Anna Kuliscioff (; ; born Anna Moiseyevna Rozenshtein, ; 9 January 1857 – 27 December 1925) was a Russian-born Italian revolutionary, a prominent feminist, an anarchist influenced by Mikhail Bakunin, and eventually a Marxist socialist militant. She was mainly active in Italy, where she was one of the first women to graduate in medicine.
Biography
Anna Kuliscioff was born Anna Moiseevna Rozenstejn in 1857 near Simferopol, in Crimea. She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family of merchants who guaranteed her a happy and dedicated childhood, so much so that she attended courses in philosophy at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Her father, Moisei, was one of the five hundred privileged Jewish "merchants of the first guild" who were permitted to reside anywhere in the Russian Empire.
She was endowed with an extraordinary memory and an exceptional predisposition to logical and rigorous reasoning. Encouraged from childhood to pursue studies with private teachers and rulers, she became interested in politics very early on.
In 1871, after studying foreign languages with private tutors, Kuliscioff was sent to study engineering at the Zürich Polytechnic, where she additionally took courses in philosophy. Political outcasts, in whom the city flourished, acquainted her with rebel and egalitarian thoughts. Deserting her investigations, in 1873 she married Pyotr Makarevich, an individual progressive of honorable birth, and together they went back to Russia. There they worked for progressive groups, first in Odessa and afterward in Kiev.
In 1874, Makarevich was condemned to five years of hard labor for his revolutionary activity. He died in jail. To avoid arrest. Anna escaped Odessa to live clandestinely, first in Kiev and then in Kharkov, frequently singing in public parks to make money. In Kiev she aligned herself with revolutionaries associated with the Land and Freedom party, who engaged in terrorist acts against the tsarist authorities. When her colleagues in this armed group were arrested, she managed to escape.
In April 1877, using a false passport, she left Russia and moved to Paris, where she became a member of a small anarchist group which, following Bakunin, preached the abolition of the state. One of the members was an Italian, Andrea Costa, with whom she had a relationship that endured for a very long time. During that period they were continually isolated by detainment and outcast. It was in Paris that Anna was first reported, in police records, as bearing the name Kuliscioff, a created name that distinguished her as coming from the East.
After being expelled from France in 1878, she settled in Italy and became the editor of Critica Sociale, a major socialist paper, in 1891. An activist for causes such as women's suffrage, Anna Kuliscioff was tried and imprisoned on several occasions. Her views on Marxism influenced Filippo Turati, who became her partner. Together, they contributed to the creation of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) as leaders of a reformist wing that came to oppose both Communism (causing the split of the new Italian Communist Party in 1921) and the irredentist attitudes of Benito Mussolini (who subsequently left the PSI). Their group was itself expelled from the PSI later in 1921, leading to the creation of a Unitary Socialist Party (PSU) – led by Turati, Kuliscioff, and Giacomo Matteotti, in opposition to the emergence of Fascism.
Romantically involved firstly with Andrea Costa and then with Filippo Turati, whom she both "converted" to Marxism. For this reason she was later defined as "the strong woman of Italian socialism". In 1947, a journalist of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Carlo Silvestri, declared: “the best political brain of Italian socialism was actually one of the most pleasant and proud women, in front of whom there was no one who, respectful and admiring, did not bend over, including Mussolini”.