Nikolai Ishutin

Nikolai Andreyevich Ishutin (Николай Андреевич Ишутин in Russian) (3(15) April 1840 – 5(17) January 1879) was one of the first Russian utopian socialists, who combined socialist propaganda among the people with conspiratorial and terrorist tactics.

Nikolai Ishutin was a hereditary honorary citizen of his hometown of Serdobsk. He was raised in Penza in a family of his cousin Dmitry Karakozov. In 1863, he became a lecturegoer at the Moscow State University, where he conducted propaganda among the students. That same year Ishutin organized a secret revolutionary society, which would come to be known as the Ishutin Society.

On April 8, 1866, he was arrested in connection with Karakozov's assassination attempt on tsar Alexander II. The Supreme Criminal Court sentenced Ishutin to death by hanging, which would be exchanged for the open-ended katorga right before his execution. Ishutin had been detained in a solitary cell in the Shlisselburg Fortress until May 1868. Then he was transferred to the Algachi prison in East Siberia in a state of mental illness. In 1871, Ishutin was relocated to the Nerchinsk katorga and then to the Kara katorga in 1875, where he would finally die in 1879.