Maria Spiridonova | |
|---|---|
| Мария Спиридонова | |
 Spiridonova before 1906 | |
| Born | 16 October 1884 |
| Died | 11 September 1941 (aged 56) |
| Political party | Socialist Revolutionary Party (1905–1917) Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (1917–1921) |
Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova (Russian: Мари́я Алекса́ндровна Спиридо́нова; 16 October 1884 – 11 September 1941) was a Narodnik-inspired Russian revolutionary. In 1906, as a novice member of a local combat group of the Tambov Socialists-Revolutionaries (SRs),[1] she assassinated a security official. Her subsequent abuse by police earned her enormous popularity with the opponents of Tsarism throughout the empire and even abroad.[2]
After spending over 11 years in Siberian prisons she was freed after the February Revolution of 1917, and returned to European Russia as a heroine of the destitute, and especially of the peasants. According to G.D.H. Cole, she was, along with Alexandra Kollontai, one of the most prominent women leaders during the Russian Revolution,[3] leading the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to initially side with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and then to break with them.
From 1918 on, Spiridonova faced repression from the Soviet government, as she was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, briefly detained in a mental sanitarium, and sent into internal exile, before being shot in 1941. A successful campaign was run to discredit her name and portray her as a hysterical extremist, and she was "forced into oblivion".[4] In 1958, when publishing the fourth volume of A History of Socialist Thought, G.D.H. Cole wrote that nothing was known of what had happened to her after 1920.[5] Twenty years later, Richard Stites was still uncertain whether her death occurred in 1937 or 1941.[6] Only after the end of Stalinism and the fall of the Soviet Union did it gradually become possible to reconstruct the last decades of her life.
- ^ Immediately after the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries was founded in 1901, its Central Committee established a separate central terrorist unit, usually called the 'Combat Organisation' (Boyevaya Organizatsiya), specializing in the assassination of state leaders and officials of the highest rank. Besides it, "the SR leadership relied on smaller terrorist or combat units (boevye druzhiny), on the flying combat detachments (letuchie boevye otriady), or on isolated individuals to carry out assassinations". In the provinces party committees operated local combat units or resorted to individuals, in order to execute the death sentences they passed on provincial tsarist officials (Geifman, p. 58).
- ^ Boniece, The Shesterka, and McDermid, passim.
- ^ Cole, IV, part II, p. 842.
- ^ Rabinowitch, 'Last Testament', p. 424. The Soviet attitude over time towards Spiridonova is exemplified by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: no mention of her was made in either of the first two editions, published respectively during 1926–1947 and 1950–1958, and not until 1976 did a brief sketch appear in the third edition, vol. 24 (Maxwell, Narodniki women, p. 176).
- ^ Cole, IV, part I, p. 194.
- ^ The women's liberation movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism 1860-1930, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978; new edition, 1990, p. 313, note 12. ISBN 0-691-05254-9