One of the
Red Army's most brutal
commissars during the
Russian Civil War. Zemliachka flourished during the
Great Terror, and became the highest-ranking woman in
Stalin's
Soviet Union.
Zemliachka was born Rosalia Zalkind in
1876, into a large family of Jewish merchants. While her father looked after the family business in
Kiev and her brothers studied there at the university, Rosalia lived with her mother in
Mogilev and was exposed to revolutionary ideas from an early age. In
1881, when members of the
People's Will society murdered Tsar
Alexander II, she caught her mother hiding illegal pamphlets her siblings had produced.
Moving to Kiev for her own studies, she was introduced to revolutionary literature by her brothers and was first arrested the year after she left school. Initially a
Populist, like the assassins of Alexander, she found their programme inadequate against the social ills she saw on a daily basis and had turned to
Marxism by 1896; imprisonments afforded her the opportunity for further study.
After a short-lived marriage - her husband died of
tuberculosis in
1902 - she became involved with the
Social Democrat underground newspaper
Iskra, and was recommended to the
St. Petersburg party committee by a friend of hers, a certain
Leon Trotsky. She first met
Lenin in
1903, the year his
Bolshevik faction split from the
Mensheviks in the party.
Now a member of the Petersburg committee herself, Zemliachka - like many of her comrades, she had adopted an underground codename - was one of Lenin's leading supporters there in
1905, when an abortive revolution took place in Russia. Fleeing to
Moscow to avoid arrest, she resumed her position as organisational secretary on her new home town's committee, and fought on the
barricades in that December's armed uprising, discovering an aptitude for violence that would last throughout her career.
Bolsheviks of both sexes valued
tverdost, or firmness - a cool rationality and diligence easily slipping into ruthlessness if need be. Zemliachka perhaps embodied
tverdost more than any other female Bolshevik, both during her period in the underground and when, after several prison spells and consequent poor health, she returned to revolutionary activity in 1917.
Returning as secretary of the Moscow committee after the
February Revolution, Zemliachka once again proved herself an enthusiastic supporter of Lenin, and as enthusiastic an organiser of the party militia, the
Red Guards. The Bolsheviks frequently railed against the
women's battalions being raised in support of Prime Minister
Aleksandr Kerensky's war effort; their qualms concerned the women's cause, not their fitness for combat.
Zemliachka, in fact, was in a minority for much of the year in believing that an armed Bolshevik uprising would succeed; she was only vindicated after the
takeover in Petersburg (now
Petrograd), rather ineffectually resisted by an over-confident Kerensky. She continued on the Moscow committee until late
1918, when she volunteered to serve at the front against the assortment of anti-Bolshevik armies known as the
Whites.
Although the Red Army made no effort to recruit women for combat - as opposed to support roles - on a large scale, a number still enlisted, and the female
machine gunner became a familiar type in early Soviet life. Prominent Bolshevik women such as
Alexandra Kollontai lauded the female war effort as the ultimate in equality, ironically echoing the bourgeois feminists, such as
Ariadna Tyrkova, whose flag-waving Kollontai had decried the year before.
However, others, even in the party, had reservations, and predictable rumours circulated about the fighting women who associated with men, cut their hair short and had a penchant for
leather coats. If the 'Bolshevik
Amazon' confirmed the worst fears of the Bolsheviks' opponents, Zemliachka was a godsend to White propagandists on the lookout for amoral Reds.
After leaving Moscow, Zemliachka was made chief political officer of the Eighth Army in the
Ukraine, incongruously adding a pair of
pince-nez to her commissar's ensemble. She was relieved of her position in April
1919 when morale in the Eighth dramatically fell, although was reinstated to the Thirteenth Army after explaining that the soldiers had lost heart because the high command had not provided them with any boots.
On assuming her position with the Thirteenth, Zemliachka went straight to the political department's headquarters, gave the highest-ranking officer there an
earful and ordered him to clear out the soldiers who had taken to using the rooms as an extra barracks. Only the next morning did she discover that they were in fact her staff.
Her final military engagement was at the end of the war in
1920, clearing the
Crimea of defeated Whites after the flight of the last White commander,
Piotr Wrangel. Alongside
Béla Kun, the
Magyar who had led the 138-day Communist revolution in
Hungary the year before, Zemliachka presided over the mass executions of political enemies of all hues, and was awarded the
Order of the Red Banner for her work in
1922.
After the war, Zemliachka was posted to the
Urals and, like most Bolshevik women, assigned to the continuing
propaganda work, but stayed close to the rising Stalin, whose appetite for confrontation and fears of an
enemy within she tended to share. In
1927 she joined the party's
Central Control Commission, soon heading the department and thus becoming, as the Stalinist terror loomed, the chief enforcer of party discipline.
Working closely with the
NKVD, Stalin's secret police, Zemliachka navigated through the
purges of the 1930s, rooting out other Old Bolsheviks with as impeccable a revolutionary pedigree as her own. She received the Soviet Union's highest honour, the
Order of Lenin, in
1936, and the next year was appointed to the
Supreme Soviet.
She became a
People's Commissar - the equivalent of a minister - with responsibility for the economy in
1939, before returning to familiar ground during
World War II, helping to organise military supply while remaining in Moscow throughout the
German siege. She died in
1947, a faithful servant of Stalin, and her ashes were buried in the
Kremlin Wall.