While it is always unusual to have your mother belong to an underground revolutionary movement...

...it would have been far less unusual in the Russian Empire in the early 1900s than in most other times and places. By the turn of the century, women made up almost one-third of the Social Revolutionary's Combat Organization, the terrorist wing of Russia's most popular revolutionary party. Young women built and threw bombs, plotted and carried out assasinations, and showed they were the equal of men in fanaticism, selflessness, and ruthlessness.
~ Tom Reiss, The Orientalist