 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom was an organization of British and American political activists and reformers who supported the Russian opposition movement against Tsarist autocracy broadly defined, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
The English Society of Friends of Russian Freedom was founded in April 1890. [1]
In 1892, the executive committee of the society included William Pollard Byles, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, Mrs. Edwin Human, Mrs. Oharies Mallet, Marjory Pease and Edward R. Pease, G. H. Perris, J. Allonson Ploton, Herbert Rix, George Standring, Adolphs Smith, Robert Spence Watson, Ethel Lilian Voynich and Wilfrid Voynich, and William W. Mackenzie. [1]
From 1890 to 1914 Society published Free Russia, a monthly newsletter edited by Sergei Stepniak and later Felix Volkhovsky.
The Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (SAFRF) was founded in April 1891 in Boston at the Russian émigré Stepniak-Kravchinskii instigation. The Society formed by the local old-time reformers and former abolitionists and also their children, who were active in various social movements. The most notable persons of the SAFRF were Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Julia Ward Howe, Mark Twain, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell. Besides them, the Society received an enthusiastic response from Francis Jackson Garrison, the son of the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and the author and activist from Valley Falls, Lillie Wyman.
According to F.F. Travis, they advised Stepniak "on how to proceed" with the Society and introduced him to the circle of Bostonian reformers. Higginson, Howe, Wyman, Francis Garrison, and Stepniak drafted the appeal of the SAFRF, "To the Friends of Russian Freedom," which was issued on April 14, 1891. The appeal signed 37 prominent Americans.
From July 1891 till July 1894 the SAFRF published the monthly magazine Free Russia.
The total number of members of the SAFRF was 164 in 1891 and 142 in 1892. The most active members of the SAFRF were Francis Garrison as the treasurer, Edmund Noble as the secretary and editor of Free Russia, and Lazar Goldenberg as the publisher of the magazine. The circulation of the periodical did not exceed 3000 copies.
The SAFRF was unable to generate critical mass in support of the "Russian cause" and in May 1894 the Executive Committee decided to suspend the American edition Free Russia. The decision was made public in the June-July edition of the paper. [2]
In 1903 the suffragist activist Alice Stone Blackwell reorganized the SAFRF. An Indiana politician William Dudley Foulke became president. The society organized the propagandist campaign of the Russian émigré Breshko-Breskovskaia in 1904-1905 in the USA. George Kennan, revealed in the New York Times on 24 March 1917 that Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb Bank on Wall Street financed Russian revolutionaries through this organization. Schiff had been financing Russian revolutionaries since 1905.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
William Lloyd Garrison was an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which Garrison founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was an abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, had become a prominent abolitionist and was a key leader of this society, who often spoke at its meetings. William Wells Brown, also a freedman, also often spoke at meetings. By 1838, the society had 1,350 local chapters with around 250,000 members.
Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.
Wendell Phillips was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney.
George Kennan was an American explorer noted for his travels in the Kamchatka and Caucasus regions of the Russian Empire. He was a cousin twice removed of the American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, whose birthday he shared.
Wilfrid Voynich was a Polish revolutionary, antiquarian and bibliophile. Voynich operated one of the largest rare book businesses in the world. He is remembered as the eponym of the Voynich manuscript.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who went by the name Wentworth, was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, politician, and soldier. He was active in abolitionism in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. He was a member of the Secret Six who supported John Brown. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862 to 1864. Following the war, he wrote about his experiences with African-American soldiers and devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women, and other disfranchised peoples. He is also remembered as a mentor to poet Emily Dickinson.
Ethel Lilian Voynich was an Irish-born novelist and musician, and a supporter of several revolutionary causes. She was born in Cork, but grew up in Lancashire, England.
Charlotte Louise Bridges Grimké was an African American anti-slavery activist, poet, and educator. She grew up in a prominent abolitionist family in Philadelphia. She taught school for years, including during the Civil War, to freedmen in South Carolina. Later in life she married Francis James Grimké, a Presbyterian minister who led a major church in Washington, DC, for decades. He was a nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and was active in civil rights.
The Peace Society, International Peace Society or London Peace Society, originally known as the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace, was a pioneering British pacifist organisation that was active from 1816 until the 1930s.
Charlotte Mary Wilson was an English Fabian and anarchist who co-founded Freedom newspaper in 1886 with Peter Kropotkin, and edited, published, and largely financed it during its first decade. She remained editor of Freedom until 1895.
Abby Kelley Foster was an American abolitionist and radical social reformer active from the 1830s to 1870s. She became a fundraiser, lecturer and committee organizer for the influential American Anti-Slavery Society, where she worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and other radicals. She married fellow abolitionist and lecturer Stephen Symonds Foster, and they both worked for equal rights for women and for Africans enslaved in the Americas.
Elizabeth Nichol was a 19th-century British abolitionist, anti-segregationist, woman suffragist, chartist and anti-vivisectionist. She was active in the Peace Society, the Temperance movement and founded the Darlington Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. In 1853 she married Dr. John Pringle Nichol (1804–1859), Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. She was one of about six women who were in the painting of the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840.
Edmund Noble was an Anglo-American author, journalist, philosopher and editor.
Sergey Mikhaylovich Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, known in the 19th century London revolutionary circles as Sergius Stepniak, was a Russian revolutionary. He is mainly known for assassinating General Nikolai Mezentsov, the chief of Russia's Gendarme corps and the head of the country's secret police, with a dagger in the streets of St. Petersburg in 1878.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Joseph Pease (1772–1846) was an English Quaker activist. Among a number of reforming interests, he became best known in the context of the British India Society.
Jane Wigham was a leading Scottish abolitionist, and was the secretary of the Glasgow Ladies' Emancipation Society.
The Edinburgh Ladies' Emancipation Society was a leading abolitionist group based in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the nineteenth century. The women associated with the organisation are considered "heroines" and the impact of these abolitionist organisations for women are thought to have had a notional impact.
John Murray (1787–1849) was an abolitionist and social activist who served as Corresponding Secretary of the Glasgow Emancipation Society.
