Yakov Stefanovich
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Yakov Vasilevich Stefanovich (Russian: Яков Васильевич Стефанович) (10 December (28 November old style) 1854 –14 April 1915) was a Ukrainian narodnik revolutionary.
Stefanovich led an unsuccessful attempt to incite a peasant revolt in Ukraine. He and his colleagues deceived participants by telling them the Russian tsar supported appropriating land from big landowners for the peasants.
Yakov Stefanovich was born in the village of Deptivka, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine region of what was then the Konotopsky Uyezd, Chernigov Governorate, Russian Empire. The son of a village priest,[1] he was educated in seminary, and then at Kiev University.
While at the university, Stefanovich joined the Kiev branch of the Chaykovsky circlean anarchist group, inspired by the writings of Mikhail Bakunin. In July 1874, he agreed to join Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Maria Kolenkina on a mission to 'go to the people' and spread propaganda in peasant villages. Stefanovich obtained a false passport, and posed as an itinerant cobbler.
After the three activists made contact with the peasants, Stefanovich was tipped off that he was likely to be arrested. He and Breshko-Breshkovskaya fled to Kherson province, where they contacted religious dissenters. Stefanovich unsuccessfully attempted to recruit them into rebellion by arguing that the apostles were opponents of autocratic rule.[2]
After receiving a coded warning not to try to rejoin Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who had been arrested, Stefanovich returned to the university. During his second year there, in 1875, he was expelled for spreading revolutionary propaganda.[3]
Chigirin affair
After his expulsion from University, Stefanovich teamed up with Leo Deutsch. In May 1876, he contacted prisoners from the Chigirin (Chyhyryn) district. The peasants in that area had demanded a fairer distribution of land, and were refusing to sign deeds that gave legally recognition to the current pattern of land ownership. In 1875, a group of peasants led by an army veteran named Foma Pryadko petitioned the tsar, wrongly believing that he secretly sympathised with them. In May 1875, the Russian authorities sent troops to suppress the protests. Two peasants were flogged to death, and hundreds were arrested and transported to Kiev.[4]
Stefanovich contacted the Chigirin prisoners in Kiev in May 1876. He promised them that he would contact the tsar on their behalf. Stefanovich gained the prisoners' trust because he spoke Ukrainian fluently, and through a profound understanding of peasant folklore, as the hostile memoirist Lev Tikhomirov - an ex-revolutionary turned monarchist - acknowledged.[3]
Stefanovich and Deutsch obtained a secret printing press and created a Secret Imperial Charter, supposedly issued by the tsar, which granted liberty to all of Chigirin's rural population and ordered that the land, including that belonging to the nobility, should be distributed equally. They also created the Statutes of the Secret Militia, which gave detailed instructions to the peasants to organise a secret, armed society to enforce the will of the 'tsar'.
Stefanovich and Deutsch recruited about a thousand peasants in the conspiracy, before careless talk alerted the authorities. Seventy-four peasants were arrested, along with Stefanovich, Deutsch, and a revolutionary named Ivan Bokhanovsky. The peasants now learnt that Stefanovich had not met the tsar, and the documents he had shown them were fake. According to Breshko-Breshkovskaya, "he expected the peasants who were in the same prison with him to be incensed ... but to his astonishment and joy, they welcomed him as friend and a leader... I now know that the peasants who were exiled to remote places in Siberia in connection with his case also considered him a very fine man and were anxious to meet him again."[5]
Stefanovich was held in Kiev prison awaiting trial. A fellow revolutionary, Mikhail Frolenko, obtained a job as a prison warder and allowed Stefanovish, Deutsch and Bokhanovsky to walk out of the prison one evening, disguised as warders.[6]
