Hesya Mirovna (Meerovna) Helfman (, ) 1855, Mazyr — 1 (N.S. 13) February 1882, Saint Petersburg), was a Russian revolutionary member of Narodnaya Volya, who was implicated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Biography Early life Born into a Jewish family, Helfman left home for Kiev at the age of 16 or 17, allegedly to avoid an arranged marriage, where she found employment in a sewing factory. Revolutionary activities In the early 1870s, Helfman was an active member of several revolutionary clubs in Kiev where she met, among others, Leo Deutsch and her future husband . Helfman was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at the during the 1877 , and on 14 March 1879 was sent into exile to the province Novgorod. She escaped a few months later and joined Narodnaya Volya in Saint Petersburg, probably following her husband who was a member of the organization's executive committee. In 1881 Helfman was part of the Narodnaya Volya group that assassinated Alexander II, albeit not in a front-line position; she was assigned to run a conspiratorial flat, where she lived with another member of the group, Nikolai Sablin, as an unsuspicious apparent married couple. When the police raided their apartment, two days after the deadly attack on the tsar, Sablin shot himself while she was captured. Death During the Pervomartovtsy trial in March 1881, Helfman refused to admit her guilt, but was nonetheless sentenced to death by hanging for her alleged part in the assassination of the tsar. A few hours after being convicted, she made a statement that "in view of the ... sentence I have received, I consider it my moral duty to declare that I am in the fourth month of pregnancy". Her husband Nikolay Kolodkevich had also been arrested in January 1881. According to contemporary law execution of pregnant women was banned as the fetus was considered innocent. Therefore, Helfman's execution was officially postponed until forty days after childbirth, and in the meantime she would stay in the harsh Peter and Paul Fortress prison. Three months later, thanks to the campaign against her execution by Socialists in Western Europe and in the foreign press, Helfman's sentence was commuted to an indefinite period of katorga. She was transferred back to the remand prison where she had been held before. On 5 July (NS), whilst still in the Peter and Paul Fortress and by permission of the Minister