Vera Nikolayevna Figner Filippova (Russian: Ве́ра Никола́евна Фи́гнер Фили́ппова; 7 July [O.S. 25 June] 1852 – 25 June 1942) was a prominent Russian revolutionary political activist. Born in Kazan Governorate, Russian Empire, into a noble family of German and Russian descent, Figner was a leader of the clandestine Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) group, which advocated the use of terror to achieve a revolutionary overthrow of the government, Figner was a participant in planning the successful Assassination of Alexander II of Russia in 1881. Figner was later arrested and spent 20 months in solitary confinement prior to trial, at which she was sentenced to death. The sentence was subsequently commuted and Figner was imprisoned in the Shlisselburg Fortress for 20 years before being sent into internal exile. Figner gained international fame in large part because of the widely translated memoir of her experiences. She was treated as a heroic icon of revolutionary sacrifice after the February Revolution in 1917 and was a popular public speaker during that year. Figner later became prominent in the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles in the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1935. Figner died of natural causes in Moscow in 1942 at the age of 89. Biography Early years Vera Figner was born July 7 (June 25 O.S.), 1852, the oldest of six children of Nikolai Alexandrovich Figner, a retired army staff captain and his wife, the former Ekaterina Khristoforovna Kuprianova, both members of the hereditary Russian nobility. Her maternal grandfather owned more than 17,000 acres of land, worked by serfs existing in a state of semi-slavery and the family retained two maids, who were also serfs, until the Emancipation of 1861. Her father served in the state forestry service, resigning that post to become a local administrative functionary called a "peace mediator" in the years after emancipation. She was the sister of Lidija Figner and of the famous Russian tenor Nikolai Figner. During Vera Figner's childhood, the adults in her family thought that she was "a beautiful doll ... good to look at ... but empty" and expected that she would go into society and marry someone older and rich. In 1863, at the age of eleven, Figner was sent to the Rodionovsky Institute for Noble Girls in the city of Kazan, which she attended for the next six years. As one of only six cities in the Russian Empire to host