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Olga Taratuta
A Grandmother of Anarchism
Tireless member of the Anarchist Black Cross

Born 1876 in Ekaterinoslav, known today as Dnipro, Ukraine
Murdered by the Cheka in 1938

In 1901 she fled Tsarist repression to live in Geneva. returning to Odessa in 1904 to join the Union of the Irreconcilables, an anarchist-communist group, along with her sister Kahyla and Kahyla's husband Kopel. After a trip to Bialystok, she helped to form a Black Banner group.

In 1905 her group carried out an attack on the Libman Cafe, one of the most significant motiveless terror acts of its time, for which she was sentenced to life in prison, escaping a year later to live in Switzerland and organize with the Buntar group.

In Odessa anarchists continued to agitate, helping to establish over 50 peasants orgs and joining in labour organizing. When a shipping company tried to break a strike using the hyper nationalist pogramist Black Hundreds, anarchists simply blew up one of their steamers.

In 1907 Olga returned to Odessa. She was arrested in 1908 in Yekaterinoslav holding a bag of 21 bombs in front of the Lukyanovskaya prison. She had planned to blow up a wing of the prison to aid in an escape.

For this she was sentenced to hard labour in the Tsarist prisons until she was released in 1917. She would take months to herself and to reconnect with her son, but was soon called back as a result of the brutality of Hetman Skoropadsky in Ukraine.

Olga worked tirelessly with the Anarchist Red Cross, which had formed from the Political RC in either 1905 or 1907 when it was discovered that funds weren't reaching ALL prisoners, but only select tendencies. In this work she aided many bolsheviks who would become her future jailers.

In June of 1920 she was elected to the secretariat of the Nabat and receive 5 million rubles from the Makhnovists to organize the now Anarchist Black Cross in Ukraine. The Ukrainian ABC engaged in self defense and medical assistance in addition to prisoner support.

She was arrested in 1920 during the Cheka raid at the Brotherhood Bookstore in Kharkov, a part of an empire wide targeting of anarchists. Black Cross centers countrywide were destroyed along with the
headquarters of the Makhnovists and the publishing houses of Golos Truda were also destroyed.

On Febuary 13th 1921, she joined Fanya and Aron Baron, David Kogan, Mark Mrachny, Aleksey Olonetsky, and Aleksandr Guevsky to carry Kropotkin's casket.

In 1922, she and Anna Stepanova, her comrade from the Black Cross, were deported to Voldoga in exile and released in 1924 where they moved to Kiev. Olga and Anna travelled and lived together, until Anna's death in 1925.

After Anna's death, Olga moved to Odessa again in 1927 where she aided in the international campaign to secure the freedom of Sacco and Vanzetti. For this, she and others experienced repression and raids from the Cheka, and many of her co-organizers were arrested.

During this time, Olga had been busy organizing a smuggling corrider of anarchist thought. Letters and literature moved along the illegal corridor from Ukraine, Moscow, Leningrad, Kursk, the Volga region and more.

It woas one of the few lifelines under Bolshevik repression.
In 1929 she was arrested for helping to organize rail workers. She moved to Moscow upon her release 2 years later. There she was arrested again, on February 8th, 1938. The charge for "anti-soviet activities."

She was sentenced and shot the next day.

I would just say this is but a cliff notes version of the life of one of the most compassionate and defiant women I have ever encountered. Her life and writing along with the events she participated in are far much richer and I wish it was easier to capture that in a thread.