41 Facts About Maria Spiridonova

Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova was a Narodnik-inspired Russian revolutionary and an early Soviet dissident.

From 1918 on, Spiridonova faced repression from the Soviet government, as she was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, briefly detained in a mental sanitarium, sent into internal exile before being shot in 1941.

Maria Spiridonova was born in the city of Tambov, located approximately 480 kilometres south-southeast of Moscow.

Maria Spiridonova's father, a bank official, was a member of the non-hereditary minor nobility of the Russian Empire.

Maria Spiridonova attended the local gymnasium until 1902, when the death of her father, and a case of tuberculosis, caused her to drop out.

Maria Spiridonova studied dentistry in Moscow for a short while, before returning to Tambov to work as a clerk for the local Assembly of the Nobility.

Maria Spiridonova soon became involved in political activism and was arrested during the student demonstrations of March 1905.

Maria Spiridonova's target was Gavriil Nikolayevich Luzhenovsky, a landowner and Tambov provincial councillor who had been appointed district security chief in Borisoglebsk, a town southeast of Tambov.

Maria Spiridonova stalked Luzhenovsky for several days, and finally got her chance at the Borisoglebsk railway station on 16 January 1906.

Unable to escape, Maria Spiridonova tried to turn her weapon against herself but was restrained, brutally beaten and arrested by Luzhenovsky's Cossack guard.

Maria Spiridonova was then transferred to the local police station where she was stripped naked, searched and mocked by her captors.

Maria Spiridonova produced seven sensational articles that appeared in March 1906.

The report acknowledged that Maria Spiridonova had been beaten by the Cossacks at the time of her arrest and that Avramov had verbally abused her on the train, but denied all the more lurid accusations.

Maria Spiridonova's extracts indicate that Spiridonova consciously participated in the image-making that was going on outside, suggesting what should be emphasized and what should be played down.

Maria Spiridonova was sent to Siberia in the company of five other prominent female SR terrorists.

Maria Spiridonova was young, attractive, and an ethnic Russian.

Each time, although she was suffering from a serious recurrence of tuberculosis, Maria Spiridonova would get up from her couch, greet the audience with smiles and patiently answer their numerous questions, expounding the SR political program.

Maria Spiridonova belonged to all who carried her in their hearts as a banner of their protest.

Maria Spiridonova had been convicted of involvement in a terrorist group.

Maria Spiridonova formed a special friendship with Spiridonova and Izmailovich, a bond of political and personal sisterhood that would last throughout their lives.

Maria Spiridonova traveled from Siberia to Moscow to attend the 3rd National Congress of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries late in May 1917, but she was not elected to the governing Central Committee of the party.

Maria Spiridonova was involved in work helping to establish soviets amongst the peasantry.

Maria Spiridonova was extremely supportive of efforts to forge a unity government between the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs, and the other socialist parties represented in the Soviets, but when it proved impossible to reach a general agreement she supported the Left SRs entering into a coalition government with only the Bolsheviks.

Maria Spiridonova's name was included by the railroad union in a list of possible candidate ministers for the unity government, but she did not take a ministerial role in the new Bolshevik-Left SR government.

Maria Spiridonova was later one of a handful of Left SR leaders offering early support for Lenin's decision to agree to the draconian peace terms offered by the government of Imperial Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Maria Spiridonova immediately assumed the "political" responsibility for the attack on behalf of the party's Central Committee.

Maria Spiridonova was sentenced to one year in prison for her part in the Left SR revolt but was amnestied the next day.

Maria Spiridonova became the voice of a radical faction of the Left SRs opposed to any accommodation with the "Communist" regime and she publicly denounced the government for having betrayed the revolution with its policies and actions.

In January 1919, after another public speech in opposition to the Communist government, Maria Spiridonova was arrested by the Moscow Cheka.

Maria Spiridonova was tried once more on 24 February 1919, with ex Left Communist leader Nikolai Bukharin as the sole witness for the prosecution.

Bukharin charged that Maria Spiridonova was mentally ill and a menace to society in the deadly political atmosphere of the Russian Civil War.

Maria Spiridonova was found guilty and sentenced to one year's incarceration in a mental sanitarium, effectively removing her from politics.

Maria Spiridonova subsequently lived underground in Moscow as a peasant woman under the pseudonym Onufrieva.

Maria Spiridonova was rearrested 19 months later, ill with typhus and suffering from an unstated nervous disorder: it was 'the night of October 26,1920, exactly three years after the victory of the October Revolution'.

Maria Spiridonova was later transferred to a Cheka medical facility, then confined in a psychiatric prison.

Maria Spiridonova was finally released to the custody of two Left SR comrades on 18 November 1921 under the condition that she cease and desist all political activity.

Nevertheless, Maria Spiridonova was charged with "having made preparations to flee abroad" and sentenced to three years of administrative exile, a sentence that was repeatedly extended.

Maria Spiridonova spent the rest of the 1920s in Kaluga, Samarkand and Tashkent.

Maria Spiridonova lived with her former prison partner Izmailovich during the whole period of exile.

In 1937 Maria Spiridonova was arrested yet again, with several former party comrades including her husband, her teenaged stepson, her invalid father-in-law, Alexandra Izmailovich, Irina Kakhovskaya and the latter's aged aunt.

Maria Spiridonova underwent cruel interrogation in prison in Ufa and in Moscow for several months, without admitting any guilt, although a confession was extorted from her husband.