She entered into a marriage of convenience with Mikhail Tomanovski, a colonel who had retired early due to illness, in order to access her inheritance, which she used to fund revolutionary causes such as the Russian-language journal Narodnoye delo.

There, she struggled to re-enter activist politics, since the radical circles of the 1870s were less sympathetic to her feminist socialism than those of the 1860s, and because she was forced to hide her communard past due to being pursued by the French, Swiss, and Russian police.

Davydovski would become a key defendant in a sensational mass trial, accused of being a ringleader of the "Jacks of Hearts" criminal conspiracy, and was convicted for fraud and murder.

Troskevich was part of the mechtchanstvo, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and came to Volok from Courland, where she had registered as sister of charity in the Lutheran evangelical order at Hasenpoth.

[1] Her status as an illegitimate child and her rejection by the Russian aristocracy were probably the origin of Dmitrieff's sensitivity to inequalities, whether serfdom in the countryside or poverty in Saint Petersburg.

[12] Dmitrieff enjoyed privileges due to her father's position in the Russian aristocracy, but her combined status as both a bastard and a girl prevented her and her sister from enrolling in school, while their brothers faced no such impediment.

[1] However, she was educated by private tutors, among whom were veterans of the revolutions of 1848[13] and composer Modest Mussorgsky, possibly a distant cousin of Dmitrieff, who came to Volok in 1862 to treat his depression and spent his time with fellow artists of The Five.

[22] Additionally, this quarter housed privileged revolutionaries, notably including Dobrolyubov, Dostoevsky, Nechayev, Pisarev, Tkachev, Lavrov, and most importantly Chernyshevsky.

[24] In 1863, Mussorgsky joined a Saint Petersburg community frequented by the writer Turgenev, the poet Shevchenko, and the historian Kostomarov, and Dmitrieff's mother brought her there.

[30] She was determined to build a bridge between Marx's economic theories and Chernyshevsky's ideas on the emancipatory capacity of the Russian village commune model.

[33] Dmitrieff developed through her reading a critical analysis of gender and class hierarchies, and envisaged using her fortune to construct a cooperative mill—an artel—which would serve the peasants of Volok.

[39] He wrote her a letter of introduction to Karl Marx:[54] Dear citizen, allow us to recommend to you our best friend, Elisabeth Tomanovskaya, sincerely and profoundly devoted to the revolutionary cause in Russia.

We will be happy, if through her we get to know you better, and if at the same time we could let you know in more detail the situation of our action, of which she will be able to tell you in depth...[55]She arrived in London at the end of 1870 and quickly became a family friend, building ties with both Karl Marx and his daughters.

Dmitrieff had an influence on the ideas of Marx, who started to envisage the possibility of alternative and plural paths to socialism, without passing by the stage of capitalist development.

On 18 March 1871, radicalized citizens and members of the National Guard refused to surrender control over the city to the Third Republic and instituted a revolutionary government, the Paris Commune.

[65] She also met with Russian socialist Pyotr Lavrov and sisters Sofya Kovalevskaya and Anne Jaclard, her neighbors in Saint Petersburg, who also participated in the Commune.

[22] She organized the work of women in workshops in the traditional sectors of the clothing and textile industries, assuring them outlets thanks to the support of the Commune's executive committee,[74] which she reported to regularly.

[76] She thus found her opportunity to link Marxist theory with Chernyshevsky's practice, which concretized in the creation of workshops in the textile industry for seamstresses, laundresses, tailors, and drapers.

"[79] Much of her work with the Union des femmes involved trying to break down the longstanding resistance to women's economic participation that was present in labor and socialist organization.

[86][87] Gustave Lefrançais mentioned in his memoirs her presence on 22 May at the entry of Rue Lepic (18th arrondissement), with a group of armed female citizens,[88] which is confirmed by the counsellor of the Russian ambassador and by Colonel Gaillard, both anti-communards, the latter affirming that she was at the head of all the canteen workers, ambulance drivers and barricaders.

[3][95] Ultimately, she was charged with "incitement of civil war by encouraging citizens or inhabitants to arm themselves" and "provoking the assembly of insurgents by distributing orders or proclamations" and convicted in absentia on 26 October 1872 and sentenced to "deportation to a walled fortress.

"[100] Dmitrieff left Saint Petersburg and, in 1871, met Ivan Mikhailovich Davydovski, steward of her husband's estate and a friend of her older brother, Alexander.

He was also charged with instigating and providing the weapon for the murder of Collegiate Councilor Sergei Slavyshensky, who was shot to death by his lover, Ekaterina Bashkirova, in December 1871.

Davydovski became one of the key defendants in the "Jacks of Hearts" case, a mass trial of con-men, swindlers, and forgers, many of whom came from respectable or even noble backgrounds, who were charged with being part of a criminal conspiracy.

While Anton Chekhov was passing by Krasnoyarsk during his return from exile in Sakhalin Oblast, she asked him if he could point her to a place to stay in Saint Petersburg.

[117][118] The history of the communards Paule Mink, Victoire Léodile Béra, and Elisabeth Dmitrieff is, according to Carolyn J. Eichner, characteristic of the invisibility of revolutionary women.

[121] Despite the lack of historical attention paid to Dmitrieff and other communardes, there are many positive descriptions of her from her contemporaries, among them Arthur Arnould, Gustave Lefrançais, Benoît Malon, and Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray.

Dmitrieff's birth village, Volok, situated 200 km from Novgorod, is different today from the city she knew, but "the inhabitants honor the memory of their compatriot":[n 2][129] the school has borne her name since 1965, and a commemorative plaque is dedicated to her at the House of Culture.

[130] In Russia, Dmitrieff is a symbol of heroism and of the working class,[129] considered by the encyclopedia Мой Красноярск as "one of the most brilliant women of the Russian revolutionary movement, and of the world".

[138] In the 1970s, a group of feminists associated with the Mouvement de libération des femmes named themselves the "Cercle Élisabeth-Dimitrieff" in her memory, although at the time they knew little about her other than that Marx had sent her to the Commune in 1871.