Viktor K. Kurnatovsky (28 June 1868-2 October 1912) was a leader of the short-lived Chita Republic in the Siberia region of Russia during the 1905 Russian Revolution.
Biography[]
Viktor K. Kurnatovsky was born on 28 June 1868 in Riga, Riga Governorate, Russian Empire (in present-day Latvia) to a family of physicians, and he joined the Narodnaya Volya movement while he was studying in St. Petersburg. He was deported to the cold Arkhangelsk after joining a Marxist circle, and he fled to Switzerland in 1892. Kurnatovsky became involved with the "Emancipation of Labor" party, and he was arrested in Russia in 1897 while attemting to return home. He was twice exiled to Siberia, and he was arrested for attempting to lead the Romanovtsy uprising in Yakutsk in 1904. After the October Manifesto of 1905, he was released to Chita, where he proclaimed the "Chita Republic", a socialist workers' and peasants' republic. In 1906, he was sentenced to perpetual hard labor after the uprising was suppressed, but he escaped to Japan and, from there, to France in 1906, dying in Paris in 1912.