ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the particularities of women's economic thought in late Imperial Russia and in the early years after the 1917 Revolution, years of dramatic changes, both political and social, as Russia sought to overcome its feudal backwardness. Educated women helped to disseminate both main currents of thought, primarily through action rather than in print. Among the Russian liberal reformers, the sole prominent woman is Ariadna Tyrkova, a political journalist and writer, whose contribution was primarily dissemination of liberal democratic ideas of the time. More women were notable among non-Marxists socialists – Radical Populists and their successors Socialist-Revolutionaries–but their contribution is primarily political activism, not theory or publications. The most representative women are: Vera Figner, Vera Zasulich, Catherine Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Maria Spiridonova. All of them passionately believed that to be democratic, socialism must be decentralized and based on a strong class of small democratic owners and cultivators.
