Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams (1869–1962)

Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova was born in St. Petersburg or Novogorod, the daughter of a Russian landowner. She studied in St. Petersburg and married married A.N. Borman, an engineer, with whom she had a son. In the early 1900s, she started to take an interest in politics after her brother was exiled for his anti-Tsarist activities. She became active in opposition groups and was arrested in 1904 for trying to smuggle copies of the radical newspaper Osvobozhdenie (Liberty) into Russia. Later the same year, she was arrested again, but escaped and fled to Germany.

She returned to Russia under the general amnesty granted following the 1905 Revolution, and helped found the Constitutional Democratic party. She became a leading proponent of equal rights for women. In 1906, she married Harold Williams, a New Zealand-born British journalist working in Russia, and took the surname Tyrkova-Williams. During World War I, she spent a year in Turkey and wrote a book about her experiences there, Staraya Turtsia (1916). During the Russian Revolution of 1917, she was elected to the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Duma, where she led the Constitutional Democratic faction. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, she helped organize anti-Bolshevik resistance in southern Russia for a while. In the spring of 1918, she fled to Great Britain. There she published her account of the first year of the Russian Revolution, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk (1919). She went back to Russia with her husband, who was reporting on the progress of the White Russian army in the civil war. She returned to Britain in 1920 and became a founder of the Russian Liberation Committee and edited its publications. She wrote a biography of Alexander Pushkin in two volumes (1928–1929), and a book about her late husband, Cheerful Giver (1935).

After World War II, she emigrated to the USA and published three volumes of memoirs in Russian in 1952, 1954, and 1956.