"Many notable people came to the settlement. Madame Breshkovskaya, "Babushka," little grandmother of the Russian Revolution, was among them. Thirteen years later she was to prove unequal to the Proletarian Revolution. But I remember how profoundly she impressed me at the time. She learned English in a Russian prison. She was going back to Russia to help the Revolution. Perhaps she would be captured, perhaps die in prison. It did not matter to her. She would be serving the cause of "the people." How was I to know that to her "the people" were not the proletariat? So Russia's revolution had one of its iron leaders in this gentle white-haired woman, member of the Russian aristocracy. How impressed I was."
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Rose Pastor Stokes I Belong to the Working Class edited by David Sterling (1992)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Catherine_Breshkovsky
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Catherine Breshkovsky
Yekaterina Konstantinovna Breshko-Breshkovskaya (née Verigo; born 25 January [O.S. 13 January] 1844 – 12 September 1934), better known as Catherine Breshkovsky, was a major figure in the Russian socialist movement, a Narodnik, and later one of the founders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. She has been described as Russia's first female political prisoner. She spent over four decades in prison and Siberian exile for peaceful opposition to Tsarism, acquiring, in her latter years, internationa
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