Ekaterina Dmitrievna Kuskova

Kuskova, Ekaterina Dmitrievna 

Born 1869; died Dec. 22, 1958, in Geneva. Russian public figure.

Kuskova was the daughter of a government official. In 1892 she participated in a Narodnik (Populist) organization in Saratov. In 1897, Kuskova and her husband, S. N. Prokopovich, joined the League of Russian Social Democrats Abroad; here she became associated with the opportunistic movement known as economism, and for this reason in 1898, at the demand of G. V. Plekhanov, she was expelled from the RSDLP. As V. I. Lenin pointed out, Kuskova “was … an opportunist; she advocated petit bourgeois views in the Social Democratic movement and championed Bernsteinism, which, in the final analysis, means subordinating the working class to the policy of liberals” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 14, p. 267). The program document of economism, Credo, written by Kuskova in 1899, was sharply criticized by Marxists, led by V. I. Lenin. Kuskova became an active member of the bourgeois liberal League of Liberation. In October 1905, at the first congress of the Constitutional Democratic (Cadet) Party, Kuskova was elected in absentia a member of the Central Committee, but she refused to join the Cadet Party. At the beginning of 1906, Kuskova was a member of the editorial board of the semi-Cadet, revisionist journal Bez zaglaviia (Without a Title); she also contributed to liberal periodicals.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Kuskova became a member of the counterrevolutionary underground. In 1921 she was active in the All-Russian Committee to Aid the Starving, which attempted to utilize hunger as a means of combating Soviet power. In 1922, Kuskova was exiled from the Soviet Union. She lived first in Prague and later in Geneva. She contributed to the émigré press.