Maria Perveeva

Perveeva was born in Zadonsk in 1879.[1] She trained to be a teacher and became involved in self-education, but was arrested in 1894 and 1901 for her activities.[1] After being arrested again in 1904, she was freed from jail by local peasants.[2] In 1905 she co-founded a group of revolutionaries in Valuysky District, which organised illegal meetings. She also joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and became a member of the provincial committee in Voronezh Governorate.[1] After another arrest, she briefly emigrated, but returned to Russia in 1907. However, she was arrested and sentenced to hard labour, spending ten years in prison in Irkutsk.[1]

Following the start of the Russian Revolution, in 1917 she was a Socialist-Revolutionary candidate in Voronezh in the Constituent Assembly elections, and was one of ten women elected to the legislature.[3][1] After the establishment of the Soviet Union, she became a member of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers,[1] and worked in an artel in Khosta. In 1937 she was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp by the Krasnodar Krai branch of the NKVD; she was rehabilitated in 1963.