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Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova-Williams (November 13, 1869, Saint Petersburg - January 12, 1962, Washington, DC, Ariadna Borman during the first marriage) was a Russian liberal politician, journalist, writer and feminist.

Biography

Revolutionary beginnings

Ariadna Tyrkova was born into the family of a Russian noble, whose hereditary estate was Vergezhi in the Novgorod region. She studied in Saint Petersburg, where she married A. N. Borman, an engineer, and had a son, Arkady (b. 1891) with him. She was active among liberal opposition groups linked to Pyotr Struve's Osvobozhdenie in the early 1900s. In 1904, she was arrested while trying to smuggle 400 copies of Osvobozhdenie into Russia ^[1]. She was arrested again later in 1904, sentenced to 30 months in prison and fled to Germany. Returning to Russia under the general amnesty granted by the October Manifesto during the Russian Revolution of 1905, she helped found the Constitutional Democratic party (aka the Kadet party) and became a member of its Central Committee in 1906.

Between the Revolutions

Tyrkova-Williams married Harold Williams (1876-1928), a New Zealand-British Slavist who was working as a journalist in Saint Petersburg for the Morning Post, in 1906. The same year she joined the All-Russian Union for Women's Equality ^[2] and, along with Ekaterina Kuskova, became a leading campaigner for equal rights for women, prompting the Constitutional Democratic party to add women's suffrage to its platform ^[3].

After the defeat of the revolution in late 1907, Tyrkova-Williams moved to the far Right of the Constitutional Democratic party and advocated an alliance with the Progressive faction in the State Duma and the Left wing of the Octobrist party ^[4]. In 1911 the family was briefly embroiled in a controversy when Harold Williams was accused of espionage, supposedly as a result of Russian secret police machinations ^[5]. During World War I she worked in the All-Russian Union of Cities. She also spent a year in Turkey and wrote a book about her experiences there ^[6].

1917 Revolution and emigration

On March 17, 1917, immediately after the February Revolution of 1917, Tyrkova-Williams was elected a member of the Petrograd Committee of the Kadet party. She coordinated party publications in Petrograd and in the summer of 1917 was elected to the Petrograd Duma, where she led the Constitutional Democratic faction. In August she became a member of the Democratic Conference and in September she was elected to the Pre-Parliament. After the Bolshevik seizure of power during the October Revolution of 1917, she ran for the Constituent Assembly in November elections and, with Alexander Izgoev, briefly edited the newspaper Borba until it was shut down by the Bolshevik government. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, she helped organize anti-Bolshevik resistance in the South of the country and then emigrated to Great Britain in the spring of 1918, where she published an account of the first year of the Russian revolution, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk. She went back to Russia in the spring of 1919 when Harold Williams was sent to the areas controlled by Gen. Anton Denikin to report on the progress of the White Movement. By then she had moved even further to the Right and wrote:

We must support the army first and place the democratic programs in the background. We must create a ruling class and not a dictatorship of the majority. The universal hegemony of Western democracy is a fraud, which politicians have foisted upon us. We must have the courage to look directly into the eye of the wild beast -- which is called the people ^[7].

Denikin was defeated in late 1919, and she returned to Great Britain the following year. In London, she was a founder of the Russian Liberation Committee, edited its publications, and raised money for Russian orphans ^[8]. In later years, she wrote a biography of Alexander Pushkin (Life of Pushkin, 1928-1929) ^[9], a book about her late husband Harold Williams (1935), and 3 volumes of memoirs (1952-1956).

Notes

• ^  See Shmuel Galai. The Liberation Movement in Russia 1900-1905, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-52647-7 p.192.
• ^  See Barbara Alpern-Engel. "Women in Revolutionary Russia, 1861-1926" in Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women, ed. Christine Faure, Routledge, 2003, ISBN 1-57958-237-0 p.255. (First edition as Encyclopédie politique et historique des femmes, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1997, ISBN 2-13-048316-X)
• ^  See Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith. A History of Women's Writing in Russia, Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-521-57280-0 p.177
• ^  See Melissa Stockdale. "The Constitutional Democratic Party" in Russia Under the Last Tsar, edited by Anna Geifman, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999, ISBN 1-55786-995-2 pp. 164-169.
• ^  See Keith Neilson. "Only a d...d marionette? The influence of ambassadors on British Foreign Policy, 1904-1914" in Diplomacy and World Power: Studies in British Foreign Policy, 1890-1951, eds. Brian J. C. McKercher and Michael L. Dockrill, Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-521-52934-4 p. 66
• ^  See Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams. Staraya Turtsia i Mladoturki: god v Konstantinopole, Petrograd, Tip. B. M. Volfa, 1916, p.179
• ^  Quoted in Ronald Grigor Suny. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-19-508105-6 p.80
• ^  See the Tyrkova-Williams Collection at the British Library
• ^  For a comparison of Tyrkova-Williams' biography of Pushkin with the one published in the Soviet Union by Yuri Tynianov at the same time, see Alexandra Smith. "Conformist by Circumstance v. Formalist at Heart: Some Observations on Tynianov's Novel Pushkin", in Neo-Formalist Papers: Contributions to the Silver Jubilee Conference to Mark 25 Years of the Neo-Formalist Circle, eds. Joe Andrew and Robert Reid, Amsterdam-Atlanta, Rodopi B. V., 1998, ISBN 90-420-0631-5 p. 305

Works

• Staraya Turtsia i Mladoturki: god v Konstantinopole, Petrograd, Tip. B. M. Volfa, 1916, 179p.
• From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk, the First Year of the Russian Revolution, London, Macmillan, 1919, 526p.
  • Second edition Westport, CT, Hyperion Press, 1977, ISBN 0-88355-448-8, 526 p.
  • Available online
• Cheerful Giver: the Life of Harold Williams, by his wife, Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, London, P. Davies, 1935, xii, 337 p.
• Na Putyakh k svobode, New York, Izd-vo im. Chekhova, 1952, 429p.
• To, chego bol'she ne budet, Paris, Vozrozhdenie, [1954], 267p.
• Zhizn' Pushkina (Life of Pushkin) vol. 1 (1799-1824), vol. 2 (1824-1837), Paris, Sklad izd. Knizhnyi magazin Vozrozhdeniia, 1929.
  • 2nd edition, Paris, YMCA Press, 1948.
  • 3rd edition, Moscow, Molodaia Gvardiia, 1998, ISBN 5-235-02310-2 (set), ISBN 5-235-02301-3 (v. 1), ISBN 5-235-02302-1 (v. 2)

See also

• Harold Williams (her husband)

External links

• The Tyrkova-Williams Collection at the British Library

References

• Arkady Borman. A. V. Tyrkova-Williams: po ee pis’mam i vospominaniiam syna, Washington, DC, Luven, 1964.
• "A. V. Tyrkova-Williams" in Novy Zhurnal, 1970, N 98.
• Politicheskie deyateli Rossii 1917: Biograficheskij slovar', ed. Pavel Volobuev, Moscow, 1993, ISBN 5-85270-137-8.
• Irene Zohrab. "Remizov, Williams, Mirsky and English Readers (with some Letters from Remizov to Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams and Two Unknown Reviews)", in New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1994, pp. 259-287.
• Alexandra Smith. "The Shaping of the Literary Canon in A. Tyrkova-Williams's book The Life of Pushkin", in Pushkinskie chteniia v Tartu: 2, ed. L. Kiseleva, University of Tartu, Tartu, 2000, pp.267-81.
• Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild. "Writing for Their Rights: Four Feminist Journalists: Mariia Chekhova, Liubov' Gurevich, Mariia Pokrovskaia, and Ariadna Tyrkova" in An Improper Profession: Women, Gender and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia, eds. Barbara T. Norton and Jehanne M. Gheith, Duke University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8223-2585-3 pp. 167-195