Maria Spiridonova
was born in Tambov in 1885. While training as a nurse she joined the
Socialist Revolutionary Party.
During
the 1905 Revolution the police brutally
suppressed a peasant uprising. In January, 1906, Spiridonova assassinated
Police Inspector Luzhenovsky who had ordered the attack. After her
arrest she was beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted.
Spiridonova
was found guilty of murder she was sent to Akatui in Siberia.
On her release she once again became active in the Socialist
Revolutionary Party and in March, 1917, blew up Chita Prison.
A member
of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party
(LSR) she supported the October Revolution.
She was elected to the Constituent Assembly but it was closed down
by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
In July,
1918, Spiridonova led a LSR anti-Bolshevik
rising. Maria Spiridonova was captured and spent over twenty years
in Siberia before she was shot in 1941.
(1)
Morgan Philips Price, My Three Revolutions
(1969)
Next day
the Congress met again. The Left S.R. delegates turned up. They had
come to stage another violent onslaught on the Bolsheviks and the
Government, the last, as it turned out, before they adopted other
methods. The business of the morning was a report by the Chairman,
Sverdlov, on the activities of the Government. He described in some
detail the methods now being adopted to secure food from the villages
in North and Central Russia. Committees of Poor Peasants had been
formed in the villages to obtain food deliveries from the more well-to-do
peasants.
"Leave
it to the free peasants to form their own communes inspired with revolutionary
enthusiasm,' cried Marie Spiridonova, that Valkyrie of the Russian
Revolution. Pale, and with a savage look on her face, she proceeded
to deliver an absolute Philippic against the Soviet Government and
all its works. One realized now that, if this romantic revolutionary
enthusiasm from the past could not be tamed, the Revolution would
go down in chaos. When Spiridonova sat down, roars of applause came
from the whole Left SR membership, the Bolsheviks sitting silent.
Then the Left S.R.s all rose and left the Congress, this time for
good. Sverdlov then adjourned the Congress till the afternoon.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
