Banquet Menu.
Breshkovsky’s 1904-05 US fundraising tour
A remarkable survival
Breshkovsky, Catherine [Mme. Katerina Breshkovskaya.] Banquet Menu and Program. 1905.
Card folded to make four pages each 3 ¾ x 6 inches; three sides printed, including a photographic first page.
Remarkably preserved menu and program for the “Banquet tendered to Mme. Katerina Breshkovskaya, by the Boston Groupe of Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, on Friday Evening, February 24, 1905, at the Modern Restaurant.” In addition to the toastmaster there were four featured speakers, including Dr. Anna Topaz whose topic was “Woman in Revolution.” Breshkovskaya herself spoke about “Russia.”
The banquet was, of course, a fundraiser for the failed 1905 Russian Revolution; Breshkovsky’s nickname of “The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution” was earned later. A colleague writes that Breshkovsky was
An early follower of Bakunin; while still a young woman she was arrested for her part in the Narodnik uprising and spent the years 1878-1896 in exile in Siberia. Once released she resumed her revolutionary activities, including a six-moth tour (1904-05) of the United States, campaigning on behalf of the revolutionary socialists. This successful speaking tour concluded, Breshkovskaya returned to Russia in March, 1905 with over $10,000 in cash. She was promptly captured, tried, and exiled once again to Siberia, where she remained until the February revolution of 1917. She allied herself with Kerensky – the wrong choice, as it turns out – and following the October Revolution was forced yet again into exile, this time in Czechoslovakia, where she remained until her death in 1935…. This is a rare remnant of the first, failed Russian Revolution and one of pre=-Bolshevik Russia’s great heroines – all but erased from the Soviet history books following her alliance with the Kerensky government. (Lorne Bair)
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