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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.

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(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.