They lived as most students do, especially the women, that is on very little. Tea and bread, some milk and a thin slice of meat, amidst spirited discussions of the latest news from the socialist world and the last book read - that was their regular fate. Those who had more money than was needed for such a way of life donated it to the common cause ... As to dress, the most parsimonious economy reigned in that direction. Our girls in Zurich seemed defiantly to throw this question at the population there: can there be a simplicity of dress which does not become a girl if she is young, intelligent and full of energy?

Several Russian girls set off abroad to attend lectures at Zurich University. At first there were only a very few of them, but now there are more than a hundred women there... Largely because of this increase in Russian women students, the ringleaders of the Russian emigration have chosen this town as a centre for revolutionary propaganda, and have done all in their power to enlist into their ranks these young women students. Under their influence, women have abandoned their studies for fruitless political agitation. Young Russians of both sexes have formed political parties of extreme shades... In the Russian Library they hold lectures of an exclusively revolutionary nature... It has become common practice for the girls to attend workers' meetings... Young and inexperienced minds are being led astray by political agitators, and set on the wrong course. And to cap it all, meetings and party struggles throw the girls into such confusion that they accept this fruitless and fraudulent propaganda as real life. Once drawn into politics the girls fall under the influence of the leaders of the emigration, and become compliant weapons in their hands. Some of them go from Zurich to Russia and back two or three times a year, carrying letters, instructions and proclamations and taking an active part in criminal propaganda. Others are led astray by communist theories about free love, and under pretext of fictitious marriages carry to the most extreme limits their rejection of the fundamental laws of morality and feminine virtue. The immoral conduct of Russian women has aroused the indignation of the local citizens against them, and landladies are even refusing to accept them as lodgers. Some of the girls have sunk so low as to practise that branch of obstetrics which is judged a criminal offence, and deserves the utter contempt of all honourable people.

Sophia Bardina, Lydia Figner, Berta Kaminskaya, Alexandra Khorzhevskaya and the Subbotina sisters, all equipped with false passports, embarked on their first political work. After three years in Zurich, the insecure adolescents who had been so avid for knowledge and liberty were now self-confident women, mature in matters of political theory. But they were totally unprepared for the realities of Russian factory life. Vera Figner, who was well aware of her physical limitations, realized that political ardour would never compensate for physical weakness. And even the women who did not succumb to the backbreaking labour, the infested beds, the overcrowded dormitories and the miserable diet were frustrated that, after fifteen hours of soul-destroying work, the exhausted workers generally had no energy to get angry about their working conditions.

Sophia Bardina and Berta Kaminskaya both got jobs in large textile factories where there was a large proportion of women workers - Sophia in the Lazareva factory, Berta in the Nosovye factory. Lydia Figner rented a small room in the city, where she lived under the passport of a soldier's wife and got a job in the large Gubner factory. Varvara Alexandrova, Marya Subbotina and Anna Toporkova all worked in factories in nearby Ivanovo-Voznesensk and lived in a communal flat leased by Anna Toporkova. On their first day at work they were greeted with the normal barrage of obscenities to which women workers were subjected. They were horrified by the demoralization and promiscuity of the workers, and tried at first to make contact with the women workers, who worked and lived apart from the men. But the women they found interested only in clothes, their sexual adventures and malicious gossip. It was obviously not long before some of the more curious workers began to question them about their presence there, with their undeniably refined ways and speech. They explained, to the workers' satisfaction, that they were Old Believers of peasant origin, who had just left their villages. Gradually they began to gain the workers' trust and respect.

Sophia Bardina was soon on friendly terms with a woman worker who confided her family problems to her, and she ended up going to the woman's home, taking with her populist fables and the latest periodicals. Her humour and persuasive narrative gifts began to win her friends, who dogged her heels, begging her for the "latest news". She began going with them to bars where they could show off their new literate friend, who was now urging them that the only way of improving their work conditions was to take immediate strike action. A small study group, the first of its kind, was formed within the factory, and a nucleus of literate workers was provided with literature to read and distribute among their friends. There was nothing very subversive about the literature - stories by Tolstoy and Sleptsov, the odd periodical.

The only openly revolutionary literature distributed among the workers was Bakunin's paper Rabotnik (The Worker), published in Berne and smuggled into the country by various "young Bakunists". It first appeared in January 1875 and was the first Russian-language paper to focus serious attention on the urban proletariat. Although it was widely distributed in the factories, its actual propaganda value was slight, making as it did unrealistic political assumptions about a largely illiterate and totally unorganized proletariat. Its vaguely idealistic collectivist spirit did not inspire immediate sympathy among the workers, and the paper soon lapsed into the sloganizing vocabulary of international revolution. The personality and intellectual power of the Moscow women far outweighed the influence of the periodicals they were distributing, and this was both their strength and their weakness. Workers were risking their jobs by inviting the women into their dormitories, where they listened reverently as the propagandists talked about the French Revolution and the International Labour Movement.

All of these accusations against us would be terrible if they were true. But they are based on misunderstanding. I do not reject property if it is acquired by one's own labour. Every person has a right to his own labour and its products. So why do our masters give us only one-third of our labour-value? As for the family, I also do not understand. Is it the social system that is destroying it, by forcing a woman to abandon her family and work for wretched wages in a factory, where she and her children are inevitably corrupted; a system that drives a woman into prostitution through sheer poverty, and which actually sanctions this prostitution as something legitimate and necessary in any well-ordered society? Or is it we who are undermining it, we, who are attempting to eliminate this poverty, which is the chief cause of all our social ills, including the destruction of the family?

As to religion, I have always been true to the principles established by the founder of Christianity, and have never propagandized against these principles. I am equally innocent of attempting to undermine the State. I do not believe any one individual is capable of destroying the State by force. If it is to be destroyed, it will be because it bears within it the embryo of its own destruction, holding as it does the people in political, economic and intellectual bondage. I am accused of inciting riot, but I believe that revolution can only be the result of a whole series of historical events, and not instigated by any one group of individuals.

We do not stand for anarchy if this means chaos and dictatorship; what we want is a social system that would establish harmony and order in all social relations. And if to attain this we must have an armed revolution, this is because in the present circumstances this is unfortunately an unavoidable evil. Whatever my fate, lords of the bench, I do not beg for mercy and I do not desire it. Persecute us if you want to, but I am deeply convinced that this vast movement which has already been existing for so many years cannot be checked by any repressive measures. It can be suppressed briefly, but then it will renew itself with even greater force, as always happens after such a reaction. Persecute us for at the moment, gentlemen, you have the material power on your side. But we have the moral power, the power of historical progress, of ideals - and ideals, I fear, you will not kill with your bayonets.

Most of the sentences of the Moscow Women were commuted by a few years. But Sophia Bardina had spoken for all her friends when she rejected mercy. She also refused any financial help in exile from her parents or from prisoners' aid organizations, and she existed for three years in a Siberian village in utter poverty. In December 1880 she managed to escape to Kazan' where, broken in spirits and health, she wandered for a few months around the countryside. All her old optimism had gone, and she was unwilling to return to her friends who were so eagerly awaiting her in the capital. In three years political events had moved far beyond her moderate socialist ideals, and she felt totally isolated from the revolutionary movement. In the spring she left for Geneva, and this time she did not return. A few months later she shot herself in the head.