Sofia Panina
[2] In 1891 Sofia Panina met a Petersburg schoolteacher twenty years older than herself, Aleksandra Vasil'evna Peshekhonova, to whose influence she attributed the decisive turn her life took in the 1890s, away from the world of aristocratic high society and toward progressive philanthropy.
They gradually added Sunday popular readings for the children's parents and older siblings, founded a library, and began offering evening courses for adults.
It pursued a progressive mission to advance popular education, cultural elevation, and rational entertainment for adults and children, as part of her project to support their development as citizens.
[3] Its evening courses and literary circles provided a meeting-place for working-class men with socialist sympathies, and during the 1905 Revolution, Panina opened Ligovsky People's House to various political groups for meetings and rallies.
Acting on the orders of the Kadet ministers Aleksandr Konovalov and Nikolai Kishkin to sabotage Bolshevik rule after the October Revolution, on 15 November she authorised the transfer of the entire funds of the Ministry of Education (93,000 rubles in total) to an unidentified account, in all likelihood in a foreign bank, to keep them out of the hands of the new government.
[6] An accusation was filed with the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Petrograd Soviet by the assistant commissar for education Isak Rogal’skii, who could not complete his takeover of the ministry, and Panina was arrested on 28 November.
[7] During her initial interrogation, she admitted having ordered the removal of the funds but refused to disclose their destination on the grounds of her loyalty to the Provisional Government.
Since the matter hinged on the defendant's refusal to recognise and cooperate with the new government, it has been argued in recent North American scholarship to constitute the first political trial in Bolshevik-ruled Russia, which echoes the claim Panina's lawyer made in court.
Iakov Gurevich (ru), representing Panina, argued for the political character of the trial by alleging that no universally recognized laws existed after the revolution, and claimed that the funds of the Ministry of Education constituted a private charitable donation.
The worker Ivanov, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, then volunteered to defend Panina by using character evidence about her charitable support for popular education at the Narodnyi Dom.
At this stage in the proceedings, Zhukov asked Panina if she would return the money within two days, which she refused, insisting that she was answerable on this matter to the Constituent Assembly alone.
Zhukov bypassed Grigory Kramarov, a Menshevik member of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a witness favourable to the defendant, and invited a worker called Naumov, who sought to put the value of Panina's charity in context by contrasting it with her actions on behalf of her class and "in organized opposition to the people’s authority."
The last testimony came from assistant commissar Rogal’skii, who stated that the missing funds prevented the payment of overdue wages to the hungry education workers, among them many women teachers, and additionally charged her and her colleagues with taking holiday bonuses before transferring the money away.
As the Tribunal retired to consider their verdict, there was further dispute: Gurevich decried the order of proceedings, Rogal’skii tried to deliver additional documents, Sergei Oldenburg accused him of lying, and Kramarov was removed for his complaints about not having been allowed to speak.
