Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova

On 16 January 1906, the 21-year-old SR combat brigade member Maria Spiridonova shot and mortally wounded Tambov provincial councillor Gavriil Luzhenovsky at the Borisoglebsk railway station, firing five bullets from a revolver. Luzhenovsky had earned notoriety for organizing mass village floggings by Cossack detachments during the suppression of peasant unrest; the Tambov SR committee passed a death sentence on him, and Spiridonova volunteered to carry it out.

After her capture she was stripped naked, beaten with whips, burned with cigarettes, and, during the train transfer to Tambov, sexually assaulted by gendarme officer Avramov. The abuse became a national scandal when a letter she smuggled out of prison was published on 12 February in the liberal St. Petersburg newspaper Rus. The image of a beautiful, chaste young woman of the upper classes who had killed a sadistic official and then become the victim of state violence electrified public opinion across the empire.

On 11 March a military court sentenced her to death by hanging. During the sixteen days she spent awaiting execution, Spiridonova reportedly shaped a tiny figure from bread crumbs and dangled it on a strand of hair, testing whether she could face death with composure. On 28 March, amid public outrage and international attention, the sentence was commuted to lifetime hard labor.

In July 1906 Spiridonova was transported to the Nerchinsk katorga in Siberia together with five other female terrorist convicts (Aleksandra Izmailovich, Anastasia Bitsenko, Lydia Ezerskaya, Revekka Fialka, and Maria Shkolnik), a group known as the Shesterka (the Six). The month-long rail journey became a triumphal progress: at every station, crowds of thousands gathered day and night to see the 'SR Madonna.' Workers pressed copper coins, women gave rings, a disabled veteran offered his last cigarettes through the carriage window. Izmailovich recalled: 'Who did not know her name? … It had become a banner uniting all who seethed with holy indignation, SRs, SDs, Kadets, ordinary people unaffiliated with parties.' At twenty-two, Spiridonova was no longer just a terrorist: she was a living icon of the revolution itself.

Spiridonova’s politics in 1917–1918 began from treating peasants not as a passive constituency but as agents who could create a new order through land and soviets. After the February Revolution she helped organize and publicize the Left Socialist-Revolutionary current, calling for an end to the war, land to the peasants, and power concentrated in the soviets, while building its influence in the congresses of peasant deputies.

The Left SRs could cooperate with the Bolsheviks on land and peace. They supported socialization of land and autonomous organization in the countryside, and at the party’s founding congress in November 1917 Spiridonova argued for close contact with the mass movement. This cooperation created a channel through which rural demands could enter state policy, but the two parties increasingly diverged over the manner of rule and the international meaning of the revolution.

The conflict of 1918 was not simply a personal break. The Left SRs emphasized peasant initiative and elected soviets, while Bolshevik grain requisitions and the policy of poor-peasant committees extended party and state coercion directly into the countryside. Historian Ettore Cinnella credits the Left SRs with an important role in institutionalizing land socialization, but argues that the Mirbach assassination and their uncompromising expectation of an immediate world revolution hastened the party’s political collapse. Spiridonova’s line thus sought to join peasant self-activity with revolutionary internationalism, yet it could not resolve the tensions created when civil war made governance increasingly centralized and coercive.

After the July 1918 Left SR uprising, Spiridonova became the voice of a radical Left SR faction opposed to any accommodation with the Communist regime, publicly denouncing the government for betraying the revolution. She kept her distance from the party's ultra-left terrorist wing and focused on revitalizing the soviets against rule by party decree.

In January 1919 she was arrested by the Moscow Cheka after another public speech. At her trial on 24 February 1919 the former Left Communist Nikolai Bukharin appeared as the sole prosecution witness, charging that she was mentally ill and a menace to society, and she was sentenced to a year in a mental sanitarium. Instead of a sanitarium she was held in a small cell in a military barracks in the Kremlin, where her health deteriorated. Left SR militants organized her escape on 2 April 1919, after which she lived underground in Moscow as a peasant woman under the pseudonym Onufrieva. When she was rearrested on 26 October 1920 she was ill with typhus and a nervous disorder. Given her health she was first placed under house arrest, then transferred to a Cheka medical facility and confined in a psychiatric prison. On 18 November 1921 she was released on the surety of Left SR comrades on condition that she cease all political activity.

The Russian-language account corroborates the sequence of repressions: arrest on 22 January 1919, conviction by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal, isolation from political activity for a year, escape in April 1919, rearrest on 26 October 1920, and confinement in Butyrka prison; a note by Dzerzhinsky dated 19 April 1921 ordered her placement in a psychiatric institution, transfer to the Prechistensky psychiatric hospital, and release on 18 November 1921 on the surety of SR leaders I. Z. Steinberg and I. Yu. Bakkal, who undertook that she would never engage in political activity, after which she lived in Malakhovka under Cheka supervision.

After a failed escape attempt abroad in 1923 she received an administrative exile sentence and spent the later 1920s in Kaluga (1923-25), Samarkand (1925-28) and Tashkent (1928-30). In 1930 she was arrested again, charged with maintaining contacts abroad, and sentenced to three more years of administrative exile in Ufa, twice extended. There she married her fellow exile Ilya Andreyevich Mayorov, a Left SR leader of peasant origin and former Deputy People's Commissar for Agriculture, and lived and worked with Alexandra Izmailovich and Irina Kakhovskaya at the Bashkir office of the State Bank.

In 1937 she was arrested with her husband, her teenaged stepson and other former comrades, accused of plotting a united counter-revolutionary center. She underwent months of cruel interrogation in Ufa and Moscow without admitting guilt, and in November 1937, from her cell, she wrote a long letter to the 4th Section of the GUGB of the NKVD protesting her prison treatment, contesting the judicial procedure and rejecting every charge. In the letter, later called her 'last testament', she proclaimed that she fully supported the construction of socialism and acknowledged the Communist leadership, but disagreed only that the death penalty remained in the system. The state was powerful enough to build socialism without it, she argued; capital punishment was a medieval institution of evil corrupting executioners and firing squads, and 'You started using this death penalty with us Left SRs and you should end it with us... But you must put an end to the death penalty.'

On 7 January 1938 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced her to 25 years, and after a hunger strike she was held in isolation at Oryol Prison. On 8 September 1941 the Military Collegium formally sentenced 161 Oryol prisoners to death; 157 were actually executed on 11 September. Sources differ on rehabilitation. The Russian-language account records partial rehabilitation in 1988 and full rehabilitation in the Russian Federation in 1992, while the English-language account states that not until 1990 were the 1941 charges rescinded and that she was fully rehabilitated in 1992; both versions should be attributed. The exact burial place of the Medvedev Forest victims has never been found. As late as 1958 G. D. H. Cole wrote that nothing was known of what happened to her after 1920, and twenty years later Richard Stites was still uncertain whether her death occurred in 1937 or 1941.

After the failed Left SR uprising of July 1918, the Bolshevik leadership detained Spiridonova in the Kremlin and sought to stage an open trial that would destroy her moral prestige. She refused to participate in what she called a 'party court' and instead wrote a long Open Letter to the Bolshevik Central Committee. The document was not a defense but a frontal indictment of Bolshevik rule.

Spiridonova argued that the Bolsheviks had betrayed Soviet democracy. She itemized their offenses: crushing free elections to local soviets by armed force, expelling right-wing socialists from the Central Executive Committee, and sending armed workers into the countryside to requisition grain by force, policies she called 'state capitalism,' not genuine socialization.

The letter's core was a defense of the soviet principle itself. A soviet, she wrote, must be 'like a barometer, sensitive to and allied with the people,' which required 'unconditional freedom of elections.' When peasants beat or drove out their own delegates for corruption, she called it 'red terror, the people's self-defense,' not counter-revolution to be crushed with artillery. The Bolsheviks, she charged, had become like 'the Grand Inquisitor' of Dostoyevsky, claiming absolute authority over the people's body and soul. She declared that if there was to be a tribunal, she would appeal to 'the Internationale and the verdict of history.' The Open Letter stands as one of the earliest and most significant critiques of Bolshevik one-party rule delivered from within the revolution itself, a revolutionary-left voice that captured, already in 1918, the central tension of 20th-century socialism: party power versus popular self-rule.