With blood and words

Born in 1902, Eugénie Markon is the daughter of the intellectual Jewish bourgeoisie of Petrograd. She denounced the Bolshevik coup d’etat and took sides with the Kronstadt insurgents and the anarchists in exile. She marries the futuristic anarchist poet Alexandre Iaroslavski. After his arrest, she frequented the criminale underground of Petrograd and Moscow and flew for survival. She wants to make her husband escape but she is interned in her turn in the Solovki Islands, an archipelago of the White Sea, heralding the Gulag. She refuses forced labor, insults her guards and executioners. A few months before her execution (1931), she wrote her autobiography. This astonishing and moving text was found intact in the Arkhangelsk police archives by Irina Fligué, head of the Memorial association which works for the revision of the official history of Stalinism. From adolescence, Evgeniia, born in 1902, child of the Jewish intellectual bourgeoisie of Saint Petersburg, caught up in the revolution of 1917 and the hopes that it raised, formed the project of working in a factory. Quickly become an anarchist activist, seller of newspapers in Moscow, she imposes herself on an iron discipline, eats little, abandons her studies of philosophy to share the fate of the poorest and live in hiding. But soon she realized that the Bolsheviks had put the revolution “under supervision” to make it a fixed and police regime and that they were thus the real counterrevolutionaries. Married to the poet Alexander Yaroslavski, Evguénia will lead an adventurous life, will make conferences across the Soviet Union, will go to Berlin, to Paris and, returned to Moscow, will live among thieves and prostitutes, the underworld and the class of “barefoot goers” constituting the only social class which, according to her, leads the real revolts against society. Fortune-teller, thief herself – she details her operating methods with precision -, animated by a fierce hatred towards the Chekists, she will be arrested several times by the GPU, the State police, and will find, barely released, the street world, before being imprisoned again and deported to Siberia. She was executed in 1931, at the age of 29, in the Solovki Islands camp.