Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova Born October 16, 1884 in Tambov in a noble family (her father was a bank employee). Having not completed her studies in the 8th grade of the Tambov Women's Gymnasium, Spiridonova in 1902 got a job as a clerk in the local provincial noble assembly. On the eve of the revolution of 1905, under the influence of his elder sister and his betrothed fiancé V.K. Volsky, Maria was drawn into the revolutionary movement and joined the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). In March 1905, she was arrested for participating in an anti-government demonstration and imprisoned for a couple of weeks, but this did not dampen the revolutionary fervor of the girl. Having been released, she continued her activities, joining the Socialist-Revolutionary fighting squad in October of the same year, which carried out terror.
All-Russian fame for the provincial revolutionary was brought by a high-profile assassination attempt, which she carried out in early 1906. Fulfilling the task of the Tambov Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, on January 16, 1906, Spiridonova mortally wounded the adviser to the Tambov governor -. The Socialist-Revolutionaries sentenced the monarchist Luzhenovsky to death because this resolute official, following the order of the governor, with the help of two companies of soldiers suppressed agrarian unrest in the province, rightly stating before that that “either the beast-revolution will sweep away the state, or the state must sweep away the beast”. Luzhenovsky began with convictions, appealing to the conscience and religious feelings of the peasants raised by the revolutionary agitators, and if his words did not lead to a result, he resorted to measures of physical influence - flogging. As a result of such actions, the riots were completely stopped in 22 days, and the revolutionary gangs were crushed. In addition, Luzhenovsky became one of the active organizers of the Black Hundred movement in the Tambov province, which also aroused the hatred of the revolutionaries.
Spiridonova personally volunteered to kill Luzhenovsky, hated by the revolutionaries. Disguised as a schoolgirl so as not to arouse suspicion, she hunted for a provincial councilor for a week until she managed to watch for him at the Borisoglebsk railway station and fire five bullets into an unarmed official. The first two bullets hit Luzhenovsky in the side; after he turned around, Spiridonova shot him in the chest, and then two more times at the official who had already fallen to the ground. According to one version, 22-year-old Spiridonova suffered a nervous breakdown after the assassination attempt, she ran along the railway platform, shouting: “I killed him!” According to another version, she tried to shoot herself, but did not have time: a Cossack ran up and stunned her with a blow from the butt.
The Cossacks, unable to save their boss, rushed to beat Spiridonova, but the mortally wounded Luzhenovsky gave the last order: “Do not kill!”, And then, having learned that a woman was shooting at him, he crossed himself and said: “God, forgive her. Doesn't know what he's doing". "If he - then the Cossacks showed - did not shout: “Leave it, don’t kill it,” not even a shred would be left of it. Where did he, my dear, only get his voice from!. Nevertheless, Spiridonova received numerous beatings from the Cossacks, and then was subjected to torture in the police station, which was indignantly perceived by the liberal and revolutionary-minded society, which condemned the "atrocities of tsarism", but was indifferent (or even with obvious sympathy) to the murder of Spiridonova monarchist official. The bailiff Zhdanov and the Cossack officer Avramov, accused of violence against her by Spiridonova, were soon killed by the Socialist-Revolutionary militants.
Prominent lawyer N.V., a member of the Central Committee of the Cadet Party, volunteered to defend the “heroine of the revolution”. Teslenko. However, the Moscow Military District Court was adamant and sentenced the killer to death. However, Spiridonova did not repent of the crime she had committed, saying: “Yes, I wanted to kill Luzhenovsky. I will die peacefully and with a good feeling in my soul.”. The terrorist spent sixteen days awaiting execution, after which she was announced a commutation of the sentence - hanging was replaced with indefinite hard labor. The new verdict to Spiridonov not so much pleased as upset. On March 20, 1906, she wrote to her party comrades: “My death seemed to me so socially valuable, I was so looking forward to it, that the abolition of the sentence had a very bad effect on me: I didn’t feel well”. And added: "I am of the breed of those who laugh at the cross».
“Her name became a banner that united under its shadow all who were seething with holy discontent - Socialist-Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Cadets, just ordinary people. She belonged not only to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. She belonged to all of them who carried her in their souls as a banner of their protest., - recalled the Socialist-Revolutionary A. Izmailovich.
After spending until the summer of 1906 in Butyrka, Spiridonova was sent to Akatui hard labor prison, where, we note, the regime was quite mild. Spiridonova wrote about the "horrors" of the tsarist prison in her memoirs: "IN 1906 . there was a free life in prisons. They were rather like clubs in which, it seems, voluntarily and temporarily, until some political complications were settled, the socialists and anarchists "agreed" to sit in order, of course, to be released soon and even in which case they would reckon big with those who would "oppress" them in prisons. Will made noise with the free press, protests and meetings. Agrarian unrest swept across the country in menacing waves. The mood of the prisoners was cheerful, happily elevated, almost festive. The regime in hard labor until the beginning of 1907 was very liberal. In the Akatui prison, where all the political convicts were concentrated so far, there was complete freedom. They let us go for a walk on parole far into the forest, 60 people at a time, for the whole day. And in a village two miles from the prison lived several dozen families of prisoners - wives, children with a whole household belongings and household, even with cows. Fathers and husbands were allowed to spend the night there. They just lived there at home with their own people and came to prison only to appear. Children, wives and mothers also came to the prison itself for the whole day and pushed around the yard and cells, like equal members of one large prison commune. Inside the guard came only in reality. Within the stone walls, the life of hard labor enjoyed complete autonomy.
But in the winter of 1907, the terrorist was transferred to the Maltsev Prison, where mostly women convicted of criminal offenses were kept and, accordingly, the regime for keeping prisoners was much stricter. In 1909 and 1910 Spiridonova made attempts to organize an escape from the Nerchen penal servitude, but both times were unsuccessful. As a result, the revolutionary stayed in hard labor until 1917, until the February Revolution freed her as a "martyr of the tsarist regime."
Already on the day of the refusal of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich to ascend the throne, March 3, 1917, by personal order of A.F. Kerensky, Maria Spiridonova was released. Having reached the European part of Russia by May 1917, the former political convict began to play one of the main roles among the Left Social Revolutionaries. She actively worked in the Petrograd organization, made propaganda speeches in military units and among workers, called for an end to the world war, the transfer of land to the peasants, and power to the Soviets. Spiridonova collaborated in the newspaper "Land and Freedom", was the editor of the magazine "Our Way", was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper "Znamya Truda", was elected chairman at the Extraordinary and II All-Russian Peasant Congresses, worked in the Central Executive Committee and in the peasant section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
Disengaged from the right SRs, Maria Spiridonova advocated the cooperation of the Socialist Revolutionaries with the Bolsheviks. She welcomed their unsuccessful armed uprising against the Provisional Government on July 3-5 and demanded the introduction of the dictatorship of the left parties in Russia. During the days of the "Kornilov rebellion" Spiridonova advocated the creation of a united revolutionary front, accusing Kerensky of conspiring with. Taking part in the work of the Democratic Conference in September 1917, she strongly condemned the coalition with the Cadets, believing that any support from the liberals would harm the revolution, for it would strengthen the position of the bourgeoisie. On the eve of the Bolshevik speech, Spiridonova was elected a member of the Petrograd City Duma and a deputy of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. And when the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, Spiridonova was among those who supported the coup. She welcomed the first decrees of the Soviet government and its course towards world revolution. “However their rude steps are alien to us, ‒ she spoke about the Bolsheviks at the First Congress of the Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (Internationalists) “But we are in close contact with them, because they are followed by a mass that has been brought out of a state of stagnation.” Believing that the popularity of the Bolsheviks among the masses was a temporary phenomenon and after a relatively short time the Leninists would go bankrupt, Spiridonova hoped that at that moment the Left Social Revolutionaries would be able to pull off a genuine “social revolution”, which, in order to win, would have to turn into a world revolution. Thus, she interpreted the events of October 1917 only as the first, "political" stage of the world revolution. On November 6, Spiridonova was elected to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of the RSFSR, and negotiated the entry of the Left Social Revolutionaries into the Council of People's Commissars (SNK).
The popularity of Maria Spiridonova these days was very high. This "a pale, bespectacled woman with slicked back hair, looking like a New England teacher", according to the author of the sensational book "Ten Days That Shook the World" by American journalist John Reed, was in 1917 year "the most popular and influential woman in Russia". Her political take-off was due both to her reputation as a “sufferer” and “protector of the people”, and to the fact that, thanks to populism, she was able to gain fame as an emotional speaker, publicist and politician defending peasant interests. All this was complemented by the extremely ascetic and strict appearance of the revolutionary, intensified by her exaltation. Revolutionary newspapers blasphemously called her the "Socialist-Revolutionary Mother of God", and in the reviews of contemporaries such characteristics as "blissful" and "violent" sounded. The leader of the right wing of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries V.M. Chernov accused Spiridonova of posturing and that “dressing up in the toga of the victim,” she was an accomplice in Bolshevik crimes.
It is not surprising that on January 4, 1918, Spiridonova was nominated by the Bolshevik faction to chair the Constituent Assembly. “The Bolsheviks do not put forward their own candidate. They will vote for the candidate of the Left SRs - Spiridonova, - recalled V.M. Chernov . ‒ The same Spiridonova, whom they will then arrest and will go through prisons and exile, exhausting the last remnants of her health and life from her, bringing her to the brink of mental illness. They now stake on the name, on the terrorist past, on the martyrdom of the woman. They hope to tear individual voices away from us and from the "neutrals." However, the calculations of the Bolsheviks did not materialize. During the voting, Spiridonova received 153 votes, while V.M. Chernov - 244.
Spiridonova approved the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, stating that “The power of the Soviets, for all its chaos, is a greater and better election than the entire Constituent Assembly, Duma and Zemstvos”. Continuing cooperation with the Bolsheviks, she, at the same time, led a discussion with them about further ways of transforming revolutionary Russia. Spiridonova, as a consistent populist, did not agree that the vanguard of the revolution should be the proletariat, and not the peasantry; demanded that the Bolsheviks accept such an important point of the Socialist-Revolutionary program as the socialization of the land and abandon its nationalization; condemned the "dictatorial socialism" of Lenin. At the same time, Spiridonova supported Lenin's point of view on the issue of peace with Germany, believing that a separate peace would benefit the world revolution, as it "will make the masses see the light." In April 1918, calling on the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to share responsibility for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks, she declared: “The peace was signed not by us and not by the Bolsheviks: it was signed by need, hunger, the unwillingness of the people to fight. And who among us will say that the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party, representing one power, would have acted differently than the Bolshevik Party? Spiridonova explained her cooperation with the Bolsheviks by the fact that if you start a fight with the Leninists under the prevailing conditions, this will lead to the strengthening of the positions of the bourgeois counter-revolution, which in her eyes was even more O more evil than Bolshevism.
However, quite soon Spiridonova, seeing that the Bolsheviks were ignoring her wishes, became disillusioned with the Soviet regime. Having described the Bolsheviks as "traitors to the revolution" and "continuers of the policy of the Kerensky government", Maria Spiridonova went over to the camp of their political opponents. In the summer of 1918, she was among those Left SRs who decided to organize a series of terrorist attacks against "the most prominent representatives of German imperialism"; resolutely condemned the policy of the Bolsheviks in the countryside; showed particular activity during the so-called. "Left SR rebellion".
“... The Left SRs suddenly found themselves collaborating with a regime of prudent politicians who are making deals with Germany and with the countries of the Quadruple Accord and are once again calling on the “bourgeoisie” to manage factories and factories, to command the army, ‒ notes R. Pipes . "......What happened to the revolution?" Everything that the Bolsheviks did after February 1918 did not suit the Left SRs... In the spring of 1918, the Left SRs began to treat the Bolsheviks in the same way that the Bolsheviks themselves treated the Provisional Government and the democratic socialists in 1917. They declared themselves the conscience of the revolution, an incorruptible alternative to the regime of opportunists and compromisers. As the influence of the Bolsheviks among industrial workers decreased, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries became more and more dangerous rivals for them, because they appealed to the very anarchic and destructive instincts of the Russian masses, on which the Bolsheviks relied while they were going to power, but, having gained power, they tried in every possible way to suppress ... In fact, the Left SRs appealed to those groups that helped the Bolsheviks seize power in October and now feel they have been betrayed.”
On July 6, 1918, during the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, along with other leaders of the Left Social Revolutionaries, Spiridonova was arrested and sent to a guardhouse in the Kremlin. (“I fought the tsar for twelve years, and now the Bolsheviks have put me in the tsar’s palace”- so she commented on this verdict). On November 27, the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee considered the case of “the conspiracy of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party against Soviet power and the revolution” and sentenced Spiridonova to a year in prison, but, taking into account “special services to the revolution”, amnestied and released her.
But Spiridonova did not stop fighting. In an open letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, written in November 1918, she threw the following accusations against the Soviet government: “With your cynical attitude towards the power of the soviets, with your White Guard dispersal of congresses and soviets, and with the unpunished arbitrariness of the Bolshevik appointees, you have placed yourself in the camp of rebels against the Soviet power, the only ones in power in Russia. (...) ... When the working people beat their Soviet delegate for deceit and theft, this delegate needs it, even if he was a Bolshevik, and the fact that in defense of such scoundrels you send artillery to the village, guided by the bourgeois concept about the authority of power, proves that you either do not understand the principle of workers' power, or do not recognize it. And when a muzhik disperses or kills rapist-appointees - this is what the Red Terror is, people's self-defense from violation of their rights, from oppression and violence. And if the mass of a given village or factory sends a right-wing socialist, let it send its right, and our misfortune is that we have not been able to earn its trust. (...) The program of the October Revolution, as it has been outlined schematically in the minds of the working people, is still alive in their souls, and the masses do not betray themselves, but they betray them. (...) Instead of free, iridescent, like light, like air, folk creativity, through change, struggle in councils and congresses, you have appointees, bailiffs and gendarmes from the Communist Party. Condemning the "Red Terror" (but not terror as such, since she considered the terror of the Socialist-Revolutionaries as a means of struggle for the oppressed and striving for freedom of the masses), Spiridonova warned the Bolsheviks: “You will soon find yourself in the hands of your Cheka, you are probably already in her hands. That's where you're on your way.".
On January 22, 1919, Spiridonova was again arrested by the Moscow Cheka. The Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal found her guilty of slandering the Soviet government and sentenced her to isolation from political and social activities for a period of 8 months. “At the trial in 1919 and 1918, I behaved so impudently and defiantly that the hall (communists) hummed with indignation, I would have torn it apart, - wrote Spiridonova in 1937 . “But as I thought, so I said. And then I was angry. It was the same at the royal court, which sentenced me to hanging, when the chairman of the court, an old general, plugged his ears and shook his head, unable to listen to too bold speeches. But all of me is like that both in life and in politics, I was like that and now I’m going to the grave. ”. However, Spiridonova managed to escape from the hospital, which became the place of her imprisonment, go underground and declare war on the "state capitalism" of the Bolsheviks. On October 26, 1920, Spiridonova was again arrested, sent to a psychiatric hospital, but a year later she was released under the obligation that she would never again engage in political activity. For an unsuccessful attempt to escape abroad, in 1923 Spiridonova was sentenced to 3 years of exile, which she served in the Moscow region and in the Kaluga region. This was followed by exiles to more distant places - to Samarkand (1925‒1928), Tashkent (1928‒1930), Ufa (1931‒1937). Having married the SR I.A. Maiorova, Spiridonova organized a family "commune" in Ufa, earning a living as an economist-planner in the Bashkir office of the State Bank.
In 1937, Spiridonova was arrested again. Seeing no guilt behind herself, the professional revolutionary, addressing the leadership of the Communist Party, wrote about herself from prison in 1937: “If now I knew behind me the underground struggle against the Soviet power, I would speak about it with my former impudence. After all, I would lead it in accordance with my views, with my convictions and faith, so why would I deny this struggle? Since I led her, I did not consider her a shameful and dirty deed, I would not have met the last retribution for her without repenting and crawling. For what? I pay for what I have done. Therefore, I am now so humiliated and mortally offended by the accusations that I disarmed a long time ago and did not fight. The reasons for this were internal and external. External causes you know yourself".
In the same letter, Spiridonova explained to the Bolsheviks why now, criticizing the Soviet government, she does not even think about terror: “Soviet power is so cruel and I would say imprudent to human life, cracking down on terror, that you need to have a lot of immorality to go on terror now. Under the tsar, only the terrorist himself and someone who accidentally got involved disappeared. Neither ancestors nor descendants were touched. (...) For KIROV, the number of people published on two huge newspaper sheets of Izvestia was shot, for the attempt on Lenin, 15 thousand people were shot by the emergency officials, I was told this by the Communists and Chekists. What kind of faith in the correctness of one's tactics and in oneself, reaching megalomania, one would have to have in order to decide to pay with so many human lives for the death of one or two response workers or leaders. Who am I to take upon myself the [right] to dispose of the lives of hundreds of people, because they live only once in the world. This moment alone is enough to abandon such a method once and for all, it would no longer be terror, but a vile adventure and provocation ... " Thus, the former terrorist involuntarily spoke of the tsarist government as much more humane than the left-wing radicals who replaced it.
"By the way," concluded Spiridonova - I am a greater friend of the Soviet government than tens of millions of the most loyal townsfolk. And a passionate and active friend. Although having the courage to have an opinion. I think you are doing better than I would. Your policy of war and peace is fully accepted by me (as of all the leftists I know), I have never taken industrial policy under fire from my criticism, I completely agree with collectivization. I agree with all the progressive pace and order, it is not worth listing. I do not agree only with the fact that the death penalty remained in the new system. (...) It is possible and must kill in a civil war while defending the rights of the revolution and the working people, but only when there are no other means of defending the revolution at hand. When there are such powerful means of protection as you have, the death penalty becomes a harmful institution, corrupting innumerably those who use this institution. (...) And I would also correct your prison regime and your penitentiary system. It should be different in a socialist country. We definitely need more humanity."
But despite assurances of loyalty, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR found Maria Spiridonova guilty of being “Until the day of her arrest, she was part of the united Socialist-Revolutionary Center and, in order to develop broad counter-revolutionary terrorist activities, organized terrorist and sabotage groups in Ufa, Gorky, Tobolsk, Kuibyshev and other cities ...”. The sentence was harsh: 25 years in prison. However, Spiridonova did not have a chance to serve this entire term. In connection with the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War and the threat of occupation of the territory where political prisoners were located, on September 11, 1941, at the age of 57, Maria Spiridonova, together with her husband and other Social Revolutionaries, was shot in the Medvedev forest near Orel. In 1990, Maria Spiridonova was partially rehabilitated, and in 1992, completely. But, despite this decision, it is difficult to recognize the revolutionary terrorist as an "innocent victim." Her whole life was devoted to the revolution, and this revolution ultimately destroyed her. “Revolution, as the god Saturn devours his children. Be careful, the gods are thirsty", - this prophetic maxim of the famous French revolutionary fully applies to the fate of the furious revolutionary Maria Spiridonova.
Prepared Andrey Ivanov, Doctor of Historical SciencesMaria Alexandrovna Spiridonova(October 16, 1884, Tambov - September 11, 1941, Medvedsky Forest near Orel) - Russian revolutionary, one of the leaders of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
Date of Birth:
Place of Birth:
Tambov, Tambov province
Date of death:
A place of death:
Medvedsky forest, Oryol region
I. A. Maiorov
Born in Tambov in the family of a collegiate secretary. In 1902 she graduated from the Tambov Women's Gymnasium. She worked as a clerk in the provincial noble assembly. She joined the local organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, joined the fighting squad of the party. In March 1905, she was arrested for participating in a demonstration, but was soon released.
On January 16, 1906, at the Borisoglebsk railway station, she mortally wounded a civil official of the VI class - an adviser to the Tambov governor G. N. Luzhenovsky firing five bullets at him. Spiridonova herself volunteered to carry out this action, she tracked Luzhenovsky at stations and trains for several days, until an opportunity presented itself to kill him. After the murder of Luzhenovsky, she tried to shoot herself, but did not have time, a Cossack who ran up stunned her with a blow from the butt. Spiridonova was brutally beaten, the doctor who examined her in prison testified to numerous injuries.
On March 12, 1906, the visiting session of the Moscow Military District Court sentenced Spiridonova to death by hanging. She spent sixteen days awaiting execution, as Spiridonova later wrote, such moments change a person forever. Maria was afraid that she would not be able to adequately meet death, she made a little man from a crumb of bread and hung it by a thread, rocked it for hours. On March 28, she was informed that her death penalty had been commuted to indefinite hard labor, which she was serving for Nerchinsk penal servitude(the anarchist terrorist was also serving a sentence there Tiavais-Shepshelevich, Austra Khristoforovna).
After the February Revolution, she was released by order of the Minister of Justice A.F. Kerensky and on March 8, 1917, she arrived in Chita, and from there in May she arrived in Moscow, where she began to play one of the main roles among the Left Social Revolutionaries. Having joined the Organizing Bureau of the left wing of the party, she worked in the Petrograd organization, spoke in military units, among workers, calling for an end to the war, the transfer of land to the peasants, and power to the Soviets. She collaborated in the newspaper "Land and Freedom", was the editor of the magazine "Our Way", was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper "Znamya Truda"; making policy statements. Spiridonova was elected chairman of the Extraordinary and II All-Russian Peasant Congresses, worked in the Central Executive Committee and in the peasant section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
Spiridonova realized the need for cooperation with the Bolsheviks. “No matter how alien their rough steps are to us,” she said at the First Congress of the PLSR (and) on November 21, 1917, “but we are in close contact with them, because the masses, brought out of a state of stagnation, are following them.” She believed that the influence of the Bolsheviks on the masses was temporary, since they "breathed everything with hatred", and that the Bolsheviks would go bankrupt in the second stage of the revolution. Such a stage, in her opinion, will be the “social revolution”, which will break out soon, but will have a chance of success only if it turns into a world one. The October Revolution as "political" is only the beginning of the world revolution. She characterized the Soviets as "the most complete expression of the people's will."
Until November 18, 1917, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Conference proclaimed itself by the First Congress of the PLSR Spiridonova harbored the hope that the left would win a majority in the AKP. While Spiridonova carried out the most important task for the Left SRs of winning the peasant majority on their side at the Extraordinary and II All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Deputies. “We need as a young party,” she told the First Congress of the PLSR, “to conquer the peasantry.” Bet on Spiridonov was made by the Left SR Central Committee not by chance. By that time, she managed to add to the halo of the great martyr, largely thanks to populism, the fame of an emotional orator, publicist and politician who defends peasant interests. John Reid called her at that moment "the most popular and influential woman in Russia."
In January 1918, she called on the III All-Russian Congress of Soviets to adopt the Law on the Socialization of the Land.
Spiridonova supported the efforts of the Russian delegation to conclude peace with Germany, believing that this would benefit the world revolution: "After the actions of the governments of England and France, the conclusion of a separate peace will be the impetus that will make the masses see the light."
In a report on April 19, 1918 at the II Congress of the PLSR Spiridonova called on the Left Social Revolutionaries to share responsibility for the Brest peace with the Bolsheviks: “The peace was signed not by us and not by the Bolsheviks: it was signed by need, hunger, the unwillingness of the people to fight. And who among us will say that the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party, if it represented one government, would have acted differently than the Bolshevik Party?
Between April and June 1918, Spiridonova abruptly changed her political position. From cooperation with the Bolsheviks, she, one of the few who sharply condemned the exit of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Council of People's Commissars, went over to the camp of political opponents of the Bolsheviks. In her own words, after the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries left the Soviet government, she was the only link with the Bolsheviks and left them "later than the others." At the same time, attitudes changed dramatically. Spiridonova to the Brest peace.
July 6, 1918 during the V All-Russian Congress of Soviets, along with other leaders of the Left SRs, was arrested and sent to a guardhouse in the Kremlin. While under arrest Spiridonova wrote that the leadership of the PLSR made a number of serious tactical mistakes. On November 27, 1918, the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee considered the case of "the conspiracy of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party against Soviet power and the revolution" and sentenced Spiridonov to a year in prison, but, taking into account the "special services to the revolution," amnestied and released her.
January 22, 1919 Spiridonova was again arrested by the Moscow Cheka. Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal, where he was a prosecution witness Nikolai Bukharin, Spiridonova was called guilty of slandering the Soviet government and thereby helping the counter-revolution and isolated from political and social activities for a year, sent to the Kremlin hospital. In April 1919, she fled from there with the help of the Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee and was in an illegal position.
On October 26, 1920, she was arrested again, on November 18, 1921, she was released under the guarantee of the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionaries I.Z. Steinberg and I. Yu. Bakala, and a commitment that she would never engage in political activity.
She lived in Malakhovka near Moscow under the supervision of the Cheka.
In 1923, she unsuccessfully tried to escape abroad and was sentenced to 3 years of exile in the Kaluga state farm colony. Then she was in exile in Samarkand (1925-1928) and Tashkent (1928-1930).
In 1937 she was again arrested in Ufa. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR finds her guilty of Spiridonova“Until the day of her arrest, she was part of the united Socialist-Revolutionary Center and, in order to launch broad counter-revolutionary terrorist activities, organized terrorist and sabotage groups in Ufa, Gorky, Tobolsk, Kuibyshev and other cities…” She was kept in the Ufa prison, and then in Moscow in the Butyrka prison. The military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced her to 25 years in prison. She served time in the Yaroslavl and Oryol prisons.
On September 11, 1941, she was shot by the NKVD in the Medvedsky forest near Orel, along with 153 other political prisoners of the Oryol prison (including A. Yu. Eichenwald, O.D. Kameneva, sister Leon Trotsky, H. G. Rakovsky, V. N. Yakovleva) by the decision of the military collegium of the USSR Armed Forces according to the decree of the GKO.
Partially rehabilitated in 1988, completely in 1992.
A bright and courageous personality in the history of the USSR.
The arrest of Professor Khomyakov is another defeat for the FSB. The purpose of the arrest was not achieved. Even having arrested the professor, a world-famous scientist and systems analyst, the author of works on the crisis of modern Russia, the FSB could not lay a paw on his archives, which are located in vaults on the territory of Ukraine, the PMR and Georgia. The volume of archives and the degree of completion of Khomyakov's works allow them to be published for a long time, until "fucking Rashka drowns in shit", which is the main goal of modern Russian resistance.
Fanny Kaplan: "There must be a snake in every woman"
"You're going to the Michelson plant, you stupid eared one." (B. G.)
“She was dressed in black. Black hair, black eyes outlined in black circles. A colorless face with pronounced Jewish features ... Her calmness was unnatural. She went to the window and looked out of it. (Bruce Lockhart) To explain with due political correctness: why Kaplan shot at Lenin, only modern American historical science is able to explain. She, in general, is able to politically correct explain anything.
A prominent specialist in the Russian radical movement of the late 19th - early 20th century. Anna Geifman, following Amy Knight, explains the behavior of terrorists Evstilia Rogozinnikova , Zinaida Konoplyannikova, Maria Spiridonova , Frumina Frumkina And Fanny Kaplan “a lack of psychological strength necessary for life, moreover, sometimes accompanied by a desire for death, as a deliverance ...
Despite the inner torment that made them want death as a deliverance, many of them abandoned the idea of senseless self-destruction. Instead, they engaged in revolutionary terror that could end their lives by giving suicide an areola of heroic deed. …
On December 22, 1906, an explosion occurred in one of the Kyiv hotels. The then "technique" for the manufacture of IEDs was not safe. "Technicians" - bomb makers are often blown up on their own products due to premature detonator operation, or decomposition of the main dynamite charge. To believe that the "communist-anarchist" Viktor Garsky (?), aka "Shmidman", aka "Toma", aka "Realist", who was preparing the assassination attempt, entrusted the equipment of the bomb to a sixteen-year-old "kid" (taking into account the acceleration, which was at the level of development current thirteen-year-olds) can only be done by someone who has not dealt with IEDs. According to Kaplan herself, “it exploded before the deadline”, most likely, a premature ignition of the fuse occurred, possibly acid leaked from a glass ampoule. She was shell-shocked by the explosion (if she had equipped a bomb, she would have hurt her hands). The concussion resulted in bouts of blindness.
Knowing what kind of organization of a terrorist act he is threatened by a "tower", Garsky fled, leaving his (?) Browning pistol in the accomplice's purse. From the point of view of the rules of the game in which they were both participants, there was nothing reprehensible in this act. With rare exceptions, persons accused of producing and storing explosive devices were usually sentenced to hard labor for terms of up to 15 years. In addition to weapons, the police found documents in the purse in the name of Fanny Efimova Kaplan . Under this name, she was tried.
Already on December 30, 1906, a court-martial from the troops of the Kyiv garrison pronounced a sentence, as a minor - indefinite hard labor. She served her sentence in Maltsevskaya, then in Akatuevskaya hard labor prison. After 1907, the detention regime was tightened and “walking in the forest all day long” as M. Spiridonova, Fanny, who had begun serving her sentence in the same Akatui prison a year earlier, did not have a chance.
But the joint conclusion brought both together even without romantic walks. Spiridonova herself ended up in hard labor as a nineteen-year-old schoolgirl - for the murder of an official Luzhenovsky. It was said that he seduced her and abandoned her. Better educated, with a strong character, Maria became an indisputable authority for Fanny. “In prison, my views were formed - I went from an anarchist to a socialist-revolutionary. I changed my views because I went to prison very young.” "...
In the early spring of 1917, liberated by the February Revolution, we, ten political convicts, rode carts from Akatuy to Chita ... It was cold, the wind lashed our cheeks, everyone was sick, coughing and Masha Spiridonova she gave me her downy shawl ... Then in Kharkov, where my eyesight returned, I really wanted to go to Moscow, to see my friends as soon as possible. And she often sat alone, wrapped in this shawl, pressing her cheek against it ... ”She had a successful operation, her future life could have turned out differently. Father and mother, four brothers and three sisters left for permanent residence in the United States back in 1911. But, it didn't work out. “In Kharkov, I met Mika, Viktor. He and I worked together in the same group, preparing an explosion. The meeting was accidental, he remained an anarchist, and he did not need me ... Even dangerous. He said that he was afraid of me, my hysteria and the past. And then I did not understand any of this. Everything was in color again, everything was returning - vision, life ... I decided to go to him to explain myself. And before that I went to the market to buy soap. Good. They asked very expensively and I sold the shawl. I bought this soap. Then ... in the morning ... he told me that he did not love me and never loved me, but it all happened because I smelled of Wanda's perfume. I returned to the hospital, sat in a chair and wanted to wrap myself in my shawl ... But I didn’t have a shawl anymore, there was this soap ... and I can’t forgive myself ... I don’t forgive. What Fanny herself said and what was included in the protocol of interrogation is quite enough to understand that from now on, murder for her is only a matter of place and time. As it is sung in the only hit number of the vulgar musical "Chicago": "He ran into himself ..." A woman with such passions is better not to come across. “Soon you will see what was hidden in my heart! And you will understand what kind of heart you have rejected!” (Charlotte Corday) “The October Revolution found me in the Kharkov hospital.
I was dissatisfied with this revolution, met it negatively. I stood for the Constituent Assembly and now I stand for it.” Judging by the number of votes cast in the elections, the Constituent Assembly was then supported by a "constitutional majority" of voters. But what significance did their voices have for the sailor Zheleznyak and the "tired" guard... Russia was moving towards the victory of the civil war. “I fully accept the Samara government and stand for an alliance against Germany. I shot at Lenin. I decided to take this step back in February. (After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Auth.) This idea matured in me in Simferopol. And since then I started to prepare for this step. In April, she arrived in Moscow, where she stayed with a familiar convict Pigit on Bolshaya Sadovaya d. 10, apt. 5…"
Kaplan's intention to shoot Lenin was catalyzed by the arrest of Maria Spiridonova, who led the Left SR rebellion on July 6, 1918. Politically, Kaplan sympathized with the Right SRs, the Chernov group. However, her sympathies for "Masha Spiridonova" lay outside politics. “I quickly realized that instead of some kind of (political Auth.) connection with Spiridonova, only her shawl would appear.” (Peters) Kaplan has no ties to any organization. Even the fact that she was a “Right Social Revolutionary” was suggested by the investigator himself during interrogation. To accomplish her plan, she did not need "addresses, appearances, passwords." In fact, "the assassination theory is as simple as a Columbus egg." (J. Gashek) It is based on the principle of ancient tragedy - the unity of place and time of action.
It is enough that at one point of the space-time continuum the paths of the killer and his victim crossed. “There is no escape from a killer if the killer is ready to die. Ten enemies will not cope with a possessed person. Common sense will never do anything like this…” (“Hagakure”) The paths of Lenin and Kaplan crossed on the evening of August 30, 1918 in the yard of the Michelson factory. A woman addressed the leader, who was leaving the rally (later turned out to be Count Popova M. G.).
While Ilyich was thinking about how to explain to an irresponsible citizen “why they don’t give out potatoes on the cards,” shots rang out. As always, there were no witnesses. Stepan Gil, an experienced VIP chauffeur who drove even the most august persons, will declare that he “saw the shooter” only “after the shots”. Then he will remember "a woman's hand with a Browning" from which "three shots were fired." “The shooting woman threw a revolver at my feet and disappeared into the crowd. This revolver lay under my feet. With me, no one raised this revolver. Later he will add that he "pushed him under the car with his foot." At the scene of the assassination, four shell casings of “yellow metal” were found (I recognize the hand of experts! Auth.) Trampled in the mud. After the announcement in Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee with a request (to the assassin? Auth.) to “return the weapon”, “eyewitnesses” who considered themselves witnesses of the incident, poured into the Cheka. (Is it necessary to recall the police saying “lies like an eyewitness”? Auth.) Factory worker Savelyev (not Mikhelson! Auth.) Kuznetsov brought “Browning” (M1900) No. 150 489. Kuznetsov claimed that he picked it up at the scene of the assassination attempt and took it with him as an "expensive relic" (!). To the question: "Where did the Browning lie?" he candidly admitted that "all this time he kept it on his chest."
Be there Peters our investigator, the case would have taken a completely different turn. But Peters lived in England and studied case law and adversarial process there. That is, he knew that a confession could not serve as evidence of guilt. He also spoke Russian badly, why he was not too lazy to clarify the question. It turned out that "the browning was lying near the body of Vladimir Ilyich." There were four rounds left in the seven-shooter's magazine. Differences in the testimony gave rise to a number of researchers to doubt the version of the investigation. Upon closer examination, the arguments of the skeptics do not look consistent: - The fact that Gil, a military man who understands weapons, calls a "pistol" a "revolver" is fully consistent with the then practice, when any short weapon was called a "revolver". - Magazine pistol Browning model 1900, indeed, holds seven rounds.
However, according to the same practice, the eighth cartridge was sent directly into the chamber. To which there is a lot of evidence in the memoirs of the militants and documents of the Russian police. - Poor eyesight is not an obstacle, especially since Kaplan fired already at dusk, simply pointing the gun towards the target. Of the four bullets, two hit Lenin, one in gr. Popov. - Inconsistencies in the testimony of witnesses are also quite normal. On the contrary, conspiracy to conceal the truth would be indicated precisely by coincidences in the main points. Guilt Kaplan did not raise any doubts Peters .
But, there were no leads in the case file leading to other alleged accomplices. And they were. Someone gave her a weapon. The sawn bullet heads, a typical Socialist-Revolutionary technique, left no doubt about the terrorist intent. The problem is that, judging by the number, the pistol was imported to Russia back in the revolution of 1905-1907. At the same time, most likely, bullets could also be sawn.
Even after ninety years, the marking of cartridge cases - the year of issue of cartridges - remains the key to answering the question of the presence or absence of a conspiracy. With the then technology of cartridge production, the shelf life, for example, of Russian rifle cartridges was determined by the decomposition time of smokeless powder in non-hermetic packaging and was determined at 10 years. Old cartridges of release 1905-1907. Kaplan herself could have used the weapons that have survived since that time. New cartridges with freshly sawn bullet heads would testify in favor of a conspiracy. In 1918, this was easy to establish even with the development of trassology at that time. “I won’t say who gave me the revolver. I didn't have any train ticket. I have not been to Tomilino. I just found a trade union card.” Having confessed to the assassination attempt, Kaplan in all other respects "went into denial." Her friends in hard labor had to be released. There was another circumstance in the case, which was not given due importance in later studies.
Then, in 1918, it could become decisive. Kaplan arrived in Moscow from a neighboring state with which the RSFSR maintained diplomatic relations. “I confirm that I came from the Crimea. Whether my socialism is connected with Skoropadsky, I will not answer ... I have a negative attitude towards the current government in Ukraine. Just before this, the Social Revolutionaries killed the German ambassador Mirbach in Moscow, and in Kyiv, the commander of the German troops in the East, Eichhorn. An international conflict could involve the Bolshevik government in a war with Germany, and in two days the German troops would be in Moscow. The Oberkommando-Ost had a corresponding operational plan, hetman Skoropadsky mentions it in his memoirs. In the current situation, the disappearance of Kaplan suited everyone. "No person - no problem."
Kaplan was sent to Peters to Lubyanka from the Kremlin several times: in the evening of the 2nd - in the morning of the 3rd of September. He didn't give in. It seemed to him. that could still be different. “With the Kaplan case, we have a chance once and for all to refuse to replace the law with any expediency.” Ahead loomed an investigative experiment, a fingerprint examination ... (What would Kaplan risk in the then legal state? On May 8, 1925, at the Vienna Opera during the performance of "Peer Gynt", to the thunder of the timpani, due to portray a thunderstorm, a certain Menika Karnichu will shoot Todor Panitsa, leader of the Macedonian terrorist organization IMRO., (Then this technique is used by Hitchcock in the film "The Man Who Knew Too Much.") As the assassin herself explains, a little confusedly, out of jealousy for the legal wife of the deceased. from behind a garter belt, a Mauser M1916 caliber 7.65 mm pistol will shoot the seducer in the back of the head eight times, then he will change the magazine and will have time to shoot twice more - at his wife and a neighbor in the box.
In the courtroom, she, terminally ill with tuberculosis, will be taken on a stretcher from the hospital. The court will determine her sentence of eight years in prison. As "unable, due to the state of her health, to serve her sentence in a maximum security prison", she will be transferred to a sanatorium, from where she will safely disappear. Menika will hide in Bulgaria, marry the man who sent her to kill - this was a condition for marriage, give birth to children ... In fact, Kaplan only wounded Lenin. She could well count on indulgence. Two officers who attempted on Lenin in February 1918 (Then Ilyich was saved by a driver trained in the palace automobile team - the same Gil, but the royal Rolls-Royce with a dual ignition system.), although they were sentenced to death, but then they were released to German front - atone for blood.) ...
Finally sent Lunacharsky he could convince anyone. “Anatoly Vasilievich gave me a lesson in Russian, delicately reminding me to what extent I am still an “Englishman” for my comrades. Later, showing off a little, Peters will tell Louise Bryant: “I had a minute when I was ridiculously not sure what to do - to shoot this woman myself, whom I hated no less than my comrades, or to shoot back from my comrades if they they will take it by force, or ... shoot themselves.” "Drink the sea, Xanth." Peters did not shoot himself, twenty years later he happened to drink the same cup as Kaplan.
If you believe the “censored” memoirs of the Kremlin commandant Malkov (and what did they have to hide in the 1930s?), he himself shot Kaplan at four in the afternoon on September 3 with one shot after Kaplan turned her back on him, at the command “To the car!” ... The investigation into the case of the attempt on Lenin continued in the 1960s. It is this circumstance that explains the persistent rumors in the USSR that Kaplan had been saved. They were dismissed by the "organs" themselves. The famous wording "ten years without the right to correspond" was put into circulation in the middle of 1930 (like the rumors about Kaplan), with the simple goal of preventing the still-living "accomplices" from blaming "the newly discovered circumstances of the case" on the executed . And suddenly they are alive and refuted ...
“In any case, this lack of psychological strength necessary for life, sometimes accompanied by a desire for death as a deliverance, explains to us why a significant number of extremists committed suicide ... They killed themselves, not wanting to suffer all the long time of official investigation, trial and imprisonment.” (E. Knight “Female Terrorists”) Judicial practice shows that even being a merciless consistent killer, a woman continues to consider herself a victim. Terrorists deliberately dehumanize the "objects" of their attempts, they need them only to achieve their goal. “Their challenge is murder. Our answer is murder. They kill - we pay with murder. Killing is their argument. Murder is our refutation.” (Heinzen) “A little sorry for her? Lunacharsky half asked. - She disgusts me! I was going to kill, but in my head ... soap.” (Peters)
(c) P. Khomyakov From the book “Images of the Russian Revolt”
Spiridonova, Maria Alexandrovna 1884-1941
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX
Spiridonova Maria Alexandrovna (1884, Tambov - 1941, Medvedevsky Forest, ca. Orel) - leader of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Genus. in a noble family collegiate secretary. She graduated from the Tambov gymnasium, studying in a swarm in 1900 - 1901 joined the Socialist-Revolutionary organization. She worked as a clerk in the provincial noble assembly. In 1905 she was arrested for participating in a demonstration, but released. In 1906, she mortally wounded the gendarmerie colonel G.N. Luzhenovsky, who was sentenced to death by the Social Revolutionaries for the cruel suppression of peasant unrest. She was captured, severely beaten in the police station, cigarettes were put out on her naked body; was subjected to bullying in the car on the way to Tambov by the officers who arrested her.
The case of Spiridonova received wide publicity and great public importance. Field session Moscow. The district military court sentenced Spiridonova to death by hanging, replaced by indefinite hard labor, to which she was serving in Nerchinsk. She was released in March 1917 by order of the Minister of Justice A.F. Kerensky and began active political work in Chita.
In May she arrived in Moscow, where she began to play one of the main roles among the Left Social Revolutionaries. Having joined the Organizing Bureau of the left wing of the party, she worked in the Petrograd organization, spoke in military units, among workers, calling for an end to the war, the transfer of land to the peasants, and power to the Soviets. She collaborated in gas. "Land and Freedom", was the editor of the magazine. "Our Way", was a member of the editorial board of the gas. "Banner of Labor"; making policy statements. Oct. In 1917, the Left SRs entered the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and actively participated in the October Revolution, in the II All-Russian. Congress of Soviets voted for the decrees on peace and land, and together with Spiridonova became members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. However IN AND. Lenin he could not convince the Left SRs, including Spiridonov, to join the Sov. government.
Considering the need for cooperation with the Bolsheviks, because. "they are followed by the masses, brought out of a state of stagnation," Spiridonova was sure that the influence of the Bolsheviks on the people was short-lived. Rudeness and bitterness are justified during barricade battles in Russia, but they are not suitable for the imminent future world "social revolution", in which the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries will take their rightful place. Spiridonova was elected chairman of the Extraordinary and II All-Russian. peasant congresses, worked in the Central Executive Committee and in the peasant section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, being, according to John Reed, "the most popular and influential woman in Russia."
When in November-Dec. In 1917, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries entered the Council of People's Commissars, thereby strengthening the Bolshevik positions, Spiridonova did not become a people's commissar just because the Socialist-Revolutionary leadership considered her work in the CEC more important. Spiridonova supported IN AND. Lenin in the matter of concluding Brest Peace and rejected the calls of those who offered to unleash a roar. war against German imperialism. The break with the Bolsheviks occurred due to the decrees of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in May-June 1918 (On the food dictatorship, on the committees, on the death penalty). Spiridonova accused the Bolshevik Central Committee of replacing the "socialization" of the land with "nationalization", of organizing food detachments and planting committees. Spiridonova was the last of the Left SRs to go over to polit. opponents of the Bolsheviks and began to oppose the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which she previously supported.
Spiridonova actively participated in the Left SR rebellion on July 6-7, 1918 and was sent to a guardhouse in the Kremlin (“I fought the tsar for twelve years, and now the Bolsheviks have put me in the tsar’s palace”). She managed to deliver the "Open Letter of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party", in which she accused her opponents of destroying the power of the Soviets, the power of workers, condemned the "Red Terror" ("You will soon find yourself in the hands of your Cheka, you, perhaps, are already in her hands. There you and the road"), called the policy Lenin , Sverdlov , Trotsky "genuine counter-revolution". In November 1918, the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced Spiridonova to a year in prison for participating in the rebellion, but, taking into account "special services to the revolution", amnestied and released her. Continued active polit. activities against the Bolshevik oligarchy. In February 1919 she was arrested again. By decision of the Moscow revolutionary tribunal, isolated from political and social activities for a year, sent to the Kremlin hospital, from where she fled with the help of the Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee and was in an illegal position.
In 1920, she was again arrested and released under the guarantee of one of the leaders of the Social Revolutionaries that she would never engage in political activities. Lived in Malakhovka near Moscow under supervision Cheka . In 1923, she unsuccessfully tried to escape abroad and was sentenced to 3 years of exile. She was ill with tuberculosis and was in financial need. In 1931 she was again sentenced to 3 years of exile. This term, then extended by 5 years, was serving in Ufa. Spiridonova married, worked as an economist-planner and completely retired from political activity. In 1937 she was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In Sept. In 1941, during the evacuation of prisoners, Spiridonova was shot by the Supreme Court of the USSR. In 1990 and 1992 she was rehabilitated.
Used materials of the book: Shikman A.P. Figures of national history. Biographical guide. Moscow, 1997
Member of the Constituent Assembly
Spiridonova Maria Alexandrovna (10/16/1884, Tambov - 09/11/1941, Orel). Vladimirsky district. No. 3 - Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Congress of the KD.
Petrograd. From the townspeople, the daughter of an employee. She left the 6th grade of the Tambov gymnasium. In the AKP since 1905, a terrorist. In 1906, for the murder of an official Luzhenovsky, she was sentenced to death, which was replaced with indefinite hard labor. She was in hard labor prisons in Transbaikalia, released in March 1917. Delegate of the III Congress of the AKP, I All-Russian Congress of the KD, member of the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Council of the KD, participant in the Democratic Conference, member of the Pre-Parliament. Honorary Chairman of the Left SR Party. Mandatory AKP candidate in the US (Petrograd, Vladimir, Podolsk districts). At a meeting of the US on January 5, she was nominated by the factions of the Bolsheviks and the Left Social Revolutionaries to chair as an alternative to V. M. Chernov.
After the performance of the Left Social Revolutionaries on July 6, 1918, she was sentenced to 1 year, and was soon amnestied. She was under the constant supervision of security officers. She was repeatedly arrested, deported to Central Asia, Crimea. In 1937, she was arrested in Ufa, where she worked as an accountant, and was sentenced by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court to 25 years in prison on charges of preparing an assassination attempt on the government of Bashkiria and K. E. Voroshilov. Shot in the Medvedev forest near Orel. Rehabilitated in 1992.
Source: III-25; IV-22; 1V-52; V-26; VII-43; VII-44.
(See code decryption here )
Used materials book. L.G. Protasov. People of the Constituent Assembly: a portrait in the interior of the era. M., ROSPEN, 2008.
Spiridonova Maria Alexandrovna (October 16, 1884, Tambov - September 11, 1941, Medvedevsky Forest, near Orel). From nobles. Genus. in the family of a collegiate adviser. In the Tambov gymnasium in the 6th grade, she joined the work of the local Socialist-Revolutionary org-tion. In 1902, she left the 8th grade of the gymnasium (according to another version, she was expelled for political unreliability). She worked as a clerk in the provincial noble assembly. Since 1905, a member of the combat squad. First arrested for participating in a demonstration in 1905, she was not punished.
Jan 16 1906, by decision of the Tambov Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, she committed terroristic. act, mortally wounded a gendarmerie colonel, early. security guard G.N. Luzhenovsky, suppressor of peasant unrest in the Tambov province. In the police station, Spiridonova, stripped naked, was subjected to severe beatings and tortures, and then, on the way to Tambov, was abused by the officers who arrested her. The case of Spiridonova received international publicity and had a noticeable public. resonance. On March 12, 1906, the visiting session of the Moscow Military District Court sentenced Spiridonova to death by hanging, which was replaced by indefinite hard labor, to which she served in Nerchinsk prisons.
As a result, Feb. revolution of 1917 was released by order A.F. Kerensky March 3 The name of Spiridonova is associated with the creation in Chita of the Socialist-Revolutionary Committee, which stood on the positions of internationalism and maximalism. Until ser. May Spiridonova took part in the work of the Chita Council of the RSD. On May 13, after Spiridonova's speech, the executive committee of the Chita Soviet decided to liquidate the Nerchinsk penal servitude.
May 31 arrived in Moscow as a delegate from the Trans-Baikal region. to the 3rd congress of the AKP. She was elected to the honorary presidium of the congress. Spiridonova's candidacy was put forward during the elections to the Central Committee of the AKP, but did not get the required number of votes. During the part. Congress Spiridonova joined the left wing of the AKP. She became a member of his Orgburo, was elected to the North. region to-t, who was under the influence of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Took part in the work of the 1st All-Russia. Congress of Soviets KD. Elected to the Executive Committee of the All-Russian. Council of KD from the 12th Army. In June joined the activities of petrogr. org-tion of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and began to cooperate in the body of the North. to-ta - gas. "Earth and Freedom". July 4th, according to F.F. Raskolnikov , Spiridonova welcomed the Kronstadt sailors who arrived in Petrograd to participate in the armament. anti-government. demonstrations (see: Raskolnikov F.F., Kronstadt and Piter in 1917, 2nd ed., M, 1990, p. 132). In Aug. The 7th Council of the party included Spiridonova in the list of mandatory candidates from the AKP in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Sobr. Aug-Sept. Spiridonova took part in the work of the lips. congresses and conferences of the AKP. Aug 16 on petrogr. lips. congress delivered a speech "On the modern moment.
From Aug. began to appear under her editorship. "Our way"; in the first issue published its program article. " About the tasks of the revolution", which became a kind of "guide to action" for the left wing of the AKP: "Revolutionary socialism is a measure by which all acts of the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries must be marked ... - the article stated, - From this point of view, our program cannot change and should not be adapted to the conditions of place and time, on the contrary, all reality should be raised to it ... At the present time, it is effective to assert theoretically and practically that our revolution is bourgeois, to cooperate with the bourgeoisie in the field both political and economic - this means to strengthen the completely shattered bourgeois system means helping it to hold out for years, tens of years on the bent shoulders of the working class...
The Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries is at the head of the social revolution, its program, in its implementation, blows up one of the strongest foundations of the modern system (land ownership), violates one of the most sacred principles of the bourgeois system - private property ... And so ... The Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, under under the pressure of the philistine people who have filled the right wing of the party, who have nothing in common with socialism, are deviating further and further from their only true path - close, inseparable ties and unity with the people ... it includes in its tactics measures and principles that not only are not consecrated by the general principles of our programs, but sharply contradicting them, encroaching on their logical and moral integrity.
The same article gave an assessment of government policy and determined the further line of the AKP, acceptable to Spiridonova. "The policy of the official ruling circles has departed infinitely far from the policy of the people, both from outside and inside, and the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries has nothing to do there...
But on all the mournful paths of Russian and world life, our place ... must be determined in the light of our Idea, in the spirit of our program - always under the banner of socialism, always by a revolutionary method, always through the people, with the people and for the people "(p. 4- 12).
During the Kornilov speech, Spiridonova tried to establish contact with the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), sharply criticized the policy of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, publicly declaring that the salvation of the revolution was the transfer of power to the workers and peasants. During this period, Spiridonova made sharp attacks on the policy of the Provisional Times. pr-va and the Executive Committee of the All-Russian. Council of KD. According to a member of the Executive Committee G.K. Pokrovsky, she publicly stated: "If the peasants are not given landowners' land, it is only thanks to the corrupt presidium, which entered into a strike with the corrupt Kerensky and the bourgeoisie" ("Year of the Russian Revolution (1917-1918). Sat. Art., M., 1918, pp. 431 She also strongly protested against the introduction of the death penalty.On September 10, Spiridonova was elected to the Petrograd city committee of the AKP, joined the editorial board of its organ, the newspaper "Znamya Truda." Council.
As a delegate from the Executive Committee Vseros. Council KD participated in the work of Democrat. meetings; on it 18 Sept. in her speech condemned the coalition with the Cadets; on the issue of power, she declared: "Down with the coalition, and long live the power of the people and the roar-tion!" (See: Bezberezhyev S.V., M.A. Spiridonova, in the book: Russia at the turn of the century. Ist, portraits, M., 1991, p. 342). As a representative of the Council of the KD, she entered the Provisional Council Ros. Republic (Pre-Parliament). Elected vowel petrogr. Gor. thoughts.
Persistently sought the convocation of the 2nd Vseros. Congress of Soviets of the RSD, participated in the struggle for the power of the Soviets, but did not agree with the Bolsheviks in everything. According to N.K. Krupskaya, "a couple of hours before the opening of the congress IN AND. Lenin met with Spiridonova and other representatives of the Left Social Revolutionaries and tried to convince them to join the government, but did not achieve the desired result (see: Krupskaya N.K., Memories of V.I. Lenin, M., 1957, p. 319 ).
The congress elected Spiridonova to the Presidium. After the Central Committee of the AKP expelled the left opposition remaining at the congress from the party, Spiridonova spoke in favor of convening the All-Russian Party. Congress of the Left SRs. Oct 28 became one of the members of the Provisional Center. Organizing Bureau of the Left SRs. Nov 6 elected member. Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee: later elected member. Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the 3rd-4th convocations. Nov 11 Extra Vseros. The Congress of Soviets of the KD (November 11-25) elected Spiridonova as its chairman.
Speaking 15 Nov. at a joint meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Petrograd. Council and Extraordinary Vseros. Congress of Soviets of the KD, Spiridonova said: “Let the Russian peasant know that without linking himself with the Russian worker, without linking himself with the worker and peasant of France, England, Australia and Germany and all other countries of the world, he will not achieve not only freedom and equality , but even that piece of land that is so vital to him." Spiridonova also called for the unity of the left forces: "Let the united revolutionary democracy act as a united front. Let us leave our disputes ... Long live the fraternal union of workers, soldiers and peasants!" ("Minutes of the meetings of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers, Peasant and Cossack Affairs. II convocation", M. 1918, pp. 65-66).
At the plenum of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on November 17. Spiridonova made a statement that the faction of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries considers the decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the dissolution of petrogr. Gor. thoughts. At the same time, she emphasized the "inevitability" for the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to take part in "the creation of a government responsible to the Central Executive Committee and in the very organs of this government" (ibid., p. 71)
Nov 19 Vseros opened. Congress of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who elected Spiridonova as its honorary chairman. In a speech at the Congress on 21 Nov. she sharply criticized the leadership of the AKP for breaking away from the old desk. program and declared that this party includes persons "alien to socialism." Addressing the congress, she said: "It is necessary for us, as a young party, to win over the peasantry." Contrasting "Soviet" democracy with "bourgeois", Spiridonova argued: "We cannot come to socialism through parliamentary struggle" ["Minutes of the 1st Congress of the Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (Internationalists); M., 1918, p. 34-351 Spiridonova entered in the Central Committee of the PLSR.
Nov 26 opened the 2nd All-Russia. the Congress of Soviets of the KD, which then split into two parts and elected two alternative executive committees: at the head of the "left" was S, at the head of the "right" - V.M. Chernov. Dec 13 Spiridonova was elected an honorary chairman. Petrotr. Council. Honorary pres. Vseros also chose her. congress of railroad workers; speaking on it on 14 Dec. with a speech, she acknowledged the "social character" of Oct. rev-tion (see Bezberezhev S.V., op. cit., in the book; Russia at the turn of the century., p. 344).
As a member of the Const. Sobr. (from the Vladimir electoral district) Spiridonova 5 Jan. 1918 took part in its opening. Spiridonova's candidacy was nominated for chairperson of the Institution. Sobr. factions of the Left SRs and Bolsheviks. Spiridonova (153 votes) lost the election to Chernov (244 votes). Together with other Left SRs, she left the Institution. Sobr. Speaking on 6 Jan. in the Tenishevsky school, "explained the need to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, spoke about the role of the Soviets ... and. . 16).
Jan 7 Spiridonova participated in the work of the 1st All-Russian. Congress of Trade Unions, which elected her as honorary chairperson, and delivered a speech at it. Jan 10-12 Joint meetings of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b) and the Central Committee of the PLSR were held to discuss questions of further tactics. According to Spiridonova, "long hours, several days passed with us in backstage meetings, in endless disputes with the Bolsheviks to win back one or another point of our program" [see: Razgon A.I. Governments, bloc of Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries (October 1917 - January 1918), Ist. Notes, vol. 117, M., 1989, p. Jan 13, 1441 Spiridonova participated in the opening of the 3rd All-Russian. Congress of Soviets of the KD and in the evening of the same day she spoke at a joint meeting of the congresses of the Soviets of the KD and RSD.
In her speech, she said: “It is extremely important to gather all the forces of revolutionary Russia in order to create from them a single revolutionary whole, a solid lump of single social energy and continue the struggle, without any mercy and without any hesitation, sweeping aside everything that will meet on the path of our struggle. which should lead us to the bright realm of socialism". Contrasting the owls form of org-tion Established. Assembly, she declared the need to approve the Soviets "by the Labor Constituent Assembly, to which should belong in their entirety all perform, and legislative functions, all decisions of which should be considered for all equally binding and unshakable law" ("3 th All-Russian Congress of Soviets of the RSKD", P, 1918, pp. 45-46).
She also urged the congress to pass a law on the socialization of the land. Congress at the meeting on 18 Jan. approved the first section of the law without debate and adopted the remaining sections as a basis. Jan 27 the united All-Russian Central Executive Committee approved the law as a whole. Among other owls. its leaders were also signed by Spiridonova. She was the author of the preface to the text of The Fundamental Law, published in 1918 by the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Publishing House Rev. Socialism. At the end of the work of the 3rd Congress of Soviets, Spiridonova headed the Executive Committee of the Cross, sections of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which took over many of the functions of the abolished Executive Committee of the Council of the KD.
In con. Feb. Spiridonova participated in a number of meetings of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the Central Committee of the PLSR, as well as joint meetings of the latter with the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) on the issue of signing the Brest Peace. Her position on this issue coincided with the point of view of that part of the Bolshevik Central Committee. to-heaven supported Lenin (see: Bezberezhyev S.V., decree. cit., in the book: Russia at the turn of the century ..., p. 346). In Art. Letters to the countryside" Spiridonova outlined the Left SR views on the cross: "... The peasantry in a short time was so revolutionized that, without debate or hesitation, the Peasant Congress went to the Tauride Palace to support and approve the Soviet government as sincerely and with force as representatives of the army and the proletariat"; "The Third Peasant Congress was already a new stage on the Path of the thorny and great historical passage of the peasants to socialism": "The peasantry is not only material for history, not only a relic of a certain system, subject to the deepest sociological. transformation, and even destruction, but a class of the future, viable and historically stable, a class that brings to the world both a new system and a new truth" ("Nash Put", 1918, No. 1, pp. 16-17).
Spiridonova actively participated in the preparation of the 2nd Congress of the PLSR, being a member of the commissions for its organization and opening. 17 Apr. the congress elected Spiridonova to the presidium. 19 Apr. she made a presentation on the current situation. Arguing with another speaker (B.D. Kamkov), Spiridonova called on the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to share with the Bolsheviks the responsibility for Brest Peace : "The peace was signed not by us and not by the Bolsheviks: it was signed by need, hunger, the unwillingness of the whole people - exhausted, tired - to fight. And which of us will say that the PLSR, if it represented one power, would have acted differently than the Bolshevik Party did ?" ("Znamya Truda", 1918, April 19). She noted that "at present the main social fact of our revolution is the land and the land question, and the driving force of our social revolution is the peasantry." "The main task of the current day" was, in her opinion, "the real implementation of the law on the socialization of the land, and this implementation, as practice has shown, is impossible without participation in the apparatus of power" (ibid.).
In view of this, Spiridonova fundamentally condemned the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries for leaving the central government: “As a class, people’s party, the PLSR has no right to build a policy based on personal experiences, and in the era of social revolution to play a political game. cross" (ibid.). However, Spiridonova's position did not receive the support of the majority. Promoted to the Central Committee, she recused herself, but he was not satisfied; elected to the Central Committee.
Compared to most members of the Central Committee of the PLSR, she advocated a political alliance with the Bolsheviks longer than others. But in the period from May to July 1918, in her public speeches, Spiridonova strongly condemned the foreign and domestic policy of the Council of People's Commissars, criticized the agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks, saying that the socialization of the land was being replaced by nationalization. Together with Kamkov, Spiridonova negotiated with members of the executive committee of the "Revolutionary International Social Organization of Foreign Workers and Peasants" on the issue of organizing an anti-German speech in Ukraine. 24 June prev. Central Committee meetings. who decided "in the interests of the Russian and international revolution to put an end to the so-called respite"; "For these purposes. - to organize a number of terroristic. acts against the most prominent representatives of German imperialism" ("The Red Book of the Cheka", vol. 1, 2nd ed., M. 1989, p. 185).
To implement this plan, the Central Committee of the PLSR allocated a Bureau, which included L.B. Golubovsky, IA Mayorov and Spiridonova. The minutes of the meeting, signed by Spiridonova, stipulated: "We regard our actions as a struggle against the real policy of the Council of People's Commissars and in no case as a struggle against the Bolsheviks" (ibid., p. 186).
The 3rd Congress of the PLSR, held on June 28, gave the Central Committee freedom of action. Spiridonova spoke out at the congress for the PLSR to become the ruling party. July 4 at the opening of the 5th All-Russian. Congress of Soviets Spiridonova was elected to its Presidium. On July 5, she delivered a report on the work of the Krest section at the congress, in which she questioned its continued existence: “At first we worked hand in hand with the Bolsheviks, often making concessions on party issues ... so that there were no disagreements "But there was a disagreement on the question of the Brest Treaty... and from that time on completely different conditions of work begin... Our section was not allowed to carry out its projects. They tried to arrange all sorts of obstacles... I believe... Soviets will pass the question of the destruction of the Peasant Section ... "(" 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers, Crosses, Soldiers and Cossack Deputies ". Stenographic report, M. 1918, pp. 53-54).
Spiridonova also sharply criticized the prod. policy of the Bolsheviks, but about the committees she openly stated: "We will fight in the localities, and the committees of the rural poor will not have a place for themselves" (ibid., p. 59). She also criticized other measures taken by the Council of People's Commissars, especially the decree on the death penalty.
In the events of July 6-7, Spiridonova showed maximum activity. On the evening of July 6, with her direct participation in the headquarters of the Cheka detachment under the commands. DI. Popova was arrested by F.E. Dzerzhinsky. Then Spiridonova, together with Golubovsky, went to the Congress of Soviets to announce the declaration of the Central Committee of the PLSR on the murder of V. Mirbach in the Big T-re under the arm. Spiridonov held meetings of the faction of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. On the night of July 7-8, Spiridonova was arrested and taken to a guardhouse in the Kremlin. During interrogation in the investigation. Commission at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 10, she took the blame for the performance of the Left Social Revolutionaries and showed: "I organized the murder of Mirbach from beginning to end. Blumkin acted on my instructions" ("Red Book of the Cheka", pp. 268-69). Nov 27 Top. roar. the tribunal at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced Spiridonova to 1 year in prison, "taking into account the special merits before the revolution." Nov 29 The Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee granted amnesty to her, she was released from custody.
Dec. 1918 - Feb. 1919 Spiridonova became involved in political activities. Participated in the work of the 2nd Council of the PLSR, edited the party. and. "Banner". Feb 18 1919 Spiridonova arrested and sentenced to Moscow. roar. tribunal to isolation from societies, and watered, activities for a period of 8 months. 2 Apr. she managed to escape from custody. Going to illegal. position, returned to the desks. work and led the minority of the Central Committee, which advocated active opposition to the policies of the RCP (b). Oct. 1920 Spiridonova was detained, spent some time in the infirmary of the Cheka and in a prison psychiatric hospital. hospital. From sept. 1921 lived in isolation and under the control of the Cheka in Malakhovka near Moscow. Subjected to repressions in 1923 and 1924. From 1925 she was in exile (Samarkand, then Ufa).
Married in exile I.A Mayorova . She worked as an economist-planner and at other households. work. In 1937 she was again arrested by the NKVD. Jan 7 1938 Military collegium Upper. USSR court sentenced her to 25 years in prison. She served time in the Yaroslavl and Oryol prisons. 11 Sept. 1941 by the verdict of the Military. board of the top. courts of the USSR shot. In 1990 she was rehabilitated in the case of 1941, in 1992 in the cases of 1918, 1923, 1924, 1937.
The materials of the article by Ya.V. Leontiev in the book: Politicians of Russia 1917. Biographical Dictionary are used. Moscow, 1993
Terrorist woman condemning terror
Spiridonova Maria Alexandrovna (1884-1941) - one of the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. In 1906, she killed the suppressor of peasant uprisings in the Tambov province G.N. Luzhenovsky. She was convicted and exiled to eternal hard labor, where she stayed until 1917. After the February Revolution, she was one of the organizers of the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
In 1917-1918. - Member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, participant of the III-V Congresses of Soviets. She broke with the Bolsheviks, in particular, because of their stakes on the "Red Terror". After the suppression of the Left SR rebellion in Moscow, she withdrew from political activity. She claimed that the terror used by her party before the revolution was a means of struggle for the oppressed and freedom-seeking masses. But the "Red Terror" used by the Bolsheviks after they seized power is the unjustified terror of the victors against their own people (Rodina, 1990, No. 5, p. 52).
N. Bukharin, who did not share her views, many of which turned out to be more accurate than Bukharin's, said of Spiridonova that he "never doubted her subjective honesty." She was shot in the Oryol prison among 154 political prisoners shortly before the occupation of the city of Orel by the Nazis. Rehabilitated posthumously.
Materials of the book were used: Torchinov V.A., Leontyuk A.M. around Stalin. Historical and biographical reference book. St. Petersburg, 2000
Compositions:
Letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, P. 1818;
From the memoirs of Nerchinskaya penal servitude, M, 1926.
Literature:
Vladimirov V. Left SRs in 1817-1818. "Span. Revolution", 1927, N 4;
Steinberg I.Z, M. Spirelonova. London, 1935;
Gusev KD, Socialist-Revolutionary Mother of God, M, 1992;
Bezberezhyev S. V. Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova // Russia at the turn of the century: Historical portraits. M. 1991.
Born in 1884, Tambov; Russian; higher;
Exiled.
Lived: Ufa.
Sentence: 25 years in prison zakl.
SPIRIDONOV MARIA ALEKSANDROVNA
(b. 1884 - d. 1941)
One of the leaders of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party, a terrorist, a participant in the October Revolution. By decision of the Tambov Committee of the Social Revolutionaries, she carried out the sentence, mortally wounding the gendarmerie colonel G. N. Luzhenovsky. Of the 57 years of her life, she spent 34 years in tsarist and Soviet prisons, in hard labor and in exile. Rehabilitated in 1992.
“A girl, the purest creature, with a beautiful soul - without pity, with the stubborn cruelty of the beast, puts five bullets into a person! .. They were brought to this, life brought them, with gradualness, terrible in its invisibility. Here it is - the movement; we all live and act not as people, but as political units without a soul, and execute, and kill, and plunder the country in the name of its good. Everything is allowed - the end justifies the means. These are the words of the unknown author of the article “Victim of the Provincial Revolution”, dedicated to the female terrorist and future victim of terror M. Spiridonova.
Maria was born on October 16, 1884 in Tambov in the noble family of Alexander Alexandrovich and Alexandra Yakovlevna Spiridonov. They were quite wealthy people, they had their own house, cottage and parquet factory. The mother devoted all her attention to five children. My father worked as an accountant in a bank and earned decent money. Marusya was a favorite in the family and from an early age her parents had high hopes for her: kind, sympathetic, generous, independent, who did not tolerate injustice, she could give everything she had to the needy, at the age of five she learned to read and write on her own - without help governesses and teachers. In the gymnasium, she immediately became the best student, but she was also known as a rare minx. In addition, she openly protested against the regime and soullessness that reigned in the gymnasium, constantly defending her human rights.
The patience of the administration was not unlimited. In the eighth grade, Maria was expelled from the gymnasium with such a characteristic that she could not continue her studies and intensively took up her own education. And besides, in 1902, his father died, and the large family quickly became impoverished. The girl had to look for a job, and she got a job in the office of the Tambov noble assembly, showed herself well and was on good terms with her colleagues. Smart, able to easily, beautifully, intelligibly and strongly express her thoughts, she attracted people to her. This ability of Spiridonova was used by comrades in the party of socialist revolutionaries (SRs) when they sent her to workers' circles. Here she was very loved and appreciated as an intelligent and educated comrade. She was especially attracted by her decisiveness, clarity of understanding of the thought being interpreted, and her ability to defend and prove the strength and significance of the idea. Maria knew how to subordinate people to her influence, she could captivate anyone, so strong was the impression that she left in people.
For participation in the revolutionary demonstrations of 1905, Maria first went to prison. Spiridonova came into the revolution with a heightened sense of injustice, with a halo of revolutionary romance, with the belief that socialist transformations would create a humane society. And for this, all means are good. Even terror.
For four days, Spiridonova hunted for her victim, spending the night at railway stations in order to enforce the decision of the Tambov organization of the Social Revolutionaries - to kill the Black Hundreds G. N. Luzhenovsky, who led the most brutal punitive expeditions in the villages in her native Tambov region. On January 16, 1906, she overtook him at the railway station in Borisoglebsk. The murderer, swollen with fat, finally went out onto the platform to stretch his legs. Of course, he was carefully guarded by the Cossacks, but no one paid attention to Mary. A tiny flirty creature in a gymnasium uniform, a chestnut braid to the knees, blue eyes shooting mischievous demons, a fashionable hat and a fur muff with browning. She chose a convenient place - the carriage platform, and fired the first shot. She jumped to the ground and fired again. The resulting commotion allowed her to fire three more bullets. And all five hit the target: two - in the stomach, two - in the chest, one - in the arm. According to Spiridonova, who described the assassination attempt in her famous letter published on February 12, 1906 in the Rus newspaper, she did not feel any excitement at the time of the shots fired at Luzhenovsky. “Since I,” she wrote, “was very calm, I was not afraid not to hit, although I had to rush over the Cossack’s shoulder; I fired as long as I could." The calmness with which the girl describes the throwing of a wounded victim is also striking. “After the first shot, Luzhenovsky squatted down, grabbed his stomach and began to rush in the direction from me, along the platform. At that time, I ran from the platform of the car to the platform and quickly, over and over again, changing the target every second, fired three more bullets. For revolutionaries like Spiridonova, Luzhenovsky and other "stranglers of people's freedom" were non-humans to be destroyed.
The girl saved the sixth bullet for herself, and if not for her cry: “Here I am. Shoot me! ... ”- and the gun at the temple, Maria, in an atmosphere of general panic and confusion, simply would not have been noticed. But she was preparing for this act and departure from life consciously and did not see salvation for herself. Maria did not have time to pull the trigger. They beat her terribly, with rifle butts and boots. A small body was dragged along the platform, along the steps, swinging, thrown into a sled, unconsciously brought to the police department, stripped naked. In the ice chamber, two of Luzhenovsky's guards, Avramov and Zhdanov, began torturing him. They beat me with whips, ripped off the exfoliating skin, cauterized bloody wounds with cigarette butts. Not a single cry for mercy. Coming to her senses, she confessed that she had carried out her death sentence. Spiridonova was not going to hide anything about herself, but she discovered that she had forgotten her last name - she called herself a seventh grade student of the gymnasium Maria Alexandrova. The executioners were so zealous that the doctors examining her after interrogation were horrified. Her face is a bloody mask, almost all her teeth are knocked out, her left eye is practically blind, her lungs are beaten off, she is deaf in her right ear, her whole body is a continuous wound. Avramov, confident in his impunity, while transporting a mutilated, exhausted prisoner to a Tambov prison, abused her.
Spiridonova survived, probably only through the prayers of the peasants, who lit candles for her health in all churches when they learned that their executioner had died after suffering for 40 days. On April 11, Avramov was killed, on May 6, Zhdanov. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party assumed responsibility for eliminating these scoundrels. This happened after the meeting of the military district court, which passed the sentence on Spiridonova on March 11, 1906 - the death penalty by hanging. But numerous newspaper publications that revealed the reasons for the terrorist act, and the publicized information about the atrocities and bullying committed against her, forced the court to change the sentence to indefinite imprisonment in Nerchinsk penal servitude.
Maria, who was preparing for death, was so shocked by such "humanity" that she decided to die on her own. Many researchers point to this. V. Golovanov, in particular, claims that the girl “really wished for death, on a meeting with her sister she asked not to appeal to the court, arguing that her death was necessary for the happiness of the people. The initial sentence - the death penalty by hanging - satisfied her, she again told her sister that death would be the best end for her - "before her thoughts were far from the questions of life, from the possibility of living and working further." The replacement of the death sentence with hard labor was a blow to her ... ”Only a categorical order from friends in the party forced the prisoner to change her mind. Contributed to this and a novel by correspondence with Vladimir Volsky. Enthusiastic love letters, which he initially sent to Mary on the recommendation of the party, almost grew into serious feelings of two strangers. They demanded dates, and Vladimir was even ready to marry. The prison authorities did not allow their rapprochement, arguing that Volsky's first marriage was not annulled, although his wife left him four years ago. The failed spouses met only in May 1917. They turned out to be so different people that they did not even find common topics for conversation.
Spiridonova perked up. “Don't you know that I am of the breed of those who laugh at the cross. The future does not frighten me: it is not important for me, the triumph of the idea is more important, ”she wrote at will. Her journey from the transit prison in Moscow to Nerchinsk was triumphant. Crowds of workers surrounded the train at every stop. The guards were forced to attend impromptu rallies. Spiridonova spoke to people simply and powerfully, but, returning to the carriage, she collapsed exhausted and choked with blood.
Three times the Social Revolutionaries tried to organize the escape of Spiridonova, but unsuccessfully. She was released in March 1917 by order of the Minister of Justice A.F. Kerensky and began active political work in Chita. In May she arrived in Moscow, where she began to play one of the main roles among the Left Social Revolutionaries. Having joined the Organizing Bureau of the left wing of the party, she worked in the Petrograd organization, spoke in military units, among workers, calling for an end to the war, the transfer of land to the peasants, and the authorities to the Soviets, collaborated in the newspaper Land and Freedom, was the editor of the magazine Our Way ", was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper" Banner of Labor "; making policy statements. Maria Alexandrovna was actively involved in the political struggle of that time. She became one of the organizers of the Left SR party. She was elected deputy chairman of the Central Committee. With the support of the Bolsheviks, Spiridonova served as chairman of the II and III Congresses of Soviets of Peasants' Deputies, was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. Her party, together with the Bolsheviks, carried out the October Revolution, and on many important political issues she supported their positions.
But in the period from May to July 1918, in her public speeches, Spiridonova strongly condemned the foreign and domestic policy of the Council of People's Commissars, criticized the agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks, saying that the socialization of the land was being replaced by nationalization. Together with Kamkov, she negotiated with members of the executive committee of the "Revolutionary International Socialist Organization of Foreign Workers and Peasants" on the issue of organizing an anti-German uprising in Ukraine. On June 24, she chaired a meeting of the Central Committee, which decided “in the interests of the Russian and international revolution to put an end to the so-called. respite" and "for this purpose, to organize a series of terrorist acts against the most prominent representatives of German imperialism."
In addition, as soon as Spiridonova realized that the Decrees on Land were fundamentally different from the programs of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, for which the peasants came to the revolution, she approved the armed uprising against the Bolsheviks, took an active part in it and took upon herself the organization of another high-profile terrorist act - the murder of the ambassador Germany of Count von Mirbach, which went down in the history of world terrorism. In this case, Spiridonova herself, together with other members of the party, only pronounced the verdict and prepared the operation. It was carried out by Yakov Blyumkin and Nikolai Andreev, both Socialist-Revolutionaries and members of the Cheka. This murder, which initially played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, completely untied their hands. The uprising was put down. The Left SRs shared the fate of the previously defeated Cadets, the Right SRs and other factions. In fact, a one-party system was established in the country.
Spiridonova was arrested on July 6, 1918 at the Fifth Congress of Soviets. From that day on, life for her became a continuous series of conclusions, surveillance and exile. The first arrests were more like isolation: imprisoned - frightened - released - surveillance. At large, she did not stop propaganda activities against the Bolsheviks. She did not hide her thoughts: she compared the government with the gendarmerie, she called the “young commissars” scoundrels strangling the people. During another arrest in November 1918, she wrote a frank letter to the Central Committee of Communist Party (b) condemning the positions of the Bolsheviks. “Your policy objectively turned out to be some kind of complete swindle of the working people. Either you don't understand the principle of workers' power, or you don't recognize it. In the name of the working class, unheard-of abominations are being perpetrated on the same workers, peasants, sailors and frightened townsfolk. Your counter-revolutionary conspiracies, who would be afraid of them if you yourself did not become related to the counter-revolution. Her speeches to the workers were even more frank and forced them to think about the current situation in the country.
For dissent, Spiridonova was accused in February 1919 of counter-revolutionary agitation and slander against the Soviet government. "Sanatoriums", psychiatric hospitals of the Cheka, where she was placed under the name "Onufriyeva", completely undermined the woman's health. This forced isolation of Spiridonova became one of the first precedents for the use of punitive medicine. Maria Alexandrovna was unable to endure violence against her freedom and personality. Her life turned into a continuous nightmare of visions of violence, which she experienced in the royal prisons. For three months Spiridonova practically did not sleep, then she refused to eat - 14 days of a dry hunger strike. Party comrades, B. Kamkov and A. Izmailovich (a friend in exile) watched in horror as she tried to die. Only a strong instinct of self-preservation brought the weakened organism out of the darkness of non-existence.
But the Bolsheviks were also afraid of Spiridonov, who was shattered by tuberculosis, scurvy, and a hunger strike, although in fact Maria Alexandrovna “disarmed”. “Since 1922, I have considered the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party dead. In 1923-1924, this is already agony. And without hope of resurrection, because the workers and peasant masses will not succumb to any slogans of the most seductive nature, ”she wrote later. But since Spiridonova did not know how to hide her opinion and always spoke openly about all the shortcomings, for the Soviet government she became an enemy, but a famous enemy - it was difficult to destroy the old revolutionary, the terrorist who fought against tsarism.
Since May 1923, Maria Alexandrovna became a political exile. She lived and worked in Samarkand, but was not involved in political activities. She wrote a book about the Nerchinsk penal servitude, which was published in the journal "Katorga and exile" and published as a separate edition. At this time, Spiridonova again felt young and energetic - love finally appeared in her life. She "found a beloved friend and husband." Ilya Andreyevich Mayorov, a former member of the Central Committee of the Left SRs, the author of the law on the socialization of the land, was also exiled. They lived together and tried not to notice the constant surveillance. Spiridonova knew that every word she said, every meeting became known to the Cheka.
Donations piled up. In September, he was again arrested, charged with links to foreign Left SR groups and exiled - now to Ufa. Here Spiridonova worked as a senior inspector of the credit-planning department of the Bashkir office of the State Bank, she worked around the house to ensure a tolerable life for her husband, his son and elderly father. She also managed to send modest parcels to distressed friends, in the past to her like-minded people.
At this time, Spiridonova was still among the most popular women of those years. At a rally in 1924 in Berlin, the famous German anarchist E. Goldman called her "one of the most courageous and noble women that the revolutionary movement knew." And in Paris, even a committee appeared, which set itself the goal of moving Spiridonova to France, but they failed to snatch the "Socialist-Revolutionary Mother of God" from the clutches of the Cheka. Despite numerous petitions, she was denied permission to travel abroad. L. D. Trotsky told K. Zetkin, who was worried about the health of the revolutionary, that Spiridonova “poses a danger to the Soviet government,” and many even doubted the stability of her psyche. Thus, the well-known English diplomat R. Lockhart, who was an eyewitness to Spiridonova’s speech at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets (1918), wrote: “The focused fanatical look of her eyes testified that the suffering she endured was reflected in her psyche. As a political activist, she was not restrained, not businesslike, but she was very popular. This was also confirmed by N.I. Bukharin, describing a case of the same time. According to him, they drove past workers clearing snow along the tram lines. On a wave of "gr. Spiridonova took out a Browning and began to wave it threateningly. It was with great difficulty that I had to restrain her, telling her: “What are you doing, is it possible?” He also described her behavior at rallies: “All her speeches were like hysterical cries, she stamped her foot, screamed hysterically ... The atmosphere was extremely difficult reminiscent of scenes from Dostoevsky.
Spiridonova's psychological breakdown was clearly present, and the more terrible she was for the Bolsheviks. For Maria Alexandrovna, the last round of the "circles of hell" began. In the terrible year of 1937, Spiridonova fully appreciated what state terror against her people meant, about which she warned back in 1918. Now she was charged with preparing an assassination attempt on K.E. Voroshilov and all members of the government of Bashkiria, the leadership of the non-existent "All-Union Counter-Revolutionary Organization", sabotage, the development of terrorist acts against the leaders of the state, including I.V. Stalin. There were 31 people involved in the case. Many could not stand the torture and gave false testimony. "Broken" and the husband of Spiridonova.
“Show humanity and kill immediately,” the woman, exhausted by illnesses, demanded. But the investigators continued to subtly mock, demanding confessions. The interrogations continued for two or three days without a break, they were not allowed to sit down. Spiridonova's legs turned into black and purple logs. Finding that beatings scared her less than body searches, they searched her ten times a day. They found the most vulnerable spot - even from the first arrest, she could hardly endure the touch of other people's hands on her body. But the warden carefully felt her completely.
On November 13, 1937, after a 9-month imprisonment, Spiridonova sent an open letter to the secret department of the NKVD (more than 100 sheets in a typewritten copy). She did not write in order to "dodge the butt." She tried to explain with some kind of confessional sincerity that the “case of the Socialist-Revolutionaries” is nothing but a fabricated “farce on the theme of “The Taming of the Shrew””, that absolutely innocent people who have long since retired from the political struggle are suffering. Spiridonova made it clear that no bullying would force her to give false testimony. She called her investigator "a ferret, a mixture of non-commissioned officer Prishibeev and Khlestakov, a fascist and a White Guard."
Maria Alexandrovna hated lies, and if she felt guilty, she would frankly admit it, since she almost completely recognized the policy of the Soviet government, the new political system and the Stalinist Constitution of 1936. “And by the way, I am a greater friend of the Soviet government than tens of millions of the townsfolk. And a passionate and active friend. Although he has the courage to have his own opinion. I think you are doing better than I would." Spiridonova remained the same ideological romantic as she was in 1906.
Such frank confessions did not change her fate. Thinking, convinced people frightened the authorities, were "enemies of the people." Spiridonova was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The completely deaf woman did not hear her sentence. She served time in the Oryol prison. On September 11, 1941, M. A. Spiridonova, her husband I. A. Mayorov and 155 prisoners were shot in the Medvedev forest on another charge of “malicious defeatist and treacherous agitation”. The fascist troops were approaching Orel, and the Chekists carefully dug out the trees, dumped the bodies into the pits and planted the trees again from above, restoring the turf. So far, the place of her burial has not been found. The forest keeps the peace of the terrorist and terror victim Maria Spiridonova. She lived, fought and died as a fighter for a social idea, without realizing that not all ideas require sacrifice, and a bright future cannot be mixed with blood.
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Spiridonova Maria Alexandrovna - (1884-1941) - Russian political activist of the early 20th century, one of the leaders of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
Born October 16, 1884 in Tambov in a noble family, the daughter of a collegiate adviser, Spiridonova already in the gymnasium joined the work of the Tambov Socialist-Revolutionary organization. In 1902, having left the 8th grade (possibly expelled for political unreliability), she worked as a clerk in the provincial noble assembly. Since 1905, a member of the fighting squad; at the same time she was arrested for the first time for participating in an anti-government demonstration.
Revolutionary socialism is the yardstick by which all acts of the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries must be marked...
Spiridonova Maria Alexandrovna
On January 16, 1906, by decision of the Tambov Committee of the Social Revolutionaries, she committed a terrorist act, mortally wounding a gendarmerie colonel, head of the security detachment G.N. Luzhenovsky, a pacifier of peasant unrest in the Tambov province. At the police station, she was stripped naked, tortured, and then abused by officers in the train car on the way to Tambov. The case of Spiridonova received public outcry and international publicity. On March 12, 1906, the Moscow Military District Court sentenced her to death by hanging, which was replaced by indefinite hard labor; she served her time in Akatuy and Nerchinsk. After the February Revolution of 1917, she was released by order of the Minister of Justice A.F. Kerensky.
After that, Spiridonova organized a Socialist-Revolutionary Committee in Chita, which stood on the positions of internationalism and maximalism. Until mid-May 1917, she took part in the work of the Chita Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. On May 13, after Spiridonova's speech, the executive committee of this Council decided to liquidate the Nerchinsk penal servitude, where she had previously been.
May 31 arrived in Moscow as a delegate of the Trans-Baikal region. at the 3rd Congress of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Having become a member of the organizational bureau of the left wing of the party, she worked in its Petrograd organization, spoke in military units, among workers, calling for an end to the war, to transfer land to the peasants, and power to the Soviets. She collaborated with the newspapers "Land and Freedom", "Znamya Labor", was the editor of the magazine "Our Way".
In August 1917, the Council of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party included Spiridonova in the list of mandatory candidates for elections to the Constituent Assembly. During the rebellion, L.G. Kornilova tried to establish contact with the Social Democrats, criticized the position of her party, publicly declaring that the salvation of the revolution was in the transfer of power to the workers and peasants.
In September 1917 she was elected a delegate to the Petrograd Soviet. She participated in the work of the Democratic Conference, condemning the coalition with the Cadets ("Down with the coalition, and long live the power of the people and the revolution!"). As a representative of the Council of Peasants' Deputies (elected in the early summer of 1917), she entered the Pre-Parliament (Provisional Council of the Russian Republic), was elected a member of the Petrograd City Duma
During the days of the October Revolution she was in Petrograd, on October 25-26 she attended a meeting of the II Congress of Soviets. According to N.K. Krupskaya, “a couple of hours before the opening of the congress,” V.I. Lenin tried to convince her to enter the government, but was refused. Considering it possible to cooperate with the Bolsheviks, since they are “followed by a mass that has been brought out of a state of stagnation,” Spiridonova considered the influence of the Bolsheviks on this mass to be temporary. A noblewoman by birth, she justified the anger of the people "only during barricade battles." At the II Congress she was elected to the Presidium, worked in the peasant section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Russia. Writer John Reed called her "the most popular and influential woman in Russia."
This amazing woman was one of those who, until October 1917, were called frantic fighters for the people's happiness. Of those who longed for the overthrow of the autocracy and - the revolution, after which Russia will finally gain freedom. But when the desired happened, her fiery comrades-in-arms immediately put her in prison and kept her there for almost a quarter of a century. Before being shot...
For four days she hunted for her victim, spending the night at railway stations, where, according to the assumption, the train carrying the provincial councilor Gavrila Luzhenovsky could stop. The adviser, of course, will go out on the platform to stretch his legs, and then ... Maria was convinced that even if he was in the crowd, she would be able to get closer - well, who would suspect a pretty schoolgirl of anything? And indeed: a rosy-cheeked baby from the frost in a coquettish hat walks around, in appearance it’s still a girl, if not for a chestnut braid to the knees. From her, and from her mischievous, teasing look, an experienced man could immediately understand: uh, my friend, what kind of child is this? Young lady! And she's got some pretty, you know, playful fantasies in her head...
She overtook Luzhenovsky at the Borisoglebsk railway station. He stood on the platform, surrounded by accompanying Cossacks. Maria chose a more comfortable place - the platform of the car, took a revolver from the fur clutch and fired. She jumped to the ground and fired again. The resulting commotion allowed her to fire three more bullets. And all five - to the target: two - to the adviser's stomach, two - to the chest, one - to the hand. Saved six for myself. However, as soon as she brought the barrel to her temple, one of the guards stunned her with a powerful blow.
First they beat her with gun butts, then they grabbed her by the legs and dragged her, which caused skirts and other clothes to slide down to her armpits, completely exposing her body. A cab was called, and the Cossack officer Avramov, winding his scythe around his arm, lifted the captive into the air and threw him into the sleigh.
She, stunned, was brought to the police department, stripped naked and thrown on the stone floor of a cold cell. Here Avramov and the assistant bailiff Zhdanov tortured her until midnight: they whipped her with whips until the skin peeled off, which was then torn off in pieces and burned the wounds with burning cigarettes, the heels of their boots fell on the feet of stiffened legs ... They found out a little: she called herself a student of the 7th grade of Tambov of the women's gymnasium Maria Alexandrova, who executed the death sentence pronounced by the Luzhenovsky Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party for the criminal notching and torturing of peasants during the riots.
It was decided that same night to send the terrorist to Tambov, to the provincial prison. They literally loaded her into the car - she did not regain consciousness, she was delirious. Podsaul Avramov locked himself in the compartment with the girl, posting guards in the corridor and explaining to his subordinates that he would continue the investigation. And therefore, they say, if screams are heard, do not pay attention. But no one heard the cries - reason did not return to the exhausted, crippled prisoner, and, taking advantage of this, the drunken guard caressed her until dawn: he hugged her hips, kissed her, felt her groin and stroked her breasts, whispered banal nonsense. And in the end - raped. Then, later, Maria complained to the prison doctor: they say she found signs of syphilis in herself. The doctor, having examined the reddened rash, reassured: “You made a mistake ...”
The news that on January 16, 1906, an attempt was made on the life of the provincial secretary Luzhenovsky was published by many newspapers. It was reported that Maria Spiridonova (her real name was revealed), a socialist-revolutionary, from a wealthy noble family, in the past the first student of the gymnasium, 21 years old and three months old, was in a terrible condition. The face is a bloody mask. And, as she herself says, “My head hurts a lot, my memory has weakened, it is difficult to express thoughts logically, my chest hurts, sometimes there is blood in my throat. One eye doesn't see anything". The right ear was deaf. There is no living area on the body, only scars and bruises.
Luzhenovsky did not survive. In April, unknown avengers finished off Avramov, in May - Zhdanov. Socialist-Revolutionaries took responsibility for eliminating the villains. They also decided to provide moral support to Maria Alexandrovna, who was awaiting trial - Vladimir Volsky, imprisoned in the same provincial prison, a socialist-revolutionary from hereditary nobles, on the advice of his comrades from the outside, suddenly began to send her ardent love letters, probably he himself inspired himself that he was crazy about Maria . His messages were filled with passion, languor of heart, romantic admiration and tender dreams of the hour when they, undoubtedly created for each other, would unite in a tremulous embrace. Most likely, she also believed in this, and a reciprocal feeling responsively flashed in her soul. Spiridonova asked her superiors to meet with Vladimir, while Volsky applied for permission to marry. Of course, they were refused, citing the fact that Volsky was already married, and his energetic oaths that his wife had left him for four years had no weight.
It is curious: they met eleven years later, in May 1917, and ... did not experience the same attraction. They were two completely alien people, indifferent to each other.
But back to the beginning of the century, in Tambov. The investigation was completed, and the military district court sentenced Spiridonova to death by hanging. However, oddly enough, it was he who found mitigating circumstances and unexpectedly replaced the gallows with indefinite hard labor in Nerchinsk. The way there ran through the Pugachev tower of the Butyrka prison in Moscow, where other desperate social revolutionaries were also kept - each of them, in different parts of the empire, for some reason, without fail, encroached on the governor. But, perhaps, liberal newspapers wrote so enthusiastically only about Spiridonova: “You are a symbol of still young, rebellious, struggling, selfless Russia. And this is all the greatness, all the beauty of your dear image.
She tried three times to escape from hard labor - to no avail! She was released by A. Kerensky, Minister of Justice of the Provisional Government, on March 3, 1917. Eleven years later, she returned to the capital and to active politics, became close to Lenin, which N. Krupskaya later recalled: “Some room in Smolny ... Spiridonova is sitting on one of the dark red sofas, Ilyich is sitting next to her and somehow gently and passionately convinces her of something.” The famous and authoritative Social Revolutionary Spiridonova often supported the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks supported her. But she categorically did not accept the way they acted, which she did not hesitate to openly declare in an indignant letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. You, she argued, have perverted our revolution! Your policy is a complete swindle of the working people! Your numerous bureaucracy will devour more than the bourgeoisie! Maria Alexandrovna was indignant, unheard of abominations are being committed against the workers, peasants, sailors and the frightened layman!
The answer to the furious denunciations was the hasty decision of the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, dated November 27, 1918: to subject M.A. Spiridonova to imprisonment for one year. True, two days later, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, considering her "special services to the revolution," announced an amnesty. An attempt to calm down the inflexible convict failed, she continued to speak temperamentally at workers' meetings. A summary of her speech at the Duks plant, made by some employee of the Cheka for a report upstairs, has been preserved: “The workers are strangled, bound hand and foot, forced to obey decrees issued by a bunch of shady faces headed by Lenin and Trotsky... All commissars are bastards, fattening on crazy salaries. Rogues sign up for the Communist Party in order to get the best rations, the best clothes, galoshes...” And each accusation, honestly noted the Chekist, caused noisy applause.
Naturally, Spiridonova was again arrested, now - "for counter-revolutionary agitation and slander of the Soviet government." The Revolutionary Tribunal decided: to isolate her for a year "by means of confinement to a sanatorium."
The sanatorium turned out to be a narrow corner at the guardhouse in ... The Kremlin, damp and dank, sentries almost every minute looked at the prisoner: is she sitting? Lies? Attached to the bucket out of natural necessity? This did not bother them either, and the detainee, too. But the thick, suffocating smoke of the mahr, bursting into the nook when the door was flung open, plunged her into a prolonged cough. Maria Alexandrovna resumed copious hemoptysis - blood simply poured from her mouth non-stop. In addition, her hands were numb, her legs did not obey, she was terribly cold. The men from the guardhouse became worried: “Amba! He's leaving now!" - and called the paramedic. She called the orderlies, and the dying Maria found herself briefly in the hospital.
She was lucky - with the help of a compassionate, from the Ryazan peasants, the guard fled. She hid in Moscow for a year and a half, but it was only a short respite. The GPU, according to Spiridonova's bitter confession, did not let her out of their clutches. When she, stricken with typhoid fever, but who managed to hand over to her party comrades a list of safe addresses, manuscripts of evil articles and ciphers, was again arrested, punitive sanctions followed one after another. Spiridonova was put in a psychiatric hospital under the name of “Onufriev” and created such an unbearable situation that she began to cloud her mind. In order not to break, she announced a two-week dry hunger strike and lay motionless with a emaciated face and eyes frozen in an expression of longing and horror. The doctors said she was dying. And only then she was released under the condition: from now on - no articles for underground newspapers, no politics! No public speaking! From now on, Spiridonova should deal only with her own health, undermined by typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy and nervous breakdown. Appropriate conditions will be created for it.
Maria Alexandrovna was sent to Malakhovka near Moscow along with her longtime and faithful friend in hard labor A. Izmailovich. For two, according to the inventory, they had: two old skirts, one old wadded trousers, one torn jacket, two old padded jackets, one wadded blanket, a knitted hat, one torn towel, an enameled plate and two iron mugs, three wooden spoons, one pan... They lived from hand to mouth, but under the clear supervision of the local Cheka, which was accumulating "compromising evidence" against them. Unfortunate women should know that the impoverished “Malakhovsky seat” will very soon seem like paradise to them.
However, fate gave Spiridonova and a short joy - in Samarkand, where she and A. Izmailovich were sent without trial, Maria Alexandrovna found a “beloved friend and husband”, married Ilya Andreevich Mayorov, a member of the Central Committee of the Left Social Revolutionaries. Member of the Collegium of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, author of the draft law on the socialization of land, he was also repressed for disagreeing with the methods of collectivization. The two persecuted formed a family, which included Mayorov's old father, the 17-year-old son of Ilya Andreevich, as well as two helpless friends of Spiridonova - former political convicts. Maiorov somehow did not gravitate towards family chores, all the worries about feeding, about clothes and shoes were taken over by Maria Alexandrovna, who also managed to send parcels to needy like-minded people: jam - to Suzdal, raisins - to Solovki, money - to Kazan and Tula. .. From God knows where the energy that came from, drowning out sticky diseases, helped her spin like a squirrel in a wheel. It seems that she once again felt young, desirable, the only one, because there was the closest person nearby, who seemed not to notice how she was decrepit ... I think she was grateful to him for this “myopia”. And in Ufa (now they were exiled here) she got two jobs, not only on holidays to buy forgotten white bread, milk, sugar.
When in February 1937 they were all arrested again, the investigator, not without malice, told Maria Alexandrovna that a significant amount of money had been confiscated from Mayorov - he hid odd jobs from his wife. This did not offend her, did not anger her - such a trifle in comparison with the torture to which she was subjected in the prison of the Bashkir NKVD, accusing her of preparing an attempt on Voroshilov. The interrogations continued for two or three days without a break, with swearing and assault. They were not allowed to sit down, which is why Spiridonova's legs turned into something log-like, black and purple, and did not fit into boots. Seeing how unpleasant personal searches were for her, they searched her incessantly - the warder even climbed into the anus and into the vagina and looked for something there with a clumsy finger.
Once they arranged a confrontation with Mayorov and read aloud his confession: yes, he was plotting a terrorist attack against Stalin, and Spiridonova knew about it. It was a monstrous absurdity, none of them had ever had such an idea.
Ah, Ilyusha! she whispered reproachfully. - It would be better if you cheated on me with a dozen women, with a whole harem, and not like this ... What a low fall!
She had no idea that her husband made a fantastic “confession” under torture by rats.
In early January of the following year, the military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR approved the sentence: M. A. Spiridonova - 25 years in prison, Mayorov - 10 years. Maria Alexandrovna did not hear the verdict - she went deaf.
The historian V. Lavrov, who today traced her life path according to archival documents and for the first time compiled an impressive book of horrors from them, cites terrible testimonies: on September 11, 1941, the prisoner M. Spiridonova, held in the Oryol prison of the NKVD, was “transported to a special room where specially selected persons from among the personnel of the prison put a cloth gag in the convict's mouth, tied it with a rag so that he could not push it out. Then she was told: “In the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ... Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova ... subject to the highest measure of punishment - execution without confiscation of property for lack thereof.”
On that day, 157 similar sentences were heard. 157 people (including I. A. Mayorov) were taken by trucks to the Medvedev forest, which is ten kilometers from Orel, to which the Germans were approaching. On the eve of the Chekists dug up trees with roots here. The executed were shoved into the pits that had formed, trees were placed on top, earth was poured in and tamped ...
The burial site has not yet been found.