Ippolit Myshkin

Ippolit Nikitich Myshkin (Russian language: Ипполит Никитич Мышкин; 3 February 1848 - 7 February 1885) was a Russian revolutionary and political prisoner in the Russian Empire. After a failed attempt to rescue writer and philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky from exile, he was imprisoned multiple times and made several escapes and escape attempts. He was executed after a violent confrontation with a prison warder.

Early life

Myshkin was born in Pskov. His father was a non-commissioned officer; his mother was a peasant. Educated at a local school in Kiev, he entered a teacher training college in Saint Petersburg in 1860, but despite being the best student in his year, he was barred from becoming a teacher because of his lowly birth, or as he put it, he was “suddenly expelled, disgraced, just because I am a soldier’s son.”

After graduating in 1864, he worked for the General Staff Academy of the Imperial Russian Army, and learned shorthand. In 1868, he started work as a court reporter, and used money saved from his salary to set up an illegal printing press in Moscow, which was used to print revolutionary literature.

Revolutionary career

In 1875, Myshkin set out on a lone mission to rescue the writer, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, from exile. He travelled more than 3,200 miles to Irkutsk, where he enlisted as a police officer, created forged documents that instructed him to accompany Chernyshevsky to Blagoveshchenka, stole a captain’s uniform, and travelled to Vilyuysk, where Chernyshevsky had been exiled. He aroused suspicion because it would have been highly unusual for so prominent a prisoner to be moved with just a single escort, and he was told that he would have to get written authorisation from the provincial governor, in Yakutsk.