15. The Born Revolutionary
She was born Rosalia Samilovna Zalkind into a Jewish family in 1876, in today’s Belarus. Given the Tsarist government’s antisemitism, it was unsurprising that her parents had radical tendencies. Years later, the future killer recalled that one of her earliest childhood memories was of her parents approving the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by revolutionaries in 1881.
Rosalia was introduced to peasant populism by an older brother and left school in 1891, when she was just fifteen, to dedicate her life to the revolution. She was arrested by the Okhrana, the Tsarist political police, soon thereafter. By 1896, hardened by stints in Tsarist prisons, Rosalia had moved from populism to Marxism. By 1902, she had adopted the revolutionary name Rosalia Zemlyachka, and that year, she joined Lenin’s faction of the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks.