Early life Helfman was born into a religious
Jewish family, in
Mozyr,
Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. She received no schooling, and had a husband picked for her by her father while she was a teenager. She ran away from home in 1868, before the wedding could take place. She lived with a local Christian friend, then moved to
Kiev, where she worked as a seamstress and began training to be a midwife.
Revolutionary activities In the early 1870s, Helfman was an active member of several revolutionary clubs in Kiev where she met, among others,
Leo Deutsch and her future husband . Helfman was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at the during the 1877 , and on 14 March 1879 was sent into
exile to the
province Novgorod. She escaped a few months later and joined
Narodnaya Volya in
Saint Petersburg, probably following her husband who was a member of the organization's executive committee. In 1881 Helfman was part of the
Narodnaya Volya group that
assassinated Alexander II, albeit not in a front-line position; she was assigned to run a conspiratorial flat, where she lived with another member of the group,
Nikolai Sablin, as an unsuspicious apparent married couple. When the police raided their apartment, two days after the deadly attack on the tsar, Sablin shot himself while she was captured.
Death During the
Pervomartovtsy trial in March 1881, Helfman refused to admit her guilt, but was nonetheless sentenced to death by
hanging for her alleged part in the assassination of the tsar. A few hours after being convicted, she made a statement that "in view of the ... sentence I have received, I consider it my moral duty to declare that I am in the fourth month of
pregnancy". Her husband Nikolay Kolodkevich had also been arrested in January 1881. According to contemporary law, execution of pregnant women was banned as the unborn child was considered innocent. Therefore, Helfman's execution was officially postponed until forty days after childbirth, and in the meantime she would stay in the harsh
Peter and Paul Fortress prison. Three months later, thanks to the campaign against her execution by Socialists in Western Europe and in the foreign press, Helfman's sentence was commuted to an indefinite period of
katorga (forced labor). She was transferred back to the
remand prison where she had been held before. On 5 July (
NS), whilst still in the Peter and Paul Fortress and by permission of the Minister of the Interior,
Count Ignatiev, she was granted an interview (which lasted almost an hour and a half) with a journalist from the newspaper
Golos who was accompanied by her defence counsel at her trial, a lawyer named Goerke. During the course of this interview, she complained about the lack of "proper medical and female attendance". Helfman gave birth in
detention in October 1881. Upon the request of the Department of Police, her childbirth was assisted by a
gynaecologist who was also employed by the Imperial court, something unprecedented. She had a severe
maternal complication, as her
perineum was torn. It was rumoured that the gynaecologist had refused the prison doctor's suggestion to sew the wound together; in any case, it never healed. She remained delirious during some of the
postnatal period. By 24 November, she had developed
peritonitis, which became acute on 17 January 1882. She nevertheless nursed her daughter from her birth in October until 25 January, when the baby was taken away from her, placed in an orphanage and registered as a child of unknown parents. According to the subsequent medical report, the peritonitis became general and caused
fever on the same day. Six days later, Helfman died. Her child died of an unknown disease shortly thereafter. Tsarist authorities had rejected the request of Kolodkevich's parents for the legal custody of the baby. Kolodkevich died in prison in 1884. ==Legacy==