Anna Leetsmann

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Anna Henriette Leetsmann (12 October 1888 – 5 March 1942) was an Estonian Bolshevik activist, politician, teacher and historian. She was the only woman elected to Estonia’s Provincial Assembly in 1917. She was expelled from the assembly in February 1919 because of her Bolshevik work while parts of Estonia were under Soviet influence. By then she had already moved to Soviet Russia, where she spent the rest of her life teaching, studying and working for the party. She was jailed twice on accusations of Trotskyism and died during the second detention.

Leetsmann was born in Kalvi, Viru County, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She grew up speaking German and studied at local schools in Rannu and Rakvere. She taught at a cement factory school and went on to study at St. Petersburg University in 1911. In 1917 she joined the Bolsheviks and became secretary of the Aseri branch. She served on Viru County’s supervisory board and was elected to the Provincial Assembly, where she often supported socialist colleagues. She was the first woman in the Assembly, and for a time the only one.

In December 1917, Bolsheviks took power in parts of Estonia. Leetsmann helped set up a revolutionary committee and organized a Red Riflemen unit. She was secretary of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers and was the Revolutionary Commissar of Viru County. After German forces expelled the communists in early 1918, she fled to Soviet Russia to continue her work. When the Estonian War of Independence ended, the Assembly expelled her on 5 February 1919, and she never returned to Estonia.

From 1923 she led the Estonian division of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West and taught the party’s history. She studied in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and taught there, later working in the city’s education system. After the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, she moved to the Tobolsky District in Omsk Oblast and headed its Education Department. She was arrested on charges of Trotskyism, expelled from the party, released, then rearrested, and she died in custody in 1942.