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Bloody Mary and Other Fearsome Women From History

Khalid Elhassan October 14, 2023 32 min

A Woman So Hardcore, She Alarmed “Iron Felix”

Bloody - Rozalia Zemlyachka, circa 1919 — Rozalia Zemlyachka, circa 1919, when she was involved in the Red Terror. Wikimedia

Rozalia Zemlyachka came in for a rough time in the Tsarist crackdown after the 1905 Russian Revolution. She was arrested and jailed numerous times, and caught tuberculosis and developed a heart disease behind bars. Zemlyachka finally fled Russia in 1909, her health broken, to join Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders in exile. She returned to Moscow in 1914, seemingly a spent force, only to bounce back to life in the 1917 Russian Revolution. As an early member of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, she was in on the ground floor when the Bolsheviks hijacked that revolution. She helped secure Moscow for the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. In the resultant Russian Civil War, she split her time between Moscow and various Bolshevik field armies, to buck up the troops with fiery speeches and political agitation.

Lenin made Zemlyachka chief political commissar for the 8^th Army in the Ukraine, then for that of the 13^th Army. However, she made her greatest mark during the Red Terror – a period of bloody repression carried out by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War that began in 1918 after a failed attempt at assassinating Lenin. Zemlyachka was involved in the terror from the start, advocated for the annihilation of class enemies, and took part in the first batches of executions in Moscow. Her zeal and methods alarmed even Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka (forerunner of the NKVD and KGB). Dzerzhinsky was known as “Iron Felix”, so it took a lot to alarm him. Yet, that is just what Zemlyachka did. So in 1920, she was bundled out of Moscow and sent to the Crimea.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.