Essen, Marha Moiseevna

Born Nov. 21 (Dec. 3), 1872, in Brest-Litovsk; died Feb. 4, 1956, in Moscow. Participant in the Social Democratic movement in Russia.

The daughter of a railroad employee, Essen took part in the revolutionary movement in Odessa and Ekaterinoslav in the early 1890’s. She subsequently joined the Kiev League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Arrested in 1899, she was exiled to Yakutsk Oblast. In 1902 she escaped and went abroad. In 1903, Essen was a member of the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP; a Bolshevik, she was co-opted into the Central Committee of the RSDLP in the same year. She was a member of the party’s St. Petersburg committee in 1905 and its Moscow committee in 1906. She gave up RSDLP activity in 1907.

Essen was a member of the Tiflis soviet in 1917; in the same year she joined the Social Democrats-Internationalists. In 1920 she became a member of the RCP(B). She engaged in party work in Georgia from 1921 to 1925, when she took up a position in Moscow. She became a member of the Writers’ Union of the USSR in 1938. Essen was granted a personal pension in 1955.