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Dangerous Women in History that the Law Couldn’t Contain

Khalid Elhassan September 28, 2021 35 min

Dangerous bandit queen Belle Starr. Dallas Gateway

Former anarchist and socialist revolutionary Fanya Kaplan’s failed attempt to assassinate Lenin, which triggered the Red Terror. Pinterest

13. A Revolutionary Whose Extremism Alarmed Even the Head of the Soviet Secret Police

The Red Terror was a period of extreme repression and mass killings carried out by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. It began in 1918, after a failed attempt at Lenin’s life. Rozalia Zemlyachka was involved in the repression campaign from the start, advocated for the annihilation of class enemies, and took part in carrying out 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).

A 1918 propaganda poster in St Petersburg, which reads ‘Death to the Bourgeoisie and its Lapdogs – Long Live the Red Terror’. Imgur

Considering that Dzerzhinsky was known among his circle of hardened revolutionaries as “Iron Felix“, it must have taken quite some doing to alarm him. Yet, that is just what Zemlyachka did. So in 1920, she was bundled out of Moscow and sent to the Crimea, as Secretary of the Crimean Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party. When she arrived, that peninsula was one of the last remaining enclaves of the Whites – those opposed to the Bolshevik Reds. She took care of that in a ruthless fashion.

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.