Women were involved in all aspects of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 when radical socialists and other sections of society challenged the authoritarian rule of Tsar Nicholas II (reign 1894 to 1917). As writers, activists, demonstrators, strikers, party members, and even assassins, women pushed not only for social change and a fairer society but specifically for better rights and opportunities for women of all classes. Participating in the wider and not necessarily Bolshevik revolutionary movement, women supported a variety of organizations, both those that attacked the Tsarist regime and those that defended it and its successor, the short-lived Provisional Government of 1917. Here are presented 12 prominent women who played significant roles in this turbulent period of Russia's history.

Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, aka Catherine Breshkovsky (1844 to 1934), was an activist and member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, but she had worked for greater women's rights since the 1860s, particularly among the peasantry. Breshko-Breshkoskaya founded a socialist commune in Kyiv (Kiev) in 1881, was arrested for agitating for reform and sent to Siberia in 1878, and toured the US in 1904 to raise funds for the Socialist Revolutionaries. She was again arrested in Russia and again sent to hard labour in Siberia, but she was still involved in revolutionary politics during the 1917 revolution when she returned from exile to support the moderate Provisional Government. When the Bolsheviks took power, she lived in exile in Czechoslovakia, where she founded a Russian-language school. She became known as 'Babushka' or 'Grandmother' of the Russian Revolution.

Anna Shabanova (1848 to 1932) was "the leading figure on the moderate wing of the women's movement from the late 1890s to 1917" (Shukman, 379). Shabanova's interest in women's rights started at an early age; at just 16, she was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison for belonging to an illegal women's group. She graduated as a doctor in 1878 and worked from 1883 as a paediatrician. Shabanova was a founder member of the non-political Russian Women's Mutual Philanthropic Society and served as its president from 1896 until 1917.

Vera Figner (1852 to 1943) trained as a doctor in Zurich and returned to Russia to help poor people as a medical assistant. Figner, almost overwhelmed by the degree of poverty in rural Russia, despaired at the ineffective discussions by socialist intellectuals, which did nothing to practically help the poor. Consequently, she became a leading figure of the revolutionary People's Will in the 1880s, a group that believed social change could only be achieved through acts of terrorism against the Tsarist regime. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (reign 1855 to 1881), Figner went on the run but was eventually arrested, tried, and imprisoned in 1884. Figner spent the next 20 years confined in the Schlüsselburg fortress, but upon release, she occasionally wrote articles on women's rights and joined marches which called for change in women's rights.

Maria Pokrovskaya (born 1852) was a teacher and then doctor who worked with the poor in St. Petersburg from 1886. Pokrovskaya particularly worked against state-licensed prostitution. She created and edited the longest-running political feminist journal Zhenskii vestnik (Women's Messenger) in 1904. The next year, Pokrovskaya, always wary of male-dominated parties, founded the Women's Progressive Party. A critic of the Bolsheviks, Pokrovskaya's fate after 1917 is unknown.

Zinaida Ivanova (1865 to 1913) was a writer (pen name Mirovich) and translator by profession, and she travelled extensively in Western Europe through the 1890s. She was one of the leaders of the Union of Equal Rights for Women, which was active from 1905 until its repression by the Tsarist regime in 1908. Ivanova continued to battle for women's rights in Russia and publicised women's issues abroad through her articles until her death in 1913.

Yekaterina Kuskova (1869 to 1958) was first interested in socialist issues in the 1880s. Arrested in 1893 for her connections to the revolutionary movement, she was exiled for one year to the centre of Russia. In 1894, Kuskova moved to Germany and joined the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad in Berlin. Back in Russia in 1898, she was a founding member of the Union of Liberation, and, after the 1905 Revolution, the Union of Unions. Kuskova helped found the Constitutional Democratic Party and briefly served on its Central Committee before deciding to pursue social change independent of any particular party. Kuskova believed that "political struggle was a distraction and the social-democratic movement should put its emphasis on economic struggle – that is the day-to-day battle between employers and employees for better wages and conditions" (Read, 41).

A prolific writer of articles, which criticised the Tsarist regime, Kuskova played active roles in various socialist publications, cooperative organisations, and the Freemasons. She opposed the revolutionary aims of the Bolsheviks and stood as a candidate for the Constituent Assembly of 1918. Kuskova was exiled by the Soviet regime in 1921 and lived the rest of her life in Geneva.

Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869 to 1939) married Vladimir Lenin (1870 to 1924), leader of the Bolsheviks, on 22 July 1898. The couple had no children and for much of their lives lived in spartan accommodation in exile either in remote areas of Russia or abroad, notably in Paris, Krakow, and Geneva. A revolutionary in her own right, Krupskaya had been a Marxist since 1891, and she organised worker strikes throughout the 1890s. She was arrested along with her husband in 1896, and when he was exiled to Siberia, she joined him and became his personal secretary. Krupskaya served as the accountant and secretary for the Bolshevik faction and their newspaper Iskra from 1903 until 1917. Another area of expertise was producing false passports, which permitted revolutionaries wanted by the authorities to secretly leave Russia. Following the Revolution of 1917, Krupskaya served as Deputy People's Commissar of Enlightenment, a role which enabled her to try and improve the system of education, the cause which had perhaps always been most dear to her heart. Krupskaya contributed to the literature that helped establish a cult of Lenin, although she had protested at the idea of embalming her husband's body and putting it on public display in a mausoleum next to Moscow's Kremlin.

Ariadna Tyrkova (1869 to 1962) was a writer and journalist on women's issues who was noted as being a member of the central committee of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the only woman to ever do so. Tyrkova was arrested in 1903 when she was caught smuggling into Russia a copy of the banned journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation). She escaped but returned to Russia two years later when she began to make public speeches calling for greater rights for women. From 1907, she held a position on the central committee of the Kadet Party until leaving Russia after the Bolshevik revolution.

Alexandra Kollontai (1872 to 1952) was first moved to join the socialist movement after seeing the poor working conditions of 12,000 workers in a textile factory in 1896. She participated in the 1905 Revolution and became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). She gave many speeches and wrote prolifically. She joined the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP in 1914, was on the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Woman Worker (Rabotnitsa), and was made a member of the Bolshevik central committee. She became People's Commissar for Social Welfare in Lenin's new state, and, as the "first woman in the world to hold a ministerial position" (Daly, 90), was able to "introduce laws to further women's emancipation and equality" (Todd, 92). Kollontai believed in 'free love' and wrote many pamphlets claiming marriage was merely a bourgeois trap. For Kollontai, in her ideal state, "women would be free to choose whatever sorts of romantic relationships met their needs" (quoted in Suny, 474).

Through the 1920s, Kollontai led Zhenotdel, the Women's Section of the Communist Party's Central Committee, which promoted women's literacy, ran community kitchens, and cared for abandoned children. Kollontai fell out with Lenin, believing the state was becoming too bureaucratic, and so she joined the opposition faction, the Workers Opposition, which pushed for a greater involvement of workers and peasants (for example, through soviet councils, trade unions, and the Communist political party itself) in the taking of decisions relevant to the economy, then the exclusive domain of the socialist intelligentsia. From 1930 to 1945, Kollontai served as the Soviet ambassador to Sweden. Her novel The Love of Worker Bees is an allegory of the relationship between Lenin, Krupskaya, and Inessa Armand (see below).

Inessa Armand (1874 to 1920) was born in France but spent her later childhood in Russia. She founded a school for peasant children, and she became president of the Moscow Society for Improving the Lot of Women in 1900. Efforts by Armand to establish a newspaper focussed on women's issues and their role in society were quashed by the Tsarist regime. In 1903, Armand joined the RSDLP. She was arrested in June 1907 and exiled to frozen northern Russia. Armand managed to escape, and she boldly participated in the Women's Congress held in St. Petersburg in December 1908 before leaving Russia, eventually settling in Paris, where she associated with Russian Bolshevik émigrés, including Lenin, with whom she probably had an affair (Read, 103). Armand was secretary for the Committee of Foreign Organizations, which coordinated the various Bolshevik groups around Europe. Asked to do so by Lenin, Armand returned illegally to Russia in 1912 and re-established the Bolshevik committee in the capital. Armand was arrested in September and sentenced to six months in prison. Once released, Armand founded and edited the Woman Worker (Rabotnitsa) newspaper, which was tolerated by the Tsarist regime. During the First World War (1914 to 18), Armand lived in Switzerland and co-organized the International Conference of Socialist Women held in Bern in March 1915. When Lenin returned to Russia by train in April 1917 to lead the revolution, Armand was on board, too.

Armand continued to push for change after the revolution, was a member of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, and became the first head of the Zhenotdel after its foundation in August 1919. Zhenotdel called for greater equality for women and greater opportunities to work. Its role was "to fashion a new Soviet woman – proudly proletarian, independent, an activist in the vanguard of the party as a leader and builder of consciousness" (Freeze, 305). In 1920, Armand organized the First International Conference of Communist Women. Armand died of cholera later that year on 24 September and was buried near the Kremlin Wall in Moscow.

Maria Spiridonova (1885 to 1941) was a trained nurse who became one of the key leaders of the Social Revolutionary Party. Spiridonova volunteered to take revenge on members of the Tsar's police force who had brutally quashed a peasant revolt near Tambov, her hometown. In this connection, she shot and killed Police Inspector Luzhenovsky in January 1916. She was then arrested, beaten, tortured, and exiled to Siberia. Released in 1917, Spiridonova promptly blew up a police station in Chita.

Spiridonova led a new party, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Internationalists). She was also elected as chair at the Second Congress of Peasants' Soviets and of the Constituent Assembly in 1917. It was Spiridonova who ordered the assassination of the German ambassador in order to prevent Lenin signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which set out Russia's terms of withdrawal from WWI). The treaty was signed anyway, and Spiridonova was arrested and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. In 1941, as German forces advanced in Operation Barbarossa during the Second World War (1939 to 45), she was shot and killed by the Soviet authorities to avoid her falling into enemy hands.

There were, of course, women who supported the Tsarist regime and Russia's Provisional Government of 1917, which governed until it was overthrown by Lenin in the Bolshevik revolution of November. One such figure is Maria 'Yashka' Bochkareva (1889 to 1920). Bochkareva volunteered to join the army in WWI and petitioned the tsar in order to be allowed to do so. "Bochkareva was a brilliant success…She was four times wounded and three times decorated…She was captured and escaped; promoted corporal and then sergeant" (Shukman, 308). When the Provisional Government took power following the Tsar's abdication in March 1917, Bochkareva was tasked with forming the first Women's Death Battalion. The main idea was that the well-drilled and disciplined 300 women of this battalion (who all shaved their heads) would shame male soldiers into being more disciplined themselves and inspire more men to join the armed forces. This was a time when Russia's armed forces had suffered many defeats, lacked equipment, and discipline had broken down following Bolshevik infiltration and the abandonment of the traditional officer-ranks hierarchy. Several other women's battalions were created in the summer of 1917 including a naval detachment. Bochkareva's battalion inflicted a serious defeat on a German army on the South-West Front in July, a victory which included the capture of 2,000 prisoners.

Bochkareva's battalion even earned the admiration of prominent promoters of women's rights abroad, notably the British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (1858 to 1928), who visited Petrograd (the new name for St. Petersburg) to see these fighting women. As a defender of the Provisional Government and status quo, the revolutionary Bolsheviks hated Bochkareva, and she was arrested and beaten, although she still refused to join them in February 1918. Bochkareva was executed by Cheka, the Communist secret police, on 16 May 1920; her memoirs were recorded by Isaac Don Levine. Pankhurst once described Bochkareva as "the greatest woman of the century" (Shukman, 307).