The young girl and the tsar: the life and death of the gymnasium student Victoria Gukovskaya

The article reconstructs the biography of high school student Victoria Gukovskaya, a resident of Odessa, on the basis of previously unused archival documents. According to the city authorities, she turned out to be one of the main actors of the political demonstration that took place on July 24, 1878 at the courthouse, where the case of members of “I.M. Kovalsky’s circle” was heard. For this, despite her being underage, she was sentenced to exile in Siberia. Based on the materials of the investigation and trial of V. Gukovsksya, the author analyzes the mechanism of Russian judicial proceedings in cases of “state crimes”, which was often biased and selective. The study of the exile period of V. Gukovskaya’s life, which began with the attempts of the East Siberian authorities to send her to the Turukhansk region and thereby further tighten the punishment imposed on her by the court, vividly shows how the repressive mechanism of the institution of political exile crushed the fate of people, if only indirectly involved in the opposition movement. The heartless formalism and unjustified cruelty of the Krasnoyarsk administration, which was striving with all its might to get rid of V. Gukovskaya by sending her to the most remote places of the province, contributed to driving her to suicide. The author concludes that the political short-sightedness and excessive cruelty of the tsarist government, its desire to punish not only obvious, but also imaginary opponents of the autocracy, had the most disastrous consequences for the Russian Empire in the future and facilitated a lot the collapse of the Russian monarchy.