When a week of reading finds you sixty pages into a 300-page book and thinking that washing that week's worth of dishes in the sink might be more fun than your nightly reading hour, it's time to admit defeat, even if the book contains considerable information on an important subject. This badly mistitled book contains almost no account of the life of the "girl"--the thirty year-old "girl"--who shot the governor. It is, rather, an intellectual and social history of the radicalization of the "forties" and "sixties" generation of Russian intellectuals. The author's close reading of and liberal quotation from tomes which, she freely admits, were neither well-written nor interesting is about as stimulating as watching grass grow, except that might be unfair to the grass. ( )

The story of what Vera Zasulich did is fairly straightforward. In 1878, pretending to be just another petitioner in the office of St Petersburg's governor, she shot him twice at point blank range. She was arrested immediately. Luckily for Vera, General Trepov survived.

Why Vera shot the governor is far more complex. At her first interrogation she said she did it "For Bogoliubov", someone she had never met. Arkhip Bogoliubov, an educated man and political detainee, was unlucky enough to have been selected at random from a group of prisoners whom Trepov felt had not paid him enough respect. Trepov had Bogoliubov flogged with birch rods, and act that had been all but banned in 1863. A prison riot ensued and then a show trial of the rioters.

Astonishingly, at her own trial for the attack on Trepov, Vera was acquitted after only thirty minutes of jury deliberation. More riots ensued. A warrant was issued for her arrest, but she was able to flee the country.

Today Vera is practically unknown, but in her time she was internationally famous. Her trial was covered in major world papers. People as disparate as Frederich Engels and Oscar Wilde wrote about her. Dostoyevsky attended her trial and used parts of it as material for his [House of the Dead].

Going beyond the facts of Vera's life, Siljak immerses the reader in her time. This is where the book excels. Starting with the publication of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons in 1862 and its ideological antithesis What is to Be Done? in 1863, she shows how a succession of reform movements developed in Russia. She offers a social history of those involved in these movements and the measures taken by those opposed to them. Nihilism, anarchism, terrorism; they're all here along with Nechaev, Bakunin, Kropotkin and others. These weren't just isolated movements. They pervaded the urban and prison cultures as Siljak demonstrates by linking them to well known writing and fiction of the time. She also discusses the role the peasants' lack of interest played in their failure.

Siljak manages to take all these swirling currents of thought and tie them to Vera's life, showing how a fairly uninteresting girl from the country progressed through protest, imprisonment, solitary confinement in the notorious House of Preliminary Detention, and eventual release from prison, to joining underground movements and becoming a revolutionary. Today her story would be sensationalized and touted as "the trial of the century". Siljak shows however that while Vera was perhaps the best known, she was just one of a generation of revolutionaries committed to changing the world for the better, even if it involved political assassination.

Siljak traces the role of assassination and its spread across late nineteenth century Europe. Political assassins knew they were offering their own lives in the process, but did so gladly, with an almost religious fervour, believing their acts would spur others to do the same, making the world a better place, one dead leader at a time.

This was a fascinating book. It doesn't require a background knowledge of nineteenth century Russia, although that would enhance it. It would certainly be of interest to Russophiles. Most of all, what it does demonstrate is that although Vera's Russia was a very different time and place, her motivations and actions have a very current feel when read in the light of today.