page_title: Maria Spiridonova
section_title: Revolt against Bolshevism
hierarchical_section_title: Maria Spiridonova / Biography / Left SR leader / Revolt against Bolshevism
caption_attribution_description: English: Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova Русский: Мария Спиридонова — российская революционерка, одна из руководителей партии левых эсеров.
context_page_description: Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova was a Narodnik-inspired Russian revolutionary. In 1906, as a novice member of a local combat group of the Tambov Socialists-Revolutionaries, she assassinated a security official. Her subsequent abuse by police earned her enormous popularity with the opponents of Tsarism throughout the empire and even abroad.
  After spending over 11 years in Siberian prisons she was freed after the February Revolution of 1917, and returned to European Russia as a heroine of the destitute, and especially of the peasants. She was the only woman other than Alexandra Kollontai to play a truly important role during the Russian Revolution, leading the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to initially side with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and then to break with them.
  From 1918 on, she was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, briefly detained in a mental sanitarium, sent into internal exile, and finally shot in 1941. A successful campaign was run to discredit her name and portray her as a hysterical extremist, and she was "forced into oblivion". In 1958, when publishing the fourth volume of A History of Socialist Thought, G.D.H.
context_section_description: The honeymoon between Spiridonova (and the Left SRs generally) and the Bolsheviks was short-lived. Late in the spring of 1918 Bolshevik military detachments were formed to conduct forced requisitions of grain in a desperate effort to stave off famine in the cities amidst economic collapse. "The brutal Bolshevik grain-procurement policy and the devastating impact on the peasantry of the Soviet government's vast territorial and increasingly onerous economic concessions to Imperial Germany" caused widespread discontent in the countryside and the Peasant Section of the VTsIK was overwhelmed with complaints and protests. As head of the Section, Spiridonova was especially aware of the deepening misery of peasants throughout the country. Unity between Left SRs and Bolsheviks turned to rivalry over the future of the revolution and a competition ensued for control of the 5th Congress of Soviets, scheduled to begin in Moscow on 4 July 1918. 
  Historian Alexander Rabinowitch summarized the prelude to what he would later term "the suicide of the Left SRs" in his work on the first year of Soviet rule in Petrograd:
  By this time popular disenchantment with Bolshevik rule was already well advanced, not only in rural but also in urban Russia. The primary beneficiaries of this nationwide grass-roots shift of public opinion were the Left SRs. During the second half of June 1918, it was an open question which of the two parties would have a majority at the Fifth All-Russians Congress of Soviets [...]
  In this altogether uncertain and fluid situation, the Left SR Central Committee, at a meeting on 24 June chaired by Spiridonova, resolved to employ terrorism against high German officials, if necessary, to provoke immediate termination of the Brest treaty. In the evening of 4 July, virtually from the moment the Fifth Congress of Soviets opened in Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, it was clear to the Left SRs that the Bolsheviks had effectively "fabricated" a sizeable majority in the congress and consequently, that there was no hope whatever of utilizing it to force a fundamental change in the government's pro-German, antipeasant policies. Spiridonova and her colleagues now concluded that resolute action outside the congress along the line sanctioned by the Left SR Central Committee on 24 June was unavoidable.
  — Alexander Rabinovitch, 'Maria Spiridonova's "Last Testament";' The Russian Review, Vol. 54, N. 3, July 1995, pp. 426-427
  On 7 July 1918 two members of the Left SR Party, Iakov Bliumkin and Nicolai Andreev, assassinated German ambassador Wilhelm Mirbach. Spiridonova immediately assumed the "political" responsibility for the attack on behalf of the party's Central Committee. In her 1937 letter to the NKVD (see below), she claimed also to have directed the attack (even showing a sort of 'professional' pride). 
  The situation did not evolve as the Left SR leadership had expected. Instead of fueling a new conflagration with Germany, Lenin used Mirbach's assassination as a pretext for the suppression of the Left SR organization: the terrorist attack was immediately portrayed as a straightforward uprising against Soviet power, and troops rapidly isolated the army units supporting their former allies. Spiridonova rushed to the Bolshoi Theatre to take the floor before the ongoing 5th Congress of Soviets: she intended to explain and justify the Left SRs' political goals and plead for support, but found that the Congress had been suspended in the aftermath of the assassination and more than 400 Left SR delegates had been detained. Spiridonova and many other Left SR leaders were imprisoned in Moscow, her Peasant Section of the VTsIK was dissolved, and an undisclosed number of other party members (over 200 according to Spiridonova herself) were summarily shot.
  After she was kept in jail for several months, it was announced that Spiridonova was to be tried on 1 December 1918. To undercut the possibility of a potentially volatile situation developing a secret trial was conducted on 27 November instead. Spiridonova was sentenced to one year in prison for her part
caption: Spiridonova at work as a Left SR leader
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