally made authorities, who were hunting the proclamations distributors, suspicious.

This tragicomic 'naturalized English subject' who came to Russia with the view of making social-democratic revolution… has demonstrated such inability to organize other people as to quickly turn this new business of his into a joke," Leskov commented.

Benni became seriously ill as a result of spending two sleepless nights in the open air on the banks of Neva embankment after a woman, thrown out of her home by husband, came to his flat and settled in his bedroom.

Warmer was the reception in the centrist magazines, Dostoyevsky's Epokha and Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, led by Pyotr Boborykin, who started to employ him as a stuff translator.

"He was talking nonsensical things in those days, making plans to go to Siberia and free Chernyshevsky, cried and prayed a lot," remembered Leskov, who's given him shelter.

[6] In the end of 1867 a small note appeared in Illustrirovannaya Gazeta, edited by Vladimir Zotov, according to which "Arthur Benni, of whom different contradictory, mostly unfavourable rumors were being spread, has been killed in Menton."

"And the same industrious people, who could have been blamed for poor Benni's initial troubles, all of a sudden with unheard of energy started to support this new slander," Nikolai Leskov wrote in The Mystery Man.