Vera Figner, a Russian noblewoman turned revolutionary terrorist, is the subject of a new biography by Boston College alumna Lynne Ann Hartnett. In The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution (Indiana University Press, 2014), Harnett reveals how Figner survived the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin’s Great Purges and died a lionized revolutionary legend. At first a champion of populist causes and women’s higher education, Figner later became an accomplice in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Hartnett is on the faculty of Villanova University.