September 11, 1941
A 56-year-old woman was shot in the Oryol forest. Maria Spiridonova — a revolutionary and the “Socialist Revolutionary Mother of God.”
Born in 1884 Tambov, The daughter of a collegiate secretary, she worked as a clerk in the provincial noble assembly. As a young woman, she joined the Socialist Revolutionary fighting squad.
At 21, she was sentenced to hang for the murder of an official. Luzhenovsky, who carried out reprisals against peasants.
When I had to meet men who had gone mad from torture, when I saw a crazy old mother whose 15-year-old beautiful daughter threw herself into an ice hole after Cossack caresses, no prospect of the most terrible torment could stop me
She spent two weeks on death row, sculpting a human figure out of bread crumbs and hanging it on a string—training herself not to flinch on the scaffold. From Butyrka, she managed to recount how the gendarmes beat and raped her.
The death sentence was commuted to lifelong hard labor in Siberia. While she was being transported, people at the stations showered her with flowers and copper coins.
In 1917, after the February Revolution, she was released and returned to party work in Moscow. By some estimates, she was the most influential woman in Russia. She became one of the leaders of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and collaborated with the Bolsheviks.
However alien their rough steps may be to us, behind them follows the masses, brought out of a state of stagnation
But in 1918 she became completely disillusioned with the political regime that the Bolsheviks were building and became one of the initiators of the unsuccessful attempt at a political coup on July 6.
For Soviet power to be responsive, sensitive, and attuned to the people, it requires unlimited freedom of elections and the play of the people's forces. Only then will the masses feel that everything that happens is their business, not someone else's.
She was imprisoned five times in the Soviet Union. In 1937, she received a 25-year sentence for counterrevolutionary activities. On September 8, 1941, a military troika sentenced her to death.
Until the very end, she treated the idea of Soviet power with “ineradicable romanticism” and spoke out against the death penalty and the Great Terror.
We have apple blossoms in our country, we have science and movement, art, beauty, we have books and general education and healing. And next to all this is this huge corner where a cruel, bloody deed is being carried out.
Fully rehabilitated in 1992.