Eva Broido
Eva L'vovna Broido (née Khava Leibovna Gordon; 7 November 1876 – c. 15 September 1941) was a Russian political figure, social democrat, revolutionary, publicist, translator, and memoirist.
Eva L'vovna Gordon was born in Švenčionys, Vilna Governorate on 7 November 1876, the daughter of a once wealthy but later impoverished Jewish bourgeois family.
Having fallen ill while being held in the House of Pre-trial Detention, on August 8, 1901, she was released on bail and placed under police supervision in Śventsiany, where she formed and led a group of Social Democrats.
During her imprisonment she organized literacy circles for workers; one of Broido's students was Mikhail Kalinin, who went on to become the President of the Soviet Union and who learned to read and write from her.
She took an active part in the armed uprising of political exiles, the so-called "Yakutsk protest" or "Romanov case", and helped her comrades by delivering weapons and provisions from the outside.
There she joined the "liquidators", who concentrated on the legal labor movement as a means to broaden the RSDLP's appeal and deepen its roots among the working class.
It was while in internal exile that she joined the "Minusinsk group" of Menshevik internationalists, headed by Fyodor Dan, that opposed the appeal by Georgy Plekhanov to the Social Democratic faction in the State Duma to vote for war credits to support the Russian Empire's participation in World War I.
On August 30, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, she was approved as a member of the editorial board of the newspaper "Voice of the Worker".
As a representative of the generation of female revolutionaries who enjoyed the support of their male comrades in the struggle for gender equality, Broido did any kind of work, from sewing dresses to translating.
The conference adopted a resolution on the formation of special commissions for agitation and organization of women, but the matter did not go beyond good intentions.
However, in late October and early November 1917, she supported negotiations with the Bolsheviks on the issue of creating a "homogeneous socialist government".
Grigory Zinoviev was supposed to speak, but Lenin arrived unexpectedly, and Broido defeated him, putting the Menshevik candidate through in the vote.
After the Bolshevik government and the central committees of all the main political parties moved to Moscow, Broido and her family settled there in 1918.
Having settled in Berlin and becoming a member of the Foreign Delegation, Broido began working as a secretary of the editorial board of the émigré Menshevik journal Socialist Messenger.
In November 1927, with the help of Latvian Social Democrats, Broido traveled alone to the Soviet Union on Dan's initiative to work illegally.
Despite the criminal prosecution, her memoir book “In the Ranks of the RSDLP” was published in Moscow in 1928, and Broido’s biography was included in the dictionary “Figures of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia”, which noted that she "actively fought against the Soviet power".
On June 28, 1928, she was sentenced by the OGPU Collegium to three years in prison under the “anti-Soviet” Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
Broydo's archive, including biographical materials and the interrogation protocol from 1938, is kept in the Archive-Library of the St. Petersburg Scientific and Information Center of Memorial.
