Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova (Russian: Мария Александровна Спиридонова; 16 October 1884 – 11 September 1941) was a Narodnik-inspired Russian revolutionary. In 1906, as a novice member of a local combat group of the Tambov Socialists-Revolutionaries (SRs), she assassinated Gavriil Luzhenovsky, a Tsarist 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. According to G.D.H. Cole, she was, along with Alexandra Kollontai, one of the most prominent women leaders during the Russian Revolution, leading the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to initially side with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and then to break with them.
From January 1918 onwards, Spiridonova faced repression from the Soviet government, as she was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, briefly detained in a mental sanitarium, and sent into internal exile, before eventually being shot in 1941 in the Medvedevsky Forest massacre. 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. Cole wrote that nothing was known of what had happened to her after 1920. Twenty years later, Richard Stites was still uncertain whether her death occurred in 1937 or 1941. Only after the end of Stalinism and the fall of the Soviet Union did it gradually become possible to reconstruct the last decades of her life.
Spiridonova was born in the city of Tambov, located approximately 480 kilometres (300 mi) south-southeast of Moscow. Her father, a bank official, was a member of the non-hereditary minor nobility of the Russian Empire. She attended the local gymnasium until 1902, when the death of her father, and a first attack of tuberculosis, caused her to drop out. She studied dentistry in Moscow for a short while, before returning to Tambov to work as a clerk for the local Assembly of the Nobility. She soon became involved in political activism and was arrested during the student demonstrations of March 1905. In September 1905 she applied for training as a feldsher (a health care professional similar to a physician assistant) but was rejected due to her political record. Instead, she joined the Party of Socialists–Revolutionaries (SRs) and became a full-time activist. During this time, she formed a relationship with Vladimir Vol'skii, a local SR leader.
Like most SRs, she shared the Narodniks' philosophy of assassination and terrorism as a weapon of revolution, and was one of hundreds of SRs who, in the years around the 1905 Revolution, attacked the Russian state and its leaders.
Spiridonova's target was Gavriil Nikolayevich Luzhenovsky, a landowner and Tambov provincial councillor who had been appointed district security chief in Borisoglebsk, a town southeast of Tambov. Luzhenovsky, also a local leader of the Union of the Russian People (the most important branch of the Black Hundred), was known for his harsh suppression of peasant unrest in the district, and the SR committee in Tambov had "passed a death sentence on him". Spiridonova volunteered to kill him. She stalked Luzhenovsky for several days, and finally got her chance at the Borisoglebsk railway station on 16 January 1906. Disguised as a secondary school student, she fired several shots from a revolver and hit Luzhenovsky five times. He died on 10 February 1906.
Unable to escape, Spiridonova tried to shoot herself but was restrained, brutally beaten and arrested by Luzhenovsky's Cossack guard. She was then transferred to the local police station where she was stripped naked, searched and mocked by her captors. She was interrogated and tortured for more than half a day by two government officials, P.F. Avramov, head of the Cossack guard, and T.S. Zhdanov, a local police officer. That night she was transported to Tambov by train. During the journey, Avramov subjected her to further ill-treatment and sexual harassment, possibly rape.
The Luzhenovsky assassination was one of close to two hundred acts of SR "individual terror" during the 1905 Revolution and the two following years' turmoil. It received mainly local attention until the following month, when Spiridonova succeeded in leaking a very well-thought-out letter to the press. It described the treatment she had received, including threats of gang rape directed at her, and hinted that Avramov might have raped her on the train to Tambov. The letter was published on 12 February 1906 by Rus, a liberal newspaper in Saint Petersburg, and soon taken up by others, becoming an immediate sensation with their readers.
Progressive public opinion in Russia traditionally tended to consider terrorism with a certain degree of understanding, as it was regarded as a natural reaction against autocracy. For example, in 1878, a jury caused a sensation by acquitting populist terrorist Vera Zasulich despite her pleading guilty to causing serious injury to Colonel Fyodor Trepov during a failed attempt to assassinate him. In the case of Spiridonova, many were outraged by the appalling cruelty to a prisoner, especially as she was an attractive young woman. Liberal circles throughout Russia condemned the Tambov authorities. Spiridonova was described as "a pure, virginal being, a flower of spiritual beauty [...] [being put] into the shaggy paws of brutally repulsive, brutally malicious, brutally salacious orangutans".
Rus sent reporter Vsevolod A. Vladimirov to Tambov. He produced seven sensational articles that appeared in March 1906. These articles exaggerated Spiridonova's mistreatment and injuries, and more explicitly touched on her alleged rape. Vladimirov also glossed over Spiridonova's political convictions, portraying her as a genteel, high-principled victim of the tyrannical Russian system. This annoyed the Tambov SRs almost as much as it did the conservatives and the authorities. Spiridonova herself repudiated Vladimirov's account.
On 11 March, Spiridonova was tried and convicted of Luzhenovsky's murder and sentenced to death. However, the tribunal also asked that the sentence be commuted to penal servitude in Siberia, in view of her ill health. This was approved on 20 March. The liberal press continued its campaign in her support. On 2 April, Avramov was himself assassinated, creating a further sensation.
The government released its report on the case on 8 April. The report acknowledged that Spiridonova had been beaten by the Cossacks at the time of her arrest and that Avramov had verbally abused her on the train, but denied all the more lurid accusations. This was denounced by some as a whitewash.
Secret letters from Spiridonova in prison to her sister Yulia, a fellow SR, had been seized by police on 19 February and were summarized by the Tambov deputy prosecutor in a report to the national authorities. His extracts indicate that Spiridonova consciously participated in the image-making that was going on outside, suggesting what should be emphasized and what should be played down. A request in one letter not to reveal her "romantic history", presumably her relationship with Volsky, was quoted. Many liberals called this an attempt to slander her morals. The governor of Tambov had known about the affair (Spiridonova appealed for a meeting with Volsky, whom she described as her fiancé although he was already married), but did not pass on the information, which would have demolished Spiridonova's "virginal" image.
Spiridonova was sent to Siberia in the company of five other prominent female SR terrorists. The group was sometimes called the Shesterka ("Six"). As a result of the press campaign, Spiridonova was the most famous. She was also young, attractive, and an ethnic Russian (at least four of the others were Jewish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian). The Shesterka were transported by train from Moscow to the Nerchinsk katorga, a system of penal labor colonies in Transbaikal (east of Lake Baikal and near the border of China). Their slow journey lasted around a month and turned into a kind of triumphal progress: the train was met at every stop by growing crowds of sympathizers. Each time, although she was suffering from a serious recurrence of tuberculosis, Spiridonova would get up from her couch, greet the audience with smiles and patiently answer their numerous questions, expounding the SR political program. Aleksandra Izmailovich, one of the Shesterka, later commented: