Maria Spiridonova
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Maria Spiridonova | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | October 16, 1884 Tambov, Russia |
| Died | September 11, 1941 Oryol, Russia |
Maria Spiridonova (Russian: Мария Спиридонова; October 16, 1884, Tambov – September 11, 1941, Medvedevsky Forest near Oryol) was a figure in Russian revolutionary circles at the beginning of the 20th century. She joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party during her training to became a nurse. In January, 1906, Spiridonova assassinated Police Inspector General G.N. Luzhenovsky who had ordered the brutal police suppression of peasant uprising during Russian Revolution of 1905. She shoot General Luzhenovsky in the face with a revolver at the provincial railway station of Borisoglebsk. Following the assassination, and after her arrest, she was subjected to horrendous physical and sexual abuse at the hands of soldiers. Some of the outrages committed against her included being dragged face down on cobbled steps, stripped and whipped, having cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts and further beating.
Sections of Russian society aired their indignation at her cruel treatment, and with the help of admiring popular support, she was spared the death sentence and instead was sent to prison in exile.
Her conviction for the assassination came and she was exiled to Siberia. Following the February Revolution of 1917 Spiridinova was released from custody and had the Chuti prison blown up, something she wanted to have repeated upon the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd, but her begging for such a thing to happen came to no avail.
Spiridonova later became the de facto leader of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1917. The LSR in theory shared the Bolshevik program of a dictatorship of the workers, but they were reluctant to follow the ruthless tactics of the Bolsheviks. They were the party of the Russian peasantry. Their platform called for the confiscation of the large estates and the disposition of the land to the peasants. To the Bolsheviks, this program with its appeal to communal ownership, bourgeois self-sufficiency, and sentimentality was counter-revolutionary. The LSR opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and broke with the Bolsheviks over this issue. Spiridonova herself had been arrested twice and imprisoned for a length of time. She was also tortured by being taken out at night and informed that she was to be shot on a spot - a favored Cheka's method at that time. This was documented by Emma Goldman, the anarchist, who secretly met Spiridonova in July 1920. Louise Bryant, the feminist writer and wife of John Reed, met her as well. During the Stalin's purges, she was arrested with twelve other Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, in Ufa, where they had been living in exile. Accused of plotting a peasant uprising, she was sentenced to tweny-five years in prison by a Military Collegium on March 8, 1937. After a hunger strike she was held in isolation at Orel prison.
Along with over 150 other political prisoners (among them Christian Rakovsky and Olga Kameneva), Maria Spiridonova was executed outside Oryol on September 11, 1941, shortly after Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. This execution was one of the many NKVD massacres of prisoners committed in 1941. She left no confession; her demise a dim echo of Leon Trotsky's taunt to the Mensheviks, hurled at the moment of Bolshevik triumph in 1918, "your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on--into the dust bin of history!"
