Yekaterina Kuskova

She was affiliated with the party of the 'People's Right' of Mark Natanson and met the future Socialist-Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov.

Then, she converted to Marxism and joined a group of Social-Democratic exiles that included her future husband, Sergei Prokopovich, whom she married in 1895.

Kuskova, in particular, became a proponent of Eduard Bernstein's Revisionism, which she championed in her famous and highly controversial 1899 article Credo, which was published without her knowledge by Vladimir Lenin.

[2] These views were labeled 'Economism' by her critics (a somewhat vague term the orthodox Marxists applied to a number of different heresies, from revolutionary syndicalism to revisionism).

The Economism controversy also attracted attention from Western European socialists and became part of the larger battle between reformists and revolutionaries that raged in the late nineteenth century.

Kuskova was one of the founders and editors of the journal Nasha Zhizn (Our Life), which became the official organ of the KDP.

She became associated with Father Gapon, an Orthodox priest and social reformer who led the unarmed demonstration on Bloody Sunday, January 9, 1905 (OS), that sparked the Revolution of 1905.

Kuskova launched the democratic socialist journal Vlasti Naroda (The People's Power), which united Defencist socialists from a variety of parties, including right-wing Mensheviks like Aleksandr Potresov, veteran Narodniks like Nikolai Tchaikovsky and right-wing SRs like Boris Savinkov.

She was fiercely critical of the Bolsheviks' anti-war agitation but also condemned the Constitutional Democrats for their involvement in the Kornilov Affair.

Their efforts were tolerated as long as the situation was dire, but the Soviet government eventually accused the Committee of engaging in anti-Soviet propaganda.

Kuskova and Prokopovich first settled in Berlin, where they were active in various organisations supporting Russian political prisoners and published a number of anti-Bolshevik journals.

In 1924 they moved to Prague, where Kuskova participated in forming the 'Republican Democratic Association with a number of exiled liberals.

During the Second World War she again hoped that, once fascism was defeated, the Soviet Union, allied with the West, would permit democratic exiles to return.