Sofia Panina

Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Panina (1871–1956) was Vice Minister of State Welfare and Vice Minister of Education in the Provisional Government following the Russian February Revolution, 1917.

Family background

She was the daughter of Anastasiia Panina. Her maternal grandfather, General Sergei Ivanovich Mal'tsov (1801–93), owned an industrial company employing over 100,000 workers, whereas her paternal grandfather, Count Viktor Nikitich Panin was a landowner with a large number of serfs and was Minister of Justice for over twenty five years. In 1882 her mother remarried Ivan Ilich Petrunkevitch, one of the founders of the Constitutional Democrat Party (Kadets)while he was still in political exile. Her grandmother, Nalalia Panina took Sofia into her custody and enrolled her at the Catherine Institute, St Petersburg. She married Alexander Polovstov in 1890, however she subsequently divorced him and reverted to her maiden name.

Charitable work

In 1891 she met Aleksandra Vasil'evna Psehekhonova with whom she collaborated in developing a caféteria in one of the poorest parts of St Petersburg. After developing her social work for twelve years, Panina founded the Ligovsky Narodnyi Dom, a community centre catering for working-class residents in an impoverished district on southern outskirts of St Petersburg. It had a progressive mission for the development of popular education and cultural elevation and provided one of the few places socialists could legally meet. On 9 May 1906 Vladimir Lenin addressed his first mass meeting in Russia there.

Political career

Although her mother had married Petrunkevitch, it was not until the February Revolution of 1917 that Sofia started playing a role in politics. She wrote in her memoirs: “I never belonged to any political party and my interests were concentrated on questions of education and general culture, which alone, I was deeply convinced, could provide a firm foundation for a free political order.” However during the war she worked for Petersburg City Duma ensuring the families of reservists called up for the war were being looked after. On International Women's Day, 1917, Panina along with some other suitable women were appointed as delegates to the Petrograd Duma. Their positions were confirmed in the August elections. She was elected to the Kadet Party Central Committee at the beginning of May and was soon the first woman in a Russian cabinet when she became assistant to the newly created Minster of Social Welfare. Then in July she was made assistant to Oldenburg, the Minister of Education. However she failed to gain a seat when she ran for the Constituent Assembly in the July election.

However when the Kadet Party was faced with the revolution of October 1917, Sofia was to play an even more prominent role. On the night of 25 October the Duma sent her as one of three delegates to visit the Aurora in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade them to hold their fire. Following the seizure of power, her home at 23 Sergievskaia Street Liteinyi district was used for meetings of three important anti-Bolshevik groups: the Little Council (also known as the Underground Provisional Government), the Committee to Save the Fatherland and Revolution composed of Kadet and socialist Duma delegates headed by Nikolai Astrov, the Kadetmayor of Petrograd. Also the Central Committee of the Kadet Party met there. As part of the Little Council she was involved in trying to withhold finances from the various ministries from the Bolsheviks and in organising a strike by civil servants. She was arrested at her home on 28 November with Fyodor Kokoshkin, Andrei Ivanovich Shingarev and Prince Pavel Dolgorukov. They had been planning an anti-bolshevik demonstration for the next day.

Trial

Sofia was put on trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Petrograd Soviet on 10 December 1917 in what was the first political trial staged by the Bolsheviks. She was accused of embezzling 93,000 rubles from the Ministry of Education, which she denied. It attracted both national and international attention, including the presence of John Reed and Louise Bryant. The trial was held in the palace of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. Julia Cassady has described the trial as showing “nascent theatricality of the Bolshevik law court.”

The Revolutionary tribunal consisted of seven men, two soldiers and five workers, six of whom were members of the Bolshevik Party. The soldiers were in uniform, while the workers wore dark suits with high white collar shirts and ties. Panina wore a modest black suit and close fitting turban Ivan Zhukov chaired the proceedings, citing historical precedents from the French Revolution. He announced the charge and called on someone to act as prosecutor. When no-one stepped forward, Gurevich proceeded with the defence, suggesting that there was no universally recognised laws in Russia at that point of time, so the trial could only be a political affair. He identified the funds in question as being a donation to the Ministry of Education for charitable purposes. “You must not, before the entire world, return evil for good and violence for love”. This received much applause from the audience.

He then called a factory worker N. I. Ivanov, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party who gave a personal account of how he had learnt to read and write at Panina's Narodnyi Dom. This too was well received by the audience and Zhukov then asked her to return the money in question within two days. She refused explaining she had deposited the money in a bank under the name of the ministry, and insisted that it should only be released to the Constituent Assembly. After bypassing Grigory Kramarov, a Menshevik member of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Zhukov invited a worker called Naumov to speak. He felt little need to focus on any facts, but merely identified Panina as member of the nobility and suggested that this was enough to determine her guilt, whatever her good deeds in the past. The next to testify was even less sympathetic. Rogal’skii was a representative of the Commissariat for Education, who engaged in a personal attack on Panina which claimed that the funds she took were unpaid wages owed to ministry workers called for military service. Finally Panina herself made a speech in her defence, claiming she was merely playing the role of a sentry safeguarding the funds for the people - as expressed through their legal representation, the Constituent Assembly.

As the Tribunal retired to consider their verdict, the court room gave way to disorder. Sergey Oldenburg accused Rogal’skii of lying. Kramarov complained about not being allowed to speak and was removed from the building when he tried to do so on the tribunal's return. The tribunal then found her guilty of “opposition to the people’s authority” and decreed that she should give the money to the Commissariat for Education. However in view of her previous good works, her punishment was limited to public censure. Following the trial she refused to pass over the money and was put back in prison until her friends paid the 93,000 rubles.

Flight and Exile

In 1918 she joined General Anton Denikin in South Russia alongside other leading Kadets, including Astrov. She travelled with him to Paris in the summer of 1919 to represent Denikin in an attempt to get further support from allies for the White Russians. This failed and she returned to South Russia briefly before spending the rest of her life in exile. She went with Astrov first to Switzerland and then from 1925 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. They founded Russkii ochag (Russian Hearth), a Russian émigré Astrov died in 1934, and when faced with the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, she left Europe for the United States settling in New York for the rest of her life.