She Escaped the Firing Squad
The Revolutionary Life of Manya Shochat
Manya Wilbushevitz was lucky to escape the death penalty. All her fellow collaborators in the plot to assassinate the Russian Minister of the Interior were put to death. Fortunately, when the plot was discovered she was out of the country, in Berlin. She was trying to obtain weapons to carry out the assassination.
Manya was born in 1880 near Grodno, now in Belarus. Her family was prosperous, with a lifestyle very different from most Jews. Her grandfather had been a supplier to the Russian army and her father owned a grain mill.
One of ten children, she had a privileged childhood but she rebelled against it, unable as a teenager to ignore the poverty of the peasants in the countryside around her. At the age of 15 she left home, moving to the nearby town of Minsk where she took a job in a carpentry workshop belonging to her brother Gedaliah. She spent her time with young political activists in Minsk, organised evening study groups for workers who’d had no education, and spent four months as a volunteer in central Russia, helping starving Tatar villagers.
Disillusioned, Manya decided that violence was the only answer to the problems facing Jews in Russia and people like von Plehve. She joined a terrorist cell plotting to assassinate him.
While she was with the Tatars, she stayed in peasant communities where they all lived communally, working together sharing land and resources. The system, known as mir, influenced Russian socialism and was one of the models for the early kibbutzim, where Manya would eventually play a formative role.
Inspired by the mir collectives, she returned to Minsk and set up an urban collective, an experiment in communal living. She joined the Bund, the Jewish socialist party and organised a strike in the factory where she worked, bringing all 500 workers out in protest against their long working hours. She was also involved in Poale Zion, another Jewish socialist party but which, in opposition to the Bund, encouraged emigration to Palestine.