Maria Spiridonova. Soviet man in the era of anti-Sovietism

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Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova is a woman of an amazing, tragic fate. She was born in 1884 into a noble family in the Tambov province. As a high school student, she joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and actively participated in the revolution of 1905. In 1906, fulfilling the decision of the Tambov Socialist Revolutionary organization, she mortally wounded in the city of Kozlov the Black Hundreds G.N. Luzhenovsky, who led punitive expeditions in her homeland during the first Russian revolution. A military court sentenced the girl to death, which was replaced by indefinite imprisonment, which she served in the Nerchinsk penal servitude.

The February Revolution of 1917 freed Spiridonova from punishment, and she became one of the organizers of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, and after the formation of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party in November 1917, she joined the Central Committee and became its de facto leader.

After the October coup, Spiridonov was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a delegate to the III-V All-Russian Congresses of Soviets. She sharply opposed the Brest Peace Treaty. She criticized the Bolsheviks for their punitive policy, for their departure from the ideas of the socialist revolution, and demanded that the ruling party change its policy.

In July 1918, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries took up arms against the Bolsheviks. Their performance was suppressed. Spiridonova was arrested on July 6, 1918 at a meeting of the V All-Russian Congress of Soviets, held at the Bolshoi Theater. During interrogation at the Investigative Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 10, 1918, she testified: “I organized the murder of Mirbach from beginning to end... Blumkin acted on my instructions.” On November 27, 1918, the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced her to imprisonment for a period of 1 year. By resolution of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of November 29, 1918, she was amnestied and released from custody.

On February 10, 1919, Spiridonova was arrested by the Cheka on charges of anti-Soviet activity and on February 24, 1919, by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal, “due to a painful and hysterical state,” she was sentenced to “isolation from political and public life” for 1 year.

On April 2, 1919, Spiridonova managed to escape from the Kremlin, where she was kept in isolation, after which she hid under the name Onufriev in Moscow. On October 20, 1920, she was detained by the Cheka authorities and placed for treatment in the Cheka infirmary, and on June 5, 1921, according to the doctors’ conclusion, she was transferred to the Prechistensky psychiatric hospital.

After the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) of September 13, 1921, Spiridonova was released from the hospital under the guarantee of the left Socialist Revolutionaries I. Z. Steinberg and I. Yu. Baikal.

In subsequent years, Spiridonova was arrested by the OPTU-NKVD and served

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In February 1919, during her second arrest, Spiridonova, while imprisoned in the Kremlin, repeatedly tried to contact the “will”, her party comrades. She wrote letters and, through the Left Socialist Revolutionaries being released from arrest or her, as it seemed to her, propagandized guards, sent them to secret addresses known to her. These letters, as a rule, ended up in the Cheka, where, after careful analysis, some of them were sent to the addresses indicated by Spiridonova, while others were used against her during the investigation. These letters, which are part of the investigation, outline her views on the policies of the Soviet government and the Bolshevik Party, and also discuss questions about the situation of the working class, the peasantry, violations of human rights in Soviet Russia and other current issues of that time.

In November 1937, Spiridonova, having been arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and then transferred to the NKVD of the USSR, wrote a voluminous letter to the 4th department of the GUGB, in which she covered many issues from the history of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, gave characteristics to its individual members, and told about her attitude to the Soviet government, the Constitution of 1936, to the problem of applying the death penalty, and also described the illegal methods of investigation used by NKVD investigators. The presence of such letters to M.A. Spiridonova was reported in domestic and foreign historiography. Currently, Spiridonova’s documents are being prepared for publication by the Russian Political Encyclopedia (ROSSPEN) association. We bring to your attention the publication of part of a letter from M.A. Spiridonova dated November 13, 1937. Spelling and syntax have been preserved. Only obvious typist errors were corrected.

To the 4th DEPARTMENT of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR.

If the question was solely about my personal fate, then even now, after 9 months of pre-trial detention with all the ensuing consequences, I would prefer not to say or write anything, leaving the final liquidation to gravity or to my extremely unlucky star conclusions and endings.

But, as the People’s Commissar of the BASSR BAK told me in Ufa, my former comrades continued to depend on my position, and therefore in Moscow I was extremely looking forward to the opportunity to speed up the investigation, and through no fault of my own it dragged on for another three months in Moscow. In Ufa, the investigation immediately after the arrest took such forms, and later, in the process of tireless interrogation, it took on such color that the possibility of any participation in this investigation was almost excluded for me.

At the first meeting with my investigator, deputy chief. (WITH) MIKHAILOV, I was very unequivocally offered the choice of putting “carrot or stick” in the context of my pre-trial detention, depending on my behavior during interrogation. “Whip,” I answered, offended to the core.

The entire six months of the Ufa investigation can be described as a sad game or farce on the theme of “The Taming of the Shrew.” When they managed to recognize some particularly sensitive or “impatient” place in my psychology, they pressed it three times, four times. So, for example, after some difficult incidents that happened to me in the Tsar’s dungeon at the beginning of 1906, I was left with an irreconcilable attitude towards personal searches. We must do justice to both the tsarist prison regime and the Soviet prison. Before my arrest, after those (1906) events, all the years of long-term imprisonment were inviolable, and my personal dignity was never hurt in particularly sensitive areas. IN tsarist time I always felt over me the invisible and unspeakable, but very tangible protection of the people; in Soviet times, the top of the government, the old Bolsheviks, with the inclusion of LENIN, spared me and, isolating me in the process of struggle, always very tightly along with. by this they took measures so that not a shadow of bullying would be inflicted on me. The year 1937 brought a complete change in this regard, and therefore there were days when I was searched 10 times in one day. They searched me when I was going to and from the treatment center, for a walk and from a walk, for interrogation and from interrogation. They never found anything on me, and that’s not why they searched me. To get rid of the groping, which was practiced by one guard and infuriated me, I screamed at the top of my lungs, struggled and resisted, and the warden covered my mouth with a sweaty hand, with the other hand he pressed me against the guard, who groped me and my panties; in order to get rid of this disgrace and a number of others, I had to starve, since otherwise there was simply no

I was arrested by the Soviet government 5 times. In 1918 8/VII, in February 1919, in September

Lupekin German Antonovich (1902-1940), native of Kyiv, Ukrainian, member of the Bolshevik Party since 1921.

He began his career in 1916 as a mechanic's assistant in the workshops of the city of Kyiv. From 1918 to 1920 he served in the Red Army. Since 1921, he worked in state security agencies in various operational positions. In 1932-1934. was the head of the secret political and economic departments of the GPU of the Belarusian SSR. In 1935, head of the SPO UNKVD of the Leningrad region. From January to April 1937, People's Commissar of the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, then head of the NKVD of the Irkutsk Region. In 1938, head of the NKVD for the Rostov region. He had the rank of senior major of state security. On November 13, 1938, he was arrested by the GUGB of the NKVD of the USSR as a member of an anti-Soviet conspiratorial organization in the NKVD and on January 28, 1940, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.

For gross violations of the law during the period of G. A. Lupekin’s work in the NKVD, a review of his case and rehabilitation were denied.

The editors do not have the opportunity to publish this voluminous (102 typewritten pages) letter from Spiridonova in its entirety and therefore considered it necessary to shorten some of the insignificant text. The text in which Spiridonova talks in detail about her life in exile, correspondence with party comrades, and challenges the absurd accusations of the investigation has been shortened.

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1920, in September 1930 and in February (8/II) 1932. In total, I was imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for 6 years, in exile for about 12 years. Since 1920, the GPU never let me out of their hands.

During each arrest, I answered all questions during interrogations with complete frankness.

I didn’t even understand and still don’t understand why I need to deny anything.

After all, if I did something, then I did it according to my conviction, a conviction dear to me, how could I renounce it under pain of reprisals? What a shame? I gave exhaustive testimony in the Mirbakh case.

At the trial in 1919 and 1918, I behaved so boldly and defiantly that the hall (the Communists) was buzzing with indignation, it would have torn apart. But that’s what I thought, that’s what I said. And then I was angry. It was the same at the royal court, which sentenced me to hanging, when the chairman of the court, an old general, covered his ears and shook his head, unable to listen to too impudent speeches.

But that’s how I am, both in life and in politics, that’s how I was and that’s how I’m going to the grave now.

I have never had the habit of hiding in the bushes and avoiding answering. After all, it was me, when the cannons were firing from the Kremlin to the Three Hierarchs and back, that my comrades from the Central Committee sent in July 1918 with a response to the Fifth Congress. After all, couldn’t I answer with my head when the hand was hot? After all, on July 9, over 200 people were shot, led by ALEXANDROVICH. s.r. and it was with us, l.s.r., that the use of the death penalty began.

And if now I knew behind me the underground struggle against the Soviet government, I would talk about it with the former insolence. After all, I would lead it in accordance with my views, with my convictions and faith, so why would I refuse this fight? Since I led it, I did not consider it a shameful and dirty deed, I would not have met the final retribution for it without repenting and crawling. For what? I pay firmly for what I have done. That’s why now I’m so humiliated and mortally offended by the accusations being made that I disarmed a long time ago and didn’t fight. The reasons for this were internal and external. You know the external reasons yourself.

All the years of my exile, supervision was kept over me, and therefore over MAYOROV, IZMAILOVICH and KAKHOVSKAYA, because We lived all 12 years of exile together, sometimes only dividing into different apartments, it was very thorough. There was one similar to him only behind GOTZ, as we heard. In Samarkand and Tashkent, especially in Samarkand, it was carried out on the street so demonstratively that I became a popular person in the city.

Four young men in riding breeches followed me, sat on the threshold of the bank and surrounded the house with almost half a platoon. There was special supervision in the house, and at work too.

In exile we had 2 informants (at V. Wed.), as we figured out later. They came to me and knew everything about us. I also had a special informant who later repented of this to me with screams and sobs, but I knew who she was much earlier than her repentance and did not consciously expel her.

In Ufa, supervision was set up more subtly and delicately after my lamentations in Moscow in 1930, when we were filtered here for 4 months, but still, in Ufa, supervision was vigilant, letters were illustrated, visitors were recorded - at the service supervision was strict, even to the point of surprise.

One day I came across a piece of paper on the typist’s desk, entitled: “list of consultants in the room where the MAS is located.” And in the room of us, consultants, now we are called inspectors, there were about 15 people sitting.

A fair number of them were dragged to the GPU for conversations, and I always unmistakably guessed, based on completely invisible signs to a prying eye, who exactly was called in to question me.

The communists reported on my conversations with them as part of party discipline, and MIKHAILOV, with a series of questions to me, now confirmed this intuitive knowledge of mine about each communist speaker with whom I spoke. I noted this to MIKHAILOVA. He did not hide the fact that this was exactly what happened: “I knew about what you said about RADEK on that same day.”

And most of all I loved talking with communists. Ufa is a city of ordinary people, old-regime and white. He, of course, disguised himself and hunkered down, but his lack of culture and savagery are still great.

She didn’t like to talk to ordinary people and was afraid to compromise them. She wasn’t afraid to compromise the communists, and they were much livelier and more interesting. I looked at my neighbors, employees in the Department, where they had been sitting in a small company for the last three years, as if they were willing and unwilling spies. Where and how to carry out major underground work? Life under an eternal glass bell.

Alexandrovich Vyacheslav Alexandrovich (Dmitrievsky P. A., “Pierre Orage”) (1884-1918) - left Socialist Revolutionary. After October Revolution, during the period when the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were part of the Soviet government, he was deputy chairman of the Cheka and ex-officio head of the Department for Combating Crimes. He took an active part in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion in Moscow. In July 1918, he was arrested by the Cheka and sentenced to death.

Mayorov Ilya Andreevich (1890-1941), native of the village. Gordeevka, Sviyazhsk district, Kazan province, from the peasantry, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1906. Member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1917.

After the October Revolution - a member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture. He took part in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion in July 1918. After the liquidation of the mutiny, he went into hiding. November 27, 1918 The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced him in absentia to 3 years in prison. He was soon arrested, served his sentence, and then exiled to Samarkand. Then the period was extended for another 3 years with a transfer to Tashkent. In 1930 he was arrested by the OGPU, served in Butyrskaya prison and in 1931 exiled to Ufa. While in exile he married M.A. Spiridonova. In 1931-1937 worked as an economist and planner at the Ufa Canning Sales Base.

In February 1937, the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was arrested on charges of active anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on January 8

1938 The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced to 25 years in prison. On September 11, 1941, according to the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was shot.

Kakhovskaya Irina Konstantinovna (1888-1960), native of the city of Tarashcha, Kyiv province, from the nobility. In 1905 she joined the Bolsheviks, in 1906 she joined the maximalists, that is, the extreme trend of populism. In 1908, the military district court sentenced her to 20 years of hard labor. In Maltsevskaya women's prison made friends with M.A. Spiridonova.

After the October Revolution, at the 2nd Congress of Soviets, she was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and headed the organizational and propaganda department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In the summer of 1918, the Central Committee of the PLSR was sent to underground work in Ukraine. On July 30, 1918, she participated in the murder of German Field Marshal Eichhorn, for which she was sentenced to death by hanging by a German military court. She escaped from prison, after which she prepared the murder of General Denikin, but due to the illness of all the participants in her group with typhus, it was not possible to carry out the murder.

In 1921, the Cheka was arrested in Moscow and exiled to Kaluga for 3 years, and then was exiled to Central Asia. In the fall of 1930, she was exiled for 3 years to Ufa, where she first worked in a children's labor commune, and then as a planner-economist at Bashmeltrest. In February 1937, she was arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir ASSR on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on December 25, 1937, by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1948, she was arrested again by state security agencies. She was declared incapable of work and returned to Kansk as an indefinite exile.

Izmailovich Alexandra Adolfovna (1878-1941), a native of St. Petersburg, from the nobility, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, participated in the unsuccessful assassination attempt on the Minsk governor P. G. Kurlov. In February 1906, she was sentenced by a military court to death by hanging, which was replaced by indefinite hard labor. She served her sentence at the Nerchinsk penal servitude, where she became close to M. Spiridonova. After the October Revolution, she participated in the creation of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party and was elected to its Central Committee. She was repeatedly arrested by the Cheka-OGPU, and served her punishment in prisons and exile. In 1930 she was exiled to Ufa, where she worked as an economist-planner in a municipal bank. On February 8, 1937, she was arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on December 25, 1937, by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He served his term in Oryol prison. On September 11, 1941, she was shot by verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.

Gots Abram Rafailovich (1882-1940), a native of Moscow, from a merchant family, member of the militant organization of the AKP, member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. After the February Revolution, leader of the Socialist Revolutionary faction in the Petrograd Soviet. Since June 1917, Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, elected by the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. During the October days he was a member of the “Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution” and was one of the organizers of the cadets’ performance in Petrograd.

In 1920, he was arrested by the Cheka for terrorist activities and in August 1922, the Supreme Revolutionary Court under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced him to death, which was commuted to 5 years in prison. Then he was in exile in Simbirsk and was sentenced to 2 years. In 1937, he was arrested on charges of terrorist activity and on June 20, 1939, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He died on August 4, 1940 in Kraslag (Krasnoyarsk Territory).

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Internal reasons:

1. A huge spatial separation from the main ideological backbone - KAMKOV, SAMOKHVALOV, etc., a gap in the time of personal communication at 16-17 years old and the absence of illegal correspondence created complete uncertainty in the moods and thoughts of friends.

The political physiognomy of a number of my closest comrades is now unclear to me: KAMKOV, SAMOKHVALOV, TRUTOVSKY. The isolation from life thanks to the snail-like attachment to one city and the supervised position is absolutely exceptional.

We don't know the village at all. But our emphasis was on the village and our entire struggle with the communists was because of the village and reflected the mistakes and failures of the mood of the village.

When the party was defeated and physically removed from the country’s accounts completely (everyone was in prison) and we ceased to be condensers of village sentiments, our leadership and our work ceased.

Without working with and for the masses, without connection with the masses, our existence turned out to be unthinkable, and we melted away. At the party congress in April 1918, based on a superficial count, we recorded 73 thousand members; there were actually more, but now it might be. there are 50 people

A huge part (peasants, workers and soldiers) went to the Bolsheviks immediately after our break with the Bolsheviks, some part, having broken away from us, hid (that’s why I really don’t want you to publish me as a center, a terrorist), not going anywhere having gone, and small fragments gradually dissolved from prisons and exiles into Soviet citizenship, having been preserved by 1932 as museum curiosities among only a few dozen people, some of whom were already newcomers in the form of the students of 1924.

3. Lack of any agreement with each other on issues of programs and tactics. During this time, historical conditions have changed so much that a reassessment of values ​​is imperative. None of this was done, and without this there could not and cannot be any talk of any restoration of the party and organizational work.

I think every one of us is left.s.r. has its own independent look in great contrast with the look of its neighbor, also a lion. s.r. MAYOROV and I had a lot of different things, but both were too lazy and reluctant to even agree on this, because... this entire area of ​​mental life has ceased to be relevant.

We always lived as if in a common cell and never had the opportunity to have separate personal conversations, and he once wrote me a note that a major political disintegration seemed to be brewing among us. It was necessary to talk and explain. They never gathered before the arrest. In Ufa, I don’t remember a single programmatic and tactical conversation with any leftist. And it seems like it should. The leader, the center of gravity, the “leader” and now, such a disgrace and shame, there were no such conversations. And this is in the presence of the fact that with all the Ufa lions. Wed, besides our four, I met for the first time in Ufa.

I have little personal knowledge of party activists, because... During the period of the open existence of the party, I was completely absorbed in Soviet revolutionary work, which took days and nights, and party representation at the top of the CPSU (b) (daily meetings with SVERDLOV in the Small Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the person of three - me, SVERDLOV and AVANESOV and with LENIN, sometimes with other security officers), I did absolutely no party work. In the underground, naturally, the leader is strictly undercover. In prisons I always sat isolated from my comrades, twice in the Kremlin and in other places only with IZMAILOVICH, later with MAYOROV and IZMAILOVICH. All the more so, I should talk to the new acquaintances, feel out what they know and how they think. And just like that, I didn’t need it.

Because we didn’t work in the party sense, talking, just talking, which is what we’ve always been passionate about. r. without advancement in life, which was obviously known, they seemed to me a depraved activity, they irritated me painfully, and I was sometimes rude and impolite if someone pestered me. I called it masturbation. And so out loud once, I once cut off the Menshevik in Ufa ASHIPTZU, cat. Now he is in prison in Ufa.

And if the organization UF was really true. regional committee, then an indispensable categorically imperative prerequisite for this would be preliminary discussions of the current moment in the context of opposing one’s program and tactics to it. How could it be otherwise? Why fence the regional committee and the struggle, in the name of what and for whom?

In relation to other comrades scattered throughout the Union, the same attempts should have been made to reach agreement on general political issues. Such coarsening, such primitivism, as soon as the slogan “get rid of the Bolsheviks, take their place” could not and does not exist in any of the most rabid groups or parties.

Kamkov (Katz) Boris Davidovich (1885-1938), native of the village. Kobylino, Soroca district, Bessarabia province, from the family of a doctor. Member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1904, for which he was persecuted by the tsarist government. Was in exile. In 1911 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Hamburg with the title of Doctor of Law.

After the February Revolution he returned to Russia and in April 1917 was elected to the Petrograd Soviet. At the 1st All-Russian Congress of Soviets he was elected to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In November 1917, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. Deputy of the Constituent Assembly for the Petrograd District. In July 1918 he took part in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion. After the rebellion was liquidated, he went into hiding. In Ukraine he participated in the creation of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, and at the end of 1918 - beginning of 1919 he stood at the origins of the PLSR of Lithuania and Belarus. Subsequently, he was repeatedly arrested by the Cheka-OGPU authorities on charges of anti-Soviet activity, and was in exile. On February 6, 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD in the Northern Territory as an active participant in the Socialist Revolutionary terrorist organization and on August 29, 1937, by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was sentenced to death.

Mikhail Davidovich Samokhvalov (1892-1942), a native of the city of Novozybkov in the former Chernigov province, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1911. Member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1917. He was arrested by state security agencies in 1923, 1930 and 1935, and was in exile. In 1936-1937 worked as a construction technician in a repair and construction office at the Ostyak-Vogul district executive committee.

In February 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD in the Omsk Region on charges of terrorist activities and on January 25, 1938, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. While serving his sentence, he died in prison on June 14, 1942.

Trutovsky Vladimir Evgenievich (1889-1937), a native of Krasnograd in the former Poltava province, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, since 1917 member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. In December 1917, he joined the Council of People's Commissars and served as People's Commissar for City and Local Government. In March 1918, he resigned from the Council of People's Commissars. In July 1918 he took part in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion. After the rebellion was liquidated, he went into hiding. November 27, 1918 The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced him in absentia to 3 years in prison. He was subsequently arrested and, after serving his sentence, in April 1923 he was deported to Turkestan. Then he was repeatedly arrested by the OGPU, and was in exile in Orenburg, Shadrinsk, Chelyabinsk region, and Kazakhstan.

On February 7, 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD of Kazakhstan on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on October 4, 1937, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.

Avanesov (Martirosov) Varlam Alexandrovich (1884-1930), native of Armenia. Member of the RSDLP since 1903, Bolshevik since 1914. He took an active part in the revolutionary movement. After the February Revolution of 1917, member of the Presidium of the Moscow Soviet. During the days of October, he was a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee.

From 1917-1919 secretary and member of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, member of the All-Russian Commission for the Repair of Railway Transport, member of the board of the People's Commissariat of State Control, chairman of the All-Russian Commission for Evacuation at the Service Station. In 1919, he was approved as deputy head of the Special Department and a member of the Board of the Cheka. In 1920-1924. member of the Board of the All-Russian Cheka, deputy people's commissar of the Russian Communist Party, representative of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Rabkrin in the All-Russian Cheka, then deputy people's commissar foreign trade. Since 1925, member of the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council. In 1922-1927 member of the USSR Central Executive Committee. Died 1930

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For this there should have been, if not a conference, then at least active live correspondence. This didn't happen. There must have been an exchange of illegal letters. This didn't happen either.

VITALIN lies, showing that he brought me a letter. I never received a single illegal letter from KAMKOV and never had the opportunity to write to him. Some books seemed to be coming to us from him, but as the investigation says, they did not reach us. Of course, the book is a myth. It must be admitted that these possibilities were not particularly looked for, since the agreement on the revaluation of values ​​did not have any actual significance.

There were no visits to each other.

During the summer of 1936, DRAVERT, while riding on a steamboat, met in Gorky with GOLBERG and SELIVANOVA, and in Kuibyshev with PODGORSKY. And not for organizational purposes, but for comradely personal purposes. He is lying about the organization.

If the investigation does not believe this, after all, there have been only two such meetings, too few for an exchange and installation of a new program. Where does any smell new program, in whose testimony?

Even MAYOROV, what a shame, writes about the restoration of capitalism, if only MIKHAILOV showed me this paragraph between the closed lines correctly. And I would have lived with him in friendship and love until the last day, if he had slipped to the right cf. and I would now maintain dogmatic camaraderie with everyone, without grinding it to pieces!!

4. The experience of Trotskyists, Decists, Smirnovites and all others, especially Trotskyists, in order to fight Soviet power, should have been extremely convincing, directly determining the rejection of such attempts.

The Trotskyists had more connections with the working masses, and they still do. In Ufa, for example, workers of a garment factory were arrested - Trotskyists, several dozen railway workers-Trotskyists, etc. The Trotskyists were party members, they used the entire apparatus of the Soviet government, offices, apartments, cars, airplanes, telephones, countless business trips and money, all the richest , a well-coordinated state apparatus.

And yet they failed and are failing so shamefully and terribly. They had the opportunity to agree on a common program of future and present actions and distribute forces. They had the opportunity to freely implement their tactics. And yet nothing came of it.

None of this happened and there is no lion. s.r. and one would have to be too much of an idiot to make any attempts to fight in their completely determined situation.

5. The main condition for the existence of any party or group and its work is communication with the masses.

The fragments of the party have this connection. s.r. not available since 1922. Since 1922 I have considered the Lev party, cf. deceased. In 1923-24 This is already agony.

And without hopes for Sunday, because the working and peasant masses now will not succumb to any slogans of the most seductive nature.

If they go to war with the imperialists now, it will be submission to the most severe necessity, an act of self-defense, forced by the terrible great enemy of the Union and the working people. Our working masses are now absolutely incapable of proactive voluntary military retreats, struggles, and uprisings.

They were too tired from such a struggle, and even if they felt very bad, they still would not move on it now.

Sociological laws and historical examples prove this.

We need to heal old wounds and bruises, recover, give birth to children, balance life over the years, shaken as if by an earthquake. The masses are now very wisely doing this. But there is another, much more powerful reason for this than the one just noted; the workers of the Union have no need for aggressive actions and in the fight against Soviet power. They have ample opportunities to organize their lives and improve it without resorting to aggressive struggle, especially now, after the successfully carried out collectivization and the publication of the new Constitution.

And due to the economic well-being that is definitely growing from year to year, workers will certainly not need to follow any slogans of any party.

6. Let us assume abstractly for a moment that the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, having limited itself to the slogan “get rid of the Bolsheviks, take their place,” would use all means to fight the Soviet regime in order to overthrow it. They would have faced an army of 20-30 million people among their 40 members. I consider the party activists of the All-Union Communist Party and the Komsomol, Kr. The army and the NKVD and the active layers of workers and peasants would completely and completely stand up against them with the support of the majority of the rest of the Union. Our young statehood currently has such economic power and such an organized defense apparatus that an attempt to shake it, not only overthrow it, but especially the current

Vitaly Simen Samoilovich, born in 1897, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1915, since 1918 member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party.

He was repeatedly arrested by the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD, kept in prisons, and was in exile. From 1933 to September 1935 he served exile in Arkhangelsk, after which he was transferred to Ufa. During interrogation in the 4th department of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR on April 10, 1937, he testified that he brought Spiridonova a letter from Arkhangelsk from Kamkov to Ufa, which allegedly talked about the intensification of the Left Socialist Revolutionary work.

Dravert Leonid Petrovich, born in 1901, native of Kazan, member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1925, for Left Socialist Revolutionary activities, a Special Meeting of the OGPU Collegium sentenced him to 3 years in a political isolation cell, in 1928 - to exile for 3 years in Kazakhstan, in 1931 - to exile for 3 years in the Urals, then to Bashkiria .

In 1937, he worked in Ufa as an economist at the Bashkir office “Zagotskot”. In Ufa I met with M. A. Spiridonova several times. In February 1937, the NKVD of the Bashkir ASSR was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities. On June 17, 1937, investigators arranged a confrontation between Dravert and Spiridonova, at which he testified that M.A. Spiridonova in Ufa was allegedly engaged in active anti-Soviet activities and, in particular, gave instructions for the organization of the Bashkir Regional Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party . M.A. Spiridonova wrote down in response to this in the protocol of the confrontation: “I deny this testimony of Dravert.”

Goldberg (not Golberg) Boris Konstantinovich, a left Socialist Revolutionary, and his wife, Selivanova Anna Antonovna, born in 1890, a native of Petrograd, a left Socialist Revolutionary, were repeatedly arrested by the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. They served exile in Ufa and other places. In 1936-1937 lived in Gorky, worked at a car plant.

2 Podgorsky Nikolai (it was not possible to establish other data), a left Socialist Revolutionary, served exile in Ufa, then lived in the city of Kuibyshev.

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mi insignificant powers that a lion possesses. s.r. and all other socialist parties, it would only be pitiful and ridiculous.

And from this point of view, I do not understand the aggressiveness and fervor with which the protective organs set about eliminating the remnants of socialism. parties. It's like an elephant chasing a fly like a mosquito.

I think in ten years, when Kirovshina will be forgotten and all suspiciousness will subside and... the main thing is that the Constitution will unfold in life. You may have to say to yourself: it was in vain that we destroyed so many people and such a people; we could have been useful both then and now.

I say destroyed, because the use of 25 or 10 years of isolation in my eyes is equivalent to the death penalty, and I personally consider the latter a more humane measure.

How, after 17 years of imprisonment and 12 exiles, again bars, a castle, isolation from life, the sun, nature and people, from hot work, an eternal top, rude and evil guards, picking in the anus and vagina (what was now happening to me 2 times in Butyrka), again these terrible long aimless days and years and now without any justification for this torment by any guilt or idea... No, show humanity this time and kill right away.

7. At this historical moment, in the event of an attack on the Union of fascist imperialists, Lev. Wed adhere exclusively to a defensist position.

Based on this position, there should be no place for any organizational struggle against Soviet power, which is why there was none.

XIX. The external and internal reasons given here can be classified as formal argumentation.

The party is laying down its arms in groups, having become convinced of the complete futility and inconsistency of its struggle.

Actually, based only on these arguments, the group could come up with a legal formalization of its disarmament, which, in fact, had already been established since the physical liquidation of the party; it spent these years in prisons, and then scattered into exile. I have an argument and essentially it is silent, if I can, I will say it at the end.

XX. I think it is precisely due to the small number of lions. Wed the investigation arose a suspicion that, due to their small size, they may have decided to unite with the other. Again we have to argue only from psychology and logic. I declare that I am right, cf. I didn't unite. KOROTNEV's testimony is false. Even conditionally assuming that they are not false, his conversation with me without any further exchange of opinions and thoughts is an empty matter. But he didn’t come up with anything else.

Where did the center, terror, local, insurrection, etc. come from?? All these formidable and new tactics had to be agreed upon. But neither I nor the GAUP had a single such letter, not to mention any messenger. Where is any document?

I did not unite with the rights. Wed not only because they didn’t offer it to me. PLEKHANOV pestered me in Tashkent, I turned him off, and this was completely confirmed by the investigation of 1930, but because I categorically do not accept them.

I would never change the Bolsheviks for them, because they are frock coats and tail coats, talkers and wafflers, who managed to let the country and people slip out of their hands when he came to them with his eyes closed, with amazing trust and with a huge charge of creativity enthusiasm.

That they became stronger and smarter after that time? There is no reason to assume this.

I don't believe in their creativity or their organizational abilities. Even assuming that by some miracle these permanent conspirators and whisperers would overthrow the current government, they would not be able to cope with the matter, and in addition they could still open the door to war, which guards every crevice of the Union.

The investigation (the whole idea of ​​​​this accusation grew before my eyes) claims that on the state farm, where in 1924 they brought in 2 weeks from Inner to rest the Central Tsekists, and where we lived, we had the beginning of the blocking (So in text).

There I had, in fact, my first meeting with the rights. Wed Having previously arrived from Chita, upon leaving hard labor in 1917, I immediately began to split the party, relations immediately became sharply hostile and I was hooted and bullied heavily. And I hated them all and not only didn’t talk, but didn’t even bow to them, which is why I didn’t know any of them.

We exchanged opinions at conferences where KAMKOV and I in Leningrad won a large share of Leningrad from me. of the proletariat, even later in Moscow. And in October we stood on opposite sides of the barricades, and blood had already been shed between us.

At the state farm we met in a different position. They talked and argued a lot. They are pretty

Korotnev Igor Alexandrovich, born in 1903, native of St. Petersburg. In 1923, while a student at Leningrad State University, he entered student group right SRs. On May 10, 1924, by resolution of the Special Meeting of the OGPU Collegium, he was sentenced to 3 years in a concentration camp. In April 1927, he was exiled to the Narym region for 3 years. Released from exile early. By resolution of the Special Meeting of the OGPU Collegium of September 3, 1929, he was exiled to Semipalatinsk for 3 years.

Since 1932, he lived in Ufa, worked as a senior economist at the Bashkoopinsoyuz, where he repeatedly met with M. A. Spiridonova. In February 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on charges of counter-revolutionary terrorist activities. On May 19, 1937, a confrontation was held between Korotnev and Spiridonova, at which he testified that she was allegedly engaged in active Socialist Revolutionary activities. Spiridonova denied everything and did not admit any charges.

Plekhanov Ivan Andreevich, right Socialist Revolutionary, in 1929-1930. served exile in Tashkent, and was also exiled to Arkhangelsk and other places.

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but they gloated over the fact that we were also in the bag. We could not agree on any point other than criticism of the communists. They were still of an allied orientation, they still felt their throats tighten with excitement at the word Establish. The Assembly, the same old Menshevism that destroyed them, on the question of social. reforms, etc.

So we soon fell behind in the exchange, and the wives were very offended by our discussions, because instead of rest and treatment in a short 2 weeks there was noise and arguing to the point of hoarseness and great excitement.

I began to hold on myself and delay MAYOROV, and we were hospitable old-timers towards each new arriving couple. I became friends with GOTZ. He is a charming person, interesting, kind and gentle and a good friend. There was no blocking then or later.

2) I didn’t recognize the Mensheviks before, and I still don’t recognize them now, and I wouldn’t unite with them for any program in the world, because they are incapable of implementing any.

This layer of the intelligentsia is absolutely revolutionary, MIKHAILOV proves the blockade with m-kas, that l.sr. DOBROKHOTOVA is married to Mr. TSEDERBAUM. But the bed block cannot be considered political, and the result is only the good boy Leva.

3) By denying the bloc with the right-wing cf., I categorically and indignantly deny the accusation that I am involved in the center. He, too, was born before my eyes in the investigative cell, where I heard about him for the first time and not on the first day or even month, because he was still in the retort.

No matter how inclined I might be, out of friendly pity and the still-living love for my close friends and comrades, to explain and justify them, I still consider it a low fall for B. D. KAMKOV to testify against me about my participation in the Center and even more so Low fall is the same testimony of I. A. MAYOROV, my beloved friend and husband. Whether there is such a center, whether KAMKOV has given his consent to join it, I do not undertake to either affirm or deny. I am inclined to think that he does not exist at all, and I am also inclined to think that KAMKOV is slandering himself, seeing that there is no other way out of the loop. Both of them, MAYOROV and KAMKOV, can be opportunists of the big hand. I, too, can be an opportunist in the interests of the cause (we did not talk about this with Lenin because of the Brest-Litovsk Peace), but in my personal behavior I categorically deny this method.

If I'm political. KAMKOV’s physiognomy is not clear enough after 16 years of separation and I still don’t fully know who he is now, maybe he really united with the rights, wed, then I am 100% responsible for MAYOROV, he is not a participant in any center, just like me. He gave false testimony.

And how and how he must suffer, getting stuck in lies further and further. And why is this necessary?

By denying my participation in the center, I naturally deny the terror center, the locals, etc.

4) I am against terror against the Bolsheviks and Lev. Wed, it was never practiced against them. In history, we are very guilty that we squandered his idea, but he was not a lion. Wed, having gone to the anarchists. We responded for his provocation by putting the entire party in prison, p.ch. There was no real underground organized then in 1919. On his part, this in relation to our party was a major provocation and defeat of the party. Not a single secret or overt resolution accepted terror against the Communist Party [as] a method of struggle.

It’s hard for me to talk about this, because you are always afraid that you will be caught for adjusting, but I must say - regardless of your attitude towards us in /evaluation of interpretation and/ actions (So in the text), we consider you comrades in goals, and Therefore, we allow terror only against fascists.

This is the main point.

For reasons of formal order against terror in the Soviet country, I will note two.

First: in tsarist times, the bureaucracy was in the last century, and always was, so mediocre and alive that talented rulers were rare and populists with terrorist tactics, starting with the Narodnaya Volya, it was at these rulers that they hurled their dynamite thunder. We did not recognize terror, which is now accepted in the tactics of the Trotskyists, we cannot remove personal workers, and those who are on certain posts, this is some kind of motiveless terror of the Odessa anarchists, which we condemned and despised, they beat the “bourgeoisie” by throwing bombs at cafes. That is why I am outraged by the accusation of an attempt on BULISHEV’s life. A very mediocre size and no matter how much we change it, I know it’s much larger than him, why would he be removed, since tomorrow a better one would replace him (So in the text)?

Therefore, the murder of PLEVE gave spring to politics, the congress, the conference, the insolence of the radical press, etc. and made a hole in the inventory of their camarilla for several years, until STOLYPIN was found and targeted, who began to strangle the revolution in 1907.

Now this would be useless, because the country is full of talented workers from top to bottom. You probably know better than me how, without much strain, in place of one worker removed for some primitive reason, you immediately find a replacement and the fabric comes to life again, overgrown with new energy.

Dobrokhotova Alexandra Sergeevna, was a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. Together with her husband Levitsky (Tsederbaum) she served exile in Ufa.

Levitsky (Tsederbaum) Vladimir Osipovich (1883-1938), native of St. Petersburg. At the end of the 90s, under the influence of his brothers Yu. O. Martov and S. O. Ezhov, he joined the Social Democratic movement. In 1903 he joined the Mensheviks. He was repeatedly arrested by the Tsarist secret police.

In 1917, he was a member of the Moscow Menshevik Committee and was a supporter of Menshevik participation in the Provisional Government. Member of the editorial board of the newspaper “Forward” and “Workers’ Newspaper”. In December 1917 - January 1918 he was kept in the Peter and Paul Fortress along with other Mensheviks. In the fall of 1919 he left the party. Then he was repeatedly arrested and exiled. On February 22, 1938, he died in Ufa during another investigation.

Bulashev Zinatulla Gizyatovich (1894-1938), native of the village. Karashids of the Ufa region of Bashkiria. Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Delegate to the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). In the fall of 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on charges of counter-revolutionary bourgeois-nationalist activities. In February 1937, a number of left Socialist Revolutionaries arrested in Bashkiria testified during the investigation that “on the personal instructions of the former member of the Central Committee of the PLSR Spiridonova M.A.” they were preparing an assassination attempt on Bulashev 3. G.

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And second: Soviet power is so cruel and, I would say, reckless of human life, dealing with terror, that you need to have a lot of immorality to resort to terror now. Under the Tsar, only the terrorist himself and someone who accidentally got involved disappeared. Neither ancestors nor descendants were touched. Fellow members of the organization answered in the order of articles about the code of laws, etc., when they came across them at their work. And now MIKHAILOV told me that he imprisoned my sisters in Tambov, when my terror on the water was written out with a pitchfork. I saw two sisters once upon arrival from hard labor in 1917, and the third also once in 1929. Short meetings after 12-24 years of separation, of course, did not create closeness. I corresponded extremely formally and rarely with one sister (she is 70 years old). Didn't contain any. All are old women, all very older than me. One is already 70 years old. One is sick with cancer, and a quarter of her muscular surface has been removed by surgery. When I sit down, not one has come to see me on a date. When ZELIKMAN asked me if I wanted to serve exile in Tambov, I said I didn’t want to. And now they have to answer for me. They threaten MAYOROV with the same thing.

For KIROV, the number of people published on two huge newspaper pages of Izvestia were shot; for the attempt on Lenin, 15 thousand people were shot by the Chekists, the communists and security officers told me this.

What kind of faith in the correctness of one’s tactics and in oneself, reaching the point of delusions of grandeur, one would have to have in order to decide to pay for the death of one, two responders or leaders with so many human lives. Who am I to take upon myself [the right] to control the lives of hundreds of people, because they only live once in the world.

This moment alone is enough to abandon such a method once and for all; it would no longer be terror, but a vile adventure and provocation, as I regarded Nikolaev’s speech. What pushed them is alien to us. We never aspired to power as such and left power from the Council of People's Commissars and others on our own initiative. And we also don’t have the frenzy and embitterment of the Trotskyists, why should he?

When in 1919-20 we anyone raised the issue of terrorism, I stated that I would consider this as a provocation and would immediately make all organizational conclusions regarding the issue raised. And so it was, the person who raised this question turned out to be a provocateur. And the time was hot. The whole party sat, and my beloved friends sat with them, the prison was declared hostages.

XXI. Now comes the hard part.

1) When I remember how BAK wrinkled his face in disgust at my mere hint and how he said, “who would believe you,” I still cannot begin to speak. I had to start from the first page about this, I broke myself for 4 days to even finish with this. Only with one foot already on the other side of life do I force myself to speak.

I admit my guilt in that I did not come forward with the legal formalization of our disarmament. What I write about external and internal reasons our non-work, I had in my head in ’33, and in ’34, ’32 and ’36.

Back in 1930, I applied something similar (So in the text) to the current MAYOROVA and KAKHOVSKAYA from Crimea with IZMAILOVICH who left me. Collectivization finally convinced me of the need to completely lay down hands, not to mention weapons, that is, struggle. Already in 1930, I began to see that of the main moments that divided us, namely the replacement of Soviet power with communist power, as I wrote in the underground labor newspaper in 1920, this moment was fading into history, and broad sections of the masses were entering the ruling apparatus.

The Red commanders, soldiers from the Far East, who were with me at the Tubin Institute in Yalta, helped me a lot. In this tuba institute there were almost exclusively communists and security officers. And I received information from them about the life of the entire Union. In my isolation from life, I could repeat back in 1925 that six months in Yalta in 1930 from III to IX moved me forward enormously.

But in 1930 we were arrested. I was brought from Yalta to Moscow, my comrades from the four at the same time from Tashkent. And, of course, during the investigation, I answered all the investigator’s questions, didn’t say anything about my moods, and with ANDREEVA, in conversations that were very good and to the point, I kept to the usual manner, telling her, “What do you want us to do with the nettle that you they stuffed our pants, sitting on it, solemnly testifying to you of their loyalty, what will you believe, the nettle or us?

2) Every year the meaninglessness of the outcast existence, its unjustification especially in relation to the BELOSTOTSKYS and others, who, after all, did nothing harmful to the Soviet government at any time, was felt more sharply, but the everlasting lock held tightly.

We had a tradition and a certain mode of behavior. It was considered a disgrace and selfishness to go to the authorities that shot our comrades, declaring their loyalty. On-

Zelikman Naum Petrovich, born in 1901, native of Novomoskovsk, Dnepropetrovsk region. In July 1933, he was appointed plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU in Bashkiria. On December 15, 1934, by order of the NKVD of the USSR, he was appointed head of the NKVD for the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Major of State Security. On March 2, 1939, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to death.

Andreeva-Gorbunova Alexandra Azarievna (1888-1951), native of the village. Kelchin, Sarapul district, Vyatka province, from the family of a religious minister. Member of the Bolshevik Party since 1905. She was subjected to repression by the tsarist government for her revolutionary activities. After the October Revolution, she worked in public education authorities in the city of Slobodsky, Vyatka province. Since 1919 in the Intelligence Department of the Red Army. In October 1921, she was transferred to work in the Cheka and appointed to the position of assistant to the head of the Secret Department of the Cheka. Subsequently, she worked as deputy head of the Secret Department of the GPU and assistant to the head of this department of the OGPU. In 1937, assistant to the special authorized representative of the NKVD of the USSR. In 1938 she was retired. On December 5, 1938, she was arrested by the NKVD of the USSR on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on May 4, 1939, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. While serving her sentence, she died on July 17, 1951 in the Mineral ITL. In 1957 rehabilitated.

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It should be noted that, according to observations, very often it was the morally unstable comrades, with a strong bias towards philistinism and towards observing their own interests, who made their individual statements. The authorities usually forgave them, released them from prison or exile, and sometimes provided, if necessary, some other protection. We called it selling ourselves for a warrant for galoshes and an apartment, covered the name of a departed comrade with contempt, and he left forever from our sight.

It was this tradition that determined our communication. They had already become narrow, they were already a lifeless form, and with pain and difficulty, but they continued to drive all the left.s.r.

And how can I, the main keeper and creator of these traditions, come out with the opposite. That's how the style stayed.

But this style determined a lot and was very harmful. He defined permanent opposition, anti-Soviet conversations among themselves, a certain oppositional tone, as a habitual reflex when discussing issues of the current moment, etc. If we completely legitimately abandoned questions of our program and tactics, then we were greedily interested in current life and newspaper reports, and the exchange of opinions on newspapers was the main topic at our meetings. The political side of the country's life and its entire life constituted our life.

When the charter of agricultural industries came out, and collective farms received their legal registration and land cadastre, I became completely unbearable. I read these charters and projects up and down, made amendments and was sad and sad. And then not a word to anyone.

During the service, the manager asked me why she was so gloomy, I showed him the newspaper, and I blurted out, “It’s my business.”

3) With the release of the Constitution, we had a conversation for one minute - if only they would let us issue a ballot, in small quantity copies for the exchange of opinions and so that everything is in full swing. s.r. They spoke about their position, attitude towards the current moment and overestimated the end. This would make it possible to reach an agreement before self-liquidation, since I am convinced that the vast majority of n/fragments would confirm what I am saying now. Moreover, I would have expressed myself in the newsletter then more fully and frankly than now, without thinking that my thoughts would be explained away with nettles, as I think now. But, of course, we soon realized that a green garden was not for us, and with the words of this song I formulated the attitude of the Constitution towards us to the comrades who came to us.

You continue to be so afraid of us that you can’t find a better place for us under the new Constitution than isolation wards. I attribute the defeat and exile most of all to this reason.

4) What stopped me, of course, was that if we were to make a statement about disarmament, no, I say incorrectly, “we”, because this was never said out loud - what stopped me was what you already had The situation at the meeting of those disarming was not at all the same as before. You suffered so many disappointments and were so shamelessly and often deceived that it was difficult for you to maintain your former trust and cordiality in statements of loyalty, and it became legitimately natural for you to regard statements as double-dealing. For me this would be unbearable.

5) And then your condition for disarmament is the imprisonment of all old comrades who did not come with statements. This is not clear to me. After all, they were also passive, like me. In my opinion this is more harmful than beneficial. And I was definitely incapable of organizing this with my comrades, who could be contacted if there were other comrades who for some reason did not come to us, and therefore would have considered those imprisoned as strikebreaking.

So you would say that I did not disarm, as you will say now.

6) By the way, I great friend Soviet power than tens of millions of loyal citizens. And a passionate and effective friend. Although he has the courage to have his own opinion. I think you are doing better than I would have done.

Your policy of war and peace is completely accepted by me (as of all the leftists I know), I have never taken industrial policy under fire from my criticism, I completely agree with collectivization. I agree with all the progressive tempo and structure, it’s not worth listing.

7) I only disagree with the fact that the death penalty remains in the modern system. Now the state is so strong that it can build Socialism without the death penalty. This article should not exist in the legislation. She can stay for the war and nothing more. In peacetime, our protective apparatus has a power that is not and has never been equal in the world. Was it really so strong among the Assirovylonians in one of their periods? And now there is no need at all to have this arch-bourgeois means of defense in your arsenal. The best minds of humanity, the passionate work of thought and heart of entire centuries called the need to destroy e/institutions as their crown and result. Honor, gil-

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otina, rope, bullet, electric. chair - medieval. Our revolution of 1905 took place entirely under the slogan of abolishing the institution of the death penalty, but dying, as if covered with a white wing by this very slogan (So in the text), bleeding itself. It is curious that Magantsev, a legislator, a thinker, a prominent lawyer, hung with orders, a teacher of two kings, who stood for the death penalty all his life, towards the end of his life [realized] that the death penalty is harmful socially and politically and must be abandoned.

The essence of the denial of the death penalty remains the same under all conditions under governments of all stripes.

One can and should kill in a civil war while defending the rights of the revolution and the working people, but only when there are no other means of defending the revolution at hand. When there are such powerful means of defense as you have, the death penalty becomes a harmful institution, corrupting incalculably those who apply this institution.

I always think about the psychology of thousands of people - technical performers, executioners, executioners, about those who escort convicts to death, about a platoon shooting in the semi-darkness of the night at a bound, disarmed, maddened man. We can’t, we can’t do this. We have apple blossoms in our country, we have science and movement, art, beauty, we have books and general education and treatment, we have sun and raising children, we have truth and next to this is this huge corner where cruel, bloody things are happening. In connection with this question, I often think about Stalin, because he is such an intelligent man and seems to be interested in the transformation of things and hearts!? How can he not see that the death penalty must be ended? Here you are, lion. Wed, they started this death penalty, we would have ended it, only by reducing it in size to one person in the person of me, as an undisarmed person - as you call me. But we need to end the death penalty.

8) And I would also adjust your prison regime and your penal system. It should be different in a socialist country. We definitely need more humanity. The worst thing about imprisonment is the transformation of a person into a thing. Tolstoy, who never spent time in prison, spoke about this remarkably in his novel “Sunday.” Everything else is just an application. Nobody thinks about it. And they would have to. During these 9 months, despite all my isolation, I have still gained so much and seen enough bad things that I am suffering from the itch to speak out, but which of you would be interested in this?

9) My guilt for not legally formalizing our non-struggle, our disarmament, is aggravated by the fact that, given the lack of disunity and fragmentation, individual leftist r.s. perhaps they continued to consider themselves obligated to undertake and organize something, whereas with this or that publication this could no longer be the case.

I would like to justify myself a little by the fact that without human equipment, without a program and tactics, without mutual coherence, a party cannot exist, and it did not exist, and everyone understood this and, most importantly, I was convinced that you knew this well. But even for self-destruction, especially if it had only a formal meaning, it was necessary for the fragments to contact, write off or gather together, which was all impossible. Without this, there would have been only an arbitrary attack from us 4, a coup d’etat (coudeta), which the comrades might not have taken into account, and you would have considered such a liquidation insufficiently authoritarian.

XXII. Coming to Moscow, I really hoped to have the opportunity to talk briefly with someone at the top, especially with someone who knew me personally.

Due to the apparent lack of such an opportunity, I have to write instead of just saying it once and without any resonance, because I wouldn’t want many people to know and read this. Now I have to write: - The Ufa investigation (MIKHAILOV) offered me, if I “confess” to the center, terror, etc. - to give me the opportunity to assign to us each employee in the case with the condition of full agreement with my distribution, which creates, from my words and release of a number of persons. KARPOVICH went further. At the beginning of August, during my second continuous interrogation vigil, he invited me to take the blame for everyone and he would then release 40 people. I would only have to confirm that I am the only inspirer, initiator and leader, and if it weren’t for me, no crime could have been born, all 40 would have done nothing. I refused.

I have a question. Is this an individual technique or a generally accepted method. In both cases, this is definitely not an acceptable method. It leads to Azerism in the full sense of the word and darkens the prospects of our future, which must increasingly unlearn and cleanse itself from the dark skills and heritage of the past, and not live by them.

There are too many traces of these dark skills in my case, and if not for them, I would not have had to die.

If now, at least a little, this death pushes this dark legacy into the past, then it was

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that would be good. It would be good to get those who told the story to admit back to their lies for the sake of the investigation. So that the truth will prevail. Everything that I have said regarding the charges brought against me is true, I swear on my life.

M. SPIRIDONOVA.

Central Election Commission FSB. D.N. 13266. T. 3. M. 1 -132. Original. Typescript.

Bezberezhev Sergey Viktorovich— Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor at Petrozavodsk University.

The 57 years of Spiridonova’s life were full of amazing, tragic events, full of revolutionary pathos. Terrorist in 1906; convict in 1906 - 1917; influential political figure, leader of the Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries (PLSR) in 1917-1918; from 1918 to 1941 (with short breaks) - in Soviet prisons and exile. Her fate was typical of many Russian socialists, who lost the political struggle in 1917 - 1920, and then were destroyed during the repressions of the 20s - 30s.

A very substantial political biography of Spiridonova appeared in the West during her lifetime. From time to time, other publications dedicated to her were published there 1 . Small materials about her began to appear in the Soviet press quite recently 2 .

Spiridonova was born on October 16, 1884 in Tambov. Her father, Alexander Alekseevich, had the rank of collegiate secretary and belonged to that layer of nobles with modest incomes who earned their livelihood by serving in provincial institutions. Mother, Alexandra Yakovlevna, took care of the housework and children, of whom there were four in the family: Evgenia, Maria, Yulia and Nikolai. Thanks to a good education at home, Maria was immediately accepted into the 2nd grade of the Tambov Girls' Gymnasium in 1895. On June 2, 1901, she was issued a certificate in which it was written that she was “awarded the title of a student who completed a full course of study.” After this, Maria entered the 8th, additional, grade. But already on February 14, 1902, the pedagogical council of the gymnasium considered the application; Spiridonova wrote: “Due to poor health and home circumstances, I wish to stop studying in the eighth grade of the gymnasium, which is why I humbly ask the Pedagogical Council to return my documents” 3 . She began working as a clerk in the Tambov provincial assembly of nobles 4.

Maria took her first steps into the revolution in 1900-1901. While still in the 6th grade of the gymnasium, she joined the Tambov Socialist Revolutionary organization, and then became a member of the fighting squad 5. One of the organizers of the Socialist Revolutionary movement in the Tambov province was V. M. Chernov, the future theorist and leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (AKP), who served exile in Tambov in 1895 - 1898. But then his and Spiridonova’s paths had not yet crossed. Maria met the Social Revolutionaries only two years after he left to emigrate. Therefore, when listing the young Tambov neo-populists who were most memorable to him, he does not mention Spiridonov 6.

Maria was first arrested for participating in a youth demonstration in Tambov on March 24, 1905. After a short investigation by the police, she was released 7 . The second arrest, on January 16, 1906, was associated with a terrorist act against the Tambov provincial councilor G.N. Luzhenovsky, who was sentenced by the local organization of Socialist Revolutionaries back in October 1905 to death for the brutal pacification of peasant uprisings and for organizing the “Black Hundred” in Tambov » 8 .

Spiridonova herself volunteered to carry out this action. She tracked Luzhenovsky at railway stations and on trains for several days and on January 16, 1906 at the station. Borisoglebsk saw him from the window of the carriage. There was, as usual, no ring of Cossack guards around. Maria started shooting from the carriage platform with a revolver, which she held in a muff wrapped in a scarf, then she jumped onto the platform and continued to fire, changing position. When Luzhenovsky fell 9, she screamed in a nervous fit: “Shoot me!” The guards who came running saw a girl with a revolver, which she brought to her temple. A Cossack standing nearby hit her on the head with a rifle butt. She fell...

The interrogation was accompanied by beatings and vile abuse of the naked Spiridonova. The final act was the abuse of a girl in a carriage on the way to Tambov. The doctor who examined Spiridonova in prison found numerous bruises and bruises on her, stripes from blows with whips on her knees and thighs, a festering stripe on her forehead, lips swollen from blows, and a severely damaged left eye 10 . Until her death, her broken lungs made themselves felt, and the nervous shock left an imprint on her character, which later allowed some people to call her “hysterical,” “hysterical,” etc. Brought to prison in severe delirium, she did not rise from her bed for a month and a half . But she prepared for life in prison in advance: during a search, they found powder on her with which she was going to poison prison mice.

An act of great public importance was Spiridonova’s open letter, published in the newspaper Rus (1906, No. 27). In it, she described the circumstances of the assassination attempt on Luzhenovsky and spoke quite frankly about the torture to which she was subjected. Her words were heard throughout Russia, which had not yet cooled down from the turbulent year of 1905: “In full agreement with this verdict (of the Socialist-Revolutionaries to Luzhenovsky - S.B.) and in full consciousness of my action, I took up the execution of this sentence... If they kill me, I will die calmly and with a good feeling in my soul.” The police believed that the letter was smuggled out by Julia, Maria's sister. After her next meeting with Maria on February 19, 1906, another letter was found in her possession. Yulia was arrested. A third sister, Evgenia, was also captured and later acquitted by a military court. The right-wing press tried to discredit the letter and its author. Then the editors of Rus sent their employee Vladimirov to Tambov to check the facts, who played a significant role in the fate of Spiridonova and later became the author of a book about her. Even then she was producing strong impression on others. Her lawyer, a prominent figure in the Cadet Party N.V. Teslenko, at the very first meeting saw in the defendant a personality of “a high-quality mental type” 11 .

The true investigation into the Spiridonova case was interfered with from above. Everything was done to hide the truth about the torture. The military department did not want a detailed investigation, since army officers were involved in the case. The visiting session of the Moscow District Military Court considered it in three hours behind closed doors on March 12, 1906 in Tambov. The second lawyer was court-appointed military lawyer A.P. Filimonov. The prosecution presented two witnesses: the Borisoglebsk police officer and the doctor who assisted Luzhenovsky. After the indictment was read, Spiridonova gave detailed explanations. In this, perhaps, the first political speech in her life, Maria spoke about the significance of the manifesto of October 17, 1905, the cruel suppression of peasant protests in the Tambov province, the atrocities of Luzhenovsky, the tasks of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the bullying of the gendarmes. Teslenko gave a bright speech. His words became known to the whole country: “In front of you is not only the humiliated, sick Spiridonova. Before you is a sick and desecrated Russia.” Maria was sentenced to death by hanging. The decision was subject to approval. O. Commander of the Moscow Military District V.G. Glazov.

Maria spent 16 days waiting for the verdict to be approved and subsequently described the feelings she experienced on death row: “For a number of subsequent months, this verdict did not go unnoticed. For those who are ready for it and who know all too well what they are dying for, the state under death penalty is often full of unearthly charm; they always remember it as the brightest and happiest period of life, a period when there was no time, when they experienced deep loneliness and at that time At the same time, an unprecedented, previously unimaginable love unity with every person and with the whole world without any barriers. And, of course, this very unusualness, being between life and the grave, cannot be considered normal, and the return to life often shook the entire nervous system” 12.

From her cell, she sent several letters to her comrades on release. Not without some panache, they still give a certain idea of ​​her ideological ideals. “My death,” she wrote, “seems to me to be so socially valuable that I will accept the mercy of the autocracy as death, as a new mockery. If it is possible and they won’t kill you soon, then I will try to be useful to you, at least by recruiting allies.” From another letter: “Belonging to the Socialist Revolutionary Party is understood by me not only as unconditional recognition of its program and tactics, but much more fully. In my opinion, this means giving your life, all your thoughts and feelings to the implementation of the ideas of the party in life; this means managing every minute of your life in such a way that your business benefits from it” 13.

Willingness for self-sacrifice, faith in party ideals, based more on feelings and emotions than on a thorough knowledge of theory, revolutionary fanaticism - these are the features that distinguished Spiridonova among the Socialist Revolutionaries and gave reason not only for admiration, but also for suspicion of exalting her own person. In those 16 days, Maria, like every person, experienced the fear of death and the fear of a revolutionary to behave unworthily on the scaffold. She prepared for this and once built something like a gallows on a prison table out of hairpins. She hung a figurine made of bread crumbs on it with a thin hair and, lost in thought, sat opposite for a long time, rocking the “little man” from time to time 14 . On March 28, she was informed that the death penalty had been replaced with indefinite hard labor. If you believe Spiridonova’s letters, this message disappointed her: she did not want favors from the autocracy.

Before being sent to hard labor, Spiridonova was brought to Moscow on May 25 and placed in the Pugachev tower of the Butyrka prison. The respect for the young terrorist was demonstrated in their letter by the famous Shlisselburg residents E. S. Sozonov, P. V. Karpovich, Sh. V. Sikorsky who were there at that time: “You have already been compared to tormented Russia, and you, comrade, are undoubtedly its symbol . But a symbol not only of a tormented country bleeding under the heel of a drunken, exhausted Cossack, you are a symbol of a still young, rebelling, fighting, selfless Russia. And this is all the greatness, all the beauty of your dear image” 15. In June 1906, Maria, and with her her future friends in hard labor L. Ezerskaya, M. Shkolnik, A. A. Izmailovich, R. Fialka and A. A. Bitsenko in a special carriage were sent to the distant, notorious Nerchinskaya hard labor. This “transfer” took place in a situation very far from the usual transfer of state criminals. The revolution in Siberia had not yet been pacified. The convict carriage was greeted at many stations with red flags and flowers. Spiridonova's popularity was enormous 16.

The regime of the Akatuevskaya prison, one of the seven prisons of the Nerchinsk penal servitude, remained very liberal until 1907. The mood of the political prisoners (25 - 30 Socialist Revolutionaries, 3 - 4 Social Democrats, several anarchists) was cheerful. Within the stone walls of the prison they enjoyed autonomy. Debates, lectures, clubs, newspapers, and books were commonplace. Having found herself in hard labor among professional revolutionaries, it was there that Spiridonova began to truly go through her universities. The greatest authority was won by G. A. Gershuni, the legendary leader of the AKP Combat Organization 17. The whole prison gathered at his lecture on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, surveillance came from behind the gates, and even the authorities allowed themselves to find out some interesting details from the lecturer. One of the most popular figures of the AKP, Yegor Sozonov, had a great influence on the development of Spiridonova’s theoretical views and moral and ethical ideas. Their meetings, and then friendly correspondence, continued until his tragic death on November 27, 1910.

In January 1907, the administration decided to relocate female prisoners to the Maltsevskaya convict prison. Maria was kept there until 1911. The former head of the convoy team, G. Chemodanov, recalled how “every boss upon arrival at hard labor certainly wanted to see its sights, among which they included Spiridonov” 18 . Maltsevskaya prison, in which in 1906 - 1911. contained 36 Socialist-Revolutionaries, 13 anarchists, 5 Bolsheviks, 2 Mensheviks, etc., and consisted of one-story wooden buildings behind a stone fence. The cells were damp and cold. The prisoners ate poorly. But they “didn’t even see the semblance of a convict regime at that time (until 1911, when they were transferred to Akatuy for correction)” 19.

The convicts did a lot of self-education. Spiridonova’s friend I.K. Kakhovskaya recalled: “Books, of course, were the main content of life, its justification, meaning, purpose. We received them at sufficient quantity from the outside, mainly scientific, and collected a small but valuable library on various branches of knowledge" 20 . Classes, including those in natural science and foreign languages, sometimes lasted until 12 o'clock at night. This was a noticeable stage in Spiridonova’s preparation for future political activity.

But the experience also took its toll. Maria was very often sick, sometimes “fell into a delirious state and lay unconscious and oblivious for whole days” 21 . Serious treatment was required. Prisoners of the Gorno-Zerentui prison, where there was a hospital, went on a hunger strike and achieved the transfer of the patient to them. “The day of her arrival remained one of the brightest moments in the life of Mountain Zerentui” 22. In the fall of 1907, the Socialist Revolutionary emigration received a letter from Spiridonova with a request to organize her escape. For this, V.N. Figner was instructed to get 4 thousand rubles, and Dr. A.Yu. Feit was instructed to find a performer capable of taking Maria out. One of the emigrants, A. Speransky, volunteered. However, both attempts he made in 1909 - 1910 were unsuccessful, and the brave young man paid with a 5-year exile to the Yakut province 23.

Liberation came only with the February Revolution. On March 3, 1917, the head of the Akatuevo prison informed political prisoners that by order of the Minister of Justice A.F. Kerensky, the Socialist-Revolutionaries A.A. Bitsenko, A.A. Izmailovich, F.E. Royblat (Kaplan), M.A. Spiridonova, N. A. Terentyeva, A. Ya. Tebenkova (Pirogov), A. Shenburg and V. V. Stalterfot. Then anarchists A. Shumilova and P.I. Shakerman were added to them 24.

Finding herself in Chita on March 8, Spiridonova immediately began active political work: in contact with the local Socialist Revolutionary group, which had been publishing the newspaper “Narodnoe Delo” since March 17, she carried out propaganda, signed appeals to the population to provide assistance to political prisoners, and made reports at meetings Executive Committee of the Chita Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. After her speech on May 13, the executive committee decided to liquidate the Nerchinsk penal servitude 25. Spiridonova established contacts with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, which appeared back in 1915, and in 1917 actively declared itself at the II Petrograd Conference of the AKP, back in Chita, firmly taking an internationalist position. Recalling her meeting there with her prison comrade S. Farashyants, she noted that “he was pretty frightened by my internationalism” and “stake on the socialist revolution” 26 .

In the second half of May, Spiridonova left for Moscow. Together with A. M. Flegont, Kakhovskaya and Bitsenko, she was supposed to represent the Socialist Revolutionaries of the Trans-Baikal region at the III Congress of the AKP. On May 31 they appeared at the congress meeting. Chairman N. S. Rusanov announced that among the delegates were Spiridonova, Bitsenko, Terentyeva, Kakhovskaya and L. P. Orestova, whose names “belong to the brightest and noblest phenomena of the Russian revolution,” and invited them to the honorary presidium. The image of a girl who was not afraid to openly speak out against evil and injustice was still vivid in the memory of the congress delegates. But Spiridonova has not yet been recognized as a political figure. She was not elected to the AKP Central Committee, although such a proposal was made. Immediately after the congress, during the elections of the executive committee at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies, out of 1,115 delegates (including 537 Socialist Revolutionaries), only 7 votes were cast for it.

Together with M.A. Nathanson, P.P. Proshyan and B.D. Kamkov, Spiridonova plays one of the main roles in the Left Socialist Revolutionary opposition 27. She joined the Organizing Bureau of the left wing of the AKP during its Third Congress and soon became actively involved in the work of the Petrograd organization. She was in contact with the editorial office of the Petrograd “Land and Freedom”, where part of the Left Socialist Revolutionary core was concentrated in the spring of 1917. She often performed at enterprises and in military units. Her emotional speeches calling for an end to the war and the immediate transfer of land to the peasant committees and the authorities to the Soviets were a great success. In the July days, V.I. Lenin already singled out Spiridonova as the most prominent leader of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. “The hesitation among the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks is expressed in the fact that Spiridonova and a number of other Socialist-Revolutionaries speak out in favor of the transfer of power to the Soviets,” he wrote in the article “Three Crises” 28 .

By the end of the summer of 1917, the influence of the left in the AKP increased. The Central Committee of the party was forced on August 11 to publish in its printed organ “Delo Naroda” a resolution of the Left Socialist Revolutionary minority, proposed to the VII Council of the AKP, condemning the policies of the coalition government and demanding that the party abdicate responsibility for the activities of its representatives in it. On August 16 and 17, the Petrograd Provincial Party Congress joined the Left SR resolution. There Spiridonova gave a speech “On the modern moment.” In September, the same decision was made by the VII Petrograd Provincial Conference of the AKP, also with the active participation of Spiridonova 29 . In those days, out of 45 thousand Socialist Revolutionaries in Petrograd, 40 thousand moved to the left positions 30. In the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party Petrograd City Committee of the AKP, Spiridonova was among its 12 members. Together with Kamkov, she became deputy chairman of the committee. At the same time, she was elected to the editorial board of the left-wing Socialist Revolutionary newspaper “Znamya Truda”, and on September 15, 1917 - a deputy of the Petrograd Soviet 31.

By that time she had already gained fame as a publicist. Her printed materials, which often appeared in the magazine “Our Way”, which she edited, did not pretend to be a deep theoretical development of the program and tactics of the Socialist Revolutionaries. They were distinguished by political pragmatism and sharp criticism of any deviations from the revolutionary “purity of former Socialist Revolutionary dogmas.” It was not for nothing that Lenin called the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries “the faithful guardians of the teachings, programs and demands of the socialist-revolutionaries” 32. But Spiridonova’s struggle against the center-right part of the AKP leadership was not aimed at splitting the AKP. Spiridonova and her comrades sought only to strengthen their positions within the party, to attract the majority of its members to their side. In one of the articles, Spiridonova wrote: “We, the minority, while remaining in the party,... declare an ideological struggle for dominance in the party” 33. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries decided to create a separate party only in November 1917.

At the Democratic Conference, convened by the Provisional Government in September with the aim of stabilizing the political situation, Spiridonova spoke as a delegate from the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Peasant Deputies. On September 18, she gave a speech that was met with thunderous applause. Her attitude to the main issue at that time - about power - was clearly expressed by the call: “Down with the coalition, and long live the power of the people and the revolution!” 34. Within the framework of the Democratic Conference, Spiridonova had not yet called for the transfer of power to the Soviets; she believed possible education anti-bourgeois government under the control of the Democratic Conference and entered the Pre-Parliament as one of 38 representatives from the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Peasants' Deputies 35. But when it became clear that the Democratic Conference did not live up to the expectations of the working people, Spiridonova and all the Left Socialist Revolutionaries left the Pre-Parliament and began to focus exclusively on the Soviets. The Left Socialist Revolutionary newspaper “Znamya Truda,” whose editorial board included Spiridonova, sharply opposed the right Socialist Revolutionaries and began to publish demands for the convening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets to resolve the issue of “organizing the life of the country,” and the Soviets were called the only organization expressing the “political will of democracy.” .

In conditions of a national crisis, the Bolsheviks, as is known, headed for an armed uprising. The position of the Left Social Revolutionaries was important in this regard. Lenin, predicting a new situation in September 1917, believed that Spiridonova’s supporters (as well as the Menshevik internationalists, supporters of Yu. O. Martov) would support the uprising 36 . Indeed, in October the Left Social Revolutionaries entered the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and actively participated in the October armed uprising. They, unlike the Mensheviks and right Socialist Revolutionaries, remained at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, voted for decrees on peace and land, and became members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (23 people, including Spiridonov) 37 . But their position was inconsistent and wavering. This was also manifested in the refusal of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to join the Soviet government. Negotiations between the Bolsheviks on October 26 with B.D. Kamkov, V.A. Karelin and V.B. Spiro, who were asked to jointly create an executive branch, were unsuccessful.

Obviously, the same issues were raised in Lenin’s conversation with Spiridonova, which took place on the same day, two hours before the opening of the second meeting of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Krupskaya recalled: “The atmosphere of this meeting remains in my memory. Some room in Smolny, with soft dark red sofas. Spiridonova is sitting on one of the sofas, Ilyich is sitting next to her and somehow gently and passionately convinces her of something” 38. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries then advocated the creation of a “homogeneous revolutionary government” from representatives of all socialist parties - from the Bolsheviks to the people's socialists. Spiridonova apparently shared this idea. In any case, when during negotiations with the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Railway Workers' Trade Union the option of forming " People's Council”, then it was proposed to include Spiridonov as Minister of State Charity in the “cabinet of ministers” allocated for him 39 .

Spiridonova, although she did not accept the tactics of the Bolsheviks, realized the need to cooperate with them. “No matter how alien their crude steps are to us,” she said at the First Congress of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party on November 21, 1917, “we are in close contact with them, because behind them are the masses, brought out of a state of stagnation.” She believed that the influence of the Bolsheviks on the masses was temporary, since the Bolsheviks “have no inspiration, no religious enthusiasm, ... everything breathes hatred, bitterness. These feelings... are good during fierce struggles and barricades. But in the second stage of the struggle, when organic work is needed, when it is necessary to create a new life based on love and altruism, then the Bolsheviks will go bankrupt. We, keeping the behests of our fighters, must always remember the second stage of the struggle” 40.

Such a stage, according to Spiridonova, will be a “social revolution”, which is “ripening and will soon break out,” but will have a chance of success only if it turns into a global one. The October Revolution as a “political” revolution is only the beginning of a world revolution. “We have dealt a strong blow to capitalism,” said Spiridonova, “the paths have been cleared for the implementation of socialism. In Western Europe, all material conditions have arrived, but there is no inspiring ideology, which we have so much of... Victory will be ensured if it goes under the banner of the International” 41. Spiridonov's assessments of the nature and prospects of the October Revolution were not much different from traditional Left Socialist Revolutionary ideas. There was perhaps some dissonance in her recognition of the “socialist character” of the October Revolution in her speech on December 14, 1917 at the All-Russian Congress of Railway Workers 42 .

She characterized the Soviets as “the most complete expression of the people’s will.” Comparing them with Western European parliaments, comparing “Soviet” and “bourgeois” democracies, she chose the Soviets: “We cannot reach socialism through parliamentary struggle” 43 . At the same time, Spiridonova was skeptical about the capabilities of the Council of People's Commissars: “Democracy hopes in vain that the government can save the revolution and the country. No government can do this, only the people themselves on our own able to save himself. If the people do not organize themselves, then it is impossible to help from above with “decrees”. The Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies must take power into their own hands and implement new, people's laws." 44

Until the Left SR Conference declared itself the First Congress of the PLSR on November 18, 1917, Spiridonova harbored hopes that the left would win a majority in the AKP. In a speech at the 1st Congress of the PLSR on November 21, Spiridonova called for remembering old traditions, sharply criticized the official party leadership for the fact that the party had ceased to have “the ideal, intimate character of the purity and sanctity of the first organizations” and had become a “state party”, which includes persons “ alien to socialism." The elections of the Central Committee of the PLSR showed that Spiridonova, Natanson and Kamkov are the recognized leaders of this party.

In those November days, Spiridonova carried out the most important task for the Left SRs of winning the peasant majority to their side at the Extraordinary and Second All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies. “We need, as a young party,” Spiridonova told the First Congress of the PLSR, “to win the peasantry. The first touchstone is this congress” (II All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies - S.B.) 45. It was not by chance that the Left Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee placed its bet on Spiridonova. By that time, she had managed to add to the halo of a great martyr, largely thanks to the populism characteristic of her political practice, the fame of an emotional speaker, publicist and political figure defending peasant interests. J. Reed called her at that moment “the most popular and influential woman in Russia” 46. It is significant that Spiridonova was elected chairman of both peasant congresses. The Extraordinary and Second All-Russian Peasant Congresses, and then the Central Executive Committee and the peasant section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee were the main arena of Spiridonova’s political activities in late 1917 - early 1918.

The bloc of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, which formed in November - December 1917, had important to strengthen Soviet power. Spiridonova's associates P.P. Proshyan, I.Z. Steinberg, A.L. Kolegaev, V.E. Trutovsky, V.A. Karelin, V.A. Algasov entered the Council of People's Commissars from the left Socialist Revolutionaries. She herself did not become a people's commissar, since the Central Committee of the PLSR considered her work in the Central Executive Committee more important. After the formation of a bloc with the Bolsheviks, Spiridonova was more loyal to the October Revolution, which took place, in her words, “perhaps not within the fundamental framework that the internationalists dreamed of,” and “much, perhaps, is subject to criticism,” but in relation to this revolution “there is no place for a single word of condemnation” 47.

Right Socialist Revolutionaries called Spiridonova “a sectarian to the root of her hair” and accused her of disdain for the Constituent Assembly; that the interests of the peasantry are less important to it than the interests of the international revolution; that she is pursuing the line of subordinating the masses of the people to the Bolsheviks: “By collaborating with the “Councils of People's Commissars”, you are trying with all your might to attract the peasants to Smolny and thereby put the peasant stamp on the decrees of the Messrs. Bolshevik commissars" 48. The attitude of the right-wing socialists towards Spiridonova was also evident on the first day of the Constituent Assembly, when, during the election of its chairman, 153 deputies (including Bolsheviks) voted for Spiridonova, and 244 deputies voted for Chernov 49 . On January 6, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, and in Petrograd a demonstration of its defenders was dispersed with weapons, and there were casualties. Chernov, in his “Open Letter to Former Comrade Maria Spiridonova,” placed part of the blame on her for this “violence against democracy,” calling the left Socialist Revolutionaries “political murderers” 50.

One of the most important issues facing the revolution was the exit from the imperialist war. Spiridonova supported the efforts of the delegation of Soviet Russia to conclude a peace treaty with Germany, believing that this would benefit the world revolution: “After the actions of the governments of England and France,” she said, “the conclusion of a separate peace will only be the impetus that will make the masses see the light” 51 . Lenin repeatedly talked with Spiridonova about the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk, 52 and she formed the firm opinion that, no matter how shameful for Russia and predatory on the part of Germany this treaty was, it was necessary to sign it. At the III Congress of the PLSR (June 28 - July 1, 1918), Spiridonova said: “At the III Congress of Soviets... during my frequent conversations with Lenin, I posed a categorical question to him, to what extent did he contemplate concessions in relation to German imperialism and whether it was possible to allow at least some deviations in our internal process socialist reforms. Then he called the entire party and Comrade Kamkov, in particular, fools for the fact that we assume that Russia will fulfill the agreement one way or another, that we will implement it only externally, that its whole being is deeply reactionary, directed against Soviet power, against Russian revolution cannot be fulfilled" 53.

The majority of the PLSR Central Committee supported the conclusion of an agreement with Germany until February 23, 1918. In those days, the German delegation set new, much more difficult peace conditions, and the Central Committee of the PLSR, first at its meeting, and then at a joint meeting with the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), spoke out against the conclusion of the treaty 54 . Spiridonova, remaining in the minority, continued to support the position of Lenin and his supporters. Even in April 1918, after the dramatic IV All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she did not change her point of view. In a report on April 19, 1918 at the II Congress of the PLSR, which can be considered her most impressive political speech, Spiridonova, polemicizing with Kamkov, called on the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to share responsibility for the Brest-Litovsk Peace with the Bolsheviks: “The peace was signed not by us and not by the Bolsheviks: it was signed by need, hunger, the reluctance of the entire people - exhausted, tired - to fight. And which of us will say that the party of left socialist revolutionaries, if it represented only power, would have acted differently from what the Bolshevik party acted? 55. Spiridonova sharply rejected the calls of some congress delegates to provoke the rupture of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and unleash a “revolutionary war” against German imperialism.

However, at the same time, Spiridonova and Kamkov were negotiating with members Executive Committee“Revolutionary International Socialist Organization of Foreign Workers and Peasants” by T. Toman, R. Reiter and F. Janczyk. The subject of the negotiations was the organization, with the help of prisoners of war, of a terrorist act against General G. von Eichhorn, who led the German occupation army group "Kyiv". Lenin, having learned about this conversation, invited Toman, Reiter and Yanchik to the Kremlin, where he held a “counter-conversation” with them, during which he told them in detail about the significance of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, about the policies of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and other parties 56 .

Between April and June 1918, Spiridonova radically changed her political position. From collaborating with the Bolsheviks, she, one of the few who sharply condemned the exit of the left Socialist Revolutionaries from the Council of People's Commissars, moves into the camp of political opponents of the Bolsheviks. In her own words, after the Left Socialist Revolutionaries left the Soviet government, she was the only link with the Bolsheviks and left them “later than others” 57. At this time, Spiridonova’s attitude towards the Brest-Litovsk Treaty changed dramatically. In June 1918, she openly opposed the “obscene” treaty, spoke with anguish at rallies about helping the peoples who rebelled against the Germans in the territories they occupied, knowing well that the price for this should be the breaking of the peace treaty. Petty-bourgeois revolutionism took precedence over a responsible state attitude to business.

In addition to Brest, a serious and perhaps the main point of disagreement between Spiridonova and the Bolsheviks is their policy towards the peasantry. In June - July 1918, Spiridonova unleashed a barrage of accusations against the Bolshevik Central Committee of betraying the interests of the peasantry. Specifically, they expressed themselves in the fact that the Bolsheviks were curtailing the “socialization” of the land, replacing it with “nationalization”; interfere with the normal activities of the Peasant Section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Spiridonova accused the Bolsheviks of a food dictatorship, of organizing food detachments that forcibly requisitioned grain from peasants, and of establishing committees of the poor.

On the eve of the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion, Spiridonova stated that if many disagreements between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries are, although serious, but still temporary, then “on the issue of policy towards the peasants we will fight at any decree”, “we will fight on places, and the committees of the village poor will not have a place for themselves" 58 . On July 2, 1918, from the newspaper “Voice of the Working Peasantry,” Lenin became acquainted with Spiridonova’s speech on June 30, 1918 at the Peasant Section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. On the eve of the rebellion (no later than July 5, 1918), he talked with Spiridonova. It was about finding a compromise between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries: the issue of transferring already nationalized lands to equal distribution was discussed 59 .

On June 24, 1918, the Central Committee of the PLSR decided to break the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by organizing terrorist attacks against the most prominent representatives of German imperialism. In addition, it was necessary to mobilize reliable military forces and “take all measures to ensure that the working peasantry and the working class join the uprising and actively support the party in this action.” To carry out such “decisive actions against the real policy of the Council of People’s Commissars,” the Central Committee of the PLSR organized a bureau of three people with dictatorial powers: Spiridonov, Golubovsky, Mayorov. Spiridonova was the main organizer of the assassination attempt on the German ambassador in Moscow V. Mirbach, personally instructed one of his killers, Ya. G. Blyumkin, and took part in staging the assassination attempt. She told the investigative commission: “I organized the murder of Mirbach from beginning to end” 60.

At the same time, in her rather frank testimony, Spiridonova stated that “in all the resolutions of the Party Central Committee, the overthrow of the Bolshevik government was never planned.” The Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion, she said, was explained only by the fact that the Central Committee of the PLSR was forced to oppose “the Russian government’s defense of the murdered agents of German imperialism” 61 . One of Spiridonova’s main roles in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion, in addition to preparing the assassination attempt on Mirbach, was an attempt to win over the peasant deputies of the V All-Russian Congress of Soviets. But her speeches on July 4-6, filled with extreme emotions, did not achieve their goal. The congress did not follow the Left Social Revolutionaries.

In the events of July 6-7, 1918, Spiridonova showed maximum activity. July 6 at about 6 o'clock. In the evening, with her direct participation in the headquarters of the detachment at the Cheka under the command of D.I. Popov, F.E. Dzerzhinsky was arrested in Trekhsvyatitelsky Lane. Then Spiridonova gave an incendiary speech to the “priests” gathered in the courtyard and went by car, guarded by sailors, to the V All-Russian Congress of Soviets. At the Bolshoi Theater, where the congress was held, she held meetings and re-elections of the bureau of the Left Socialist Revolutionary faction, made speeches, and tried to maintain the fighting spirit of the isolated Left Socialist Revolutionaries. On July 7, the rebellion was suppressed.

On the night of July 8, members of the Left Socialist Revolutionary faction were registered and disarmed at the Bolshoi Theater. More than 100 people surrendered their weapons voluntarily. Spiridonova refused, and during the search her revolver was taken away. The bulk of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, transferred on July 8 from the Bolshoi to the Maly Theater, were released on July 9, and 13 people, along with Spiridonova, were sent to the Kremlin guardhouse. On July 9, 10 people were released, leaving Spiridonova, Mstislavsky and Izmailovich. The assistant commandant of the Kremlin said that Lenin ordered Spiridonov to be given the best possible situation. She was given two good rooms in the palace, food was brought from the kitchen of the Council of People's Commissars, cigarettes, various literature, and letters were delivered. But she herself was dissatisfied with the “apartment” and said about this: “I fought against the tsar for twelve years, and now the Bolsheviks put me in the tsar’s palace” 62 .

Rumors circulated around Moscow about the execution of Spiridonova. One of the leaders of the Cheka, J. H. Peters, gave an interview on this issue on August 22, 1918 to the newspaper “Evening News of the Moscow Council”, in which he reported that these rumors were provocative 63 . Kremlin Commandant P.V. Malkov also spoke about some of the circumstances of Spiridonova’s detention in the Kremlin. In particular, about how, with the permission of Ya. M. Sverdlov, her comrades A. M. Ustinov and A. L. Kolegaev, who did not take part in the rebellion, were allowed to meet with Spiridonova in September 1918. Their attempt to “convince Spiridonova” ended in failure 64.

While Spiridonova was sitting in the Kremlin, her party was worried hard times. A number of local Left Socialist Revolutionary organizations expressed their condemnation of the actions of the Central Committee of the PLSR. However, the First Council of the PLSR (August 1918) approved the actions of the PLSR Central Committee, elected the Central Bureau as the Temporary Executive Body of the party, and authorized the PLSR to go underground 65 . In August - September 1918, two independent parties were formed from among the left Socialist Revolutionaries who condemned the rebellion: the revolutionary communists and the populist communists.

While under arrest in the Kremlin, Spiridonova knew about the processes taking place in the PLSR. Analyzing the causes of the crisis in the party, she admitted that the leadership of the PLSR made a number of serious tactical mistakes. In a letter to the IV Congress of the PLSR October 2 - 7, 1918, she noted: “The fault of the Central Committee, in particular mine (I would have myself quartered now for my guilt), is in hindsight, lack of foresight, which should have foreseen possible consequences act and neutralize them in advance.” Spiridonova wrote that she took up organizing the act, feeling guilty for supporting the Brest-Litovsk Peace. At the same time, she spoke out against terror towards the Bolsheviks, did not advocate an immediate uprising, but called on the party to adopt a “protective color” in order to avoid attacks from the Bolsheviks, regain the trust of the masses and “develop wise tactics that would give the Russian revolution the opportunity break the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk" 66.

In November 1918, Spiridonova, writing in the Kremlin, sent out an “Open Letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party”, in which, justifying the actions of the Central Committee of the PLSR, she brought down a lot of accusations of abandoning the revolution on the heads of the Bolsheviks. One of the theses of the letter was that the defeat of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party meant the defeat of Soviet power and the establishment of the power of the Bolshevik Party. Condemning violence in general and the Red Terror in particular, she, turning to Lenin, wrote: “And really, really, you, Vladimir Ilyich, with your enormous intelligence and personal selflessness and kindness, could not have guessed not to kill Kaplan. How it would not only be beautiful and noble, not according to the tsarist template, as our revolution would need.” Sharply speaking out against the activities of the Cheka, she warned the Central Committee of the RCP (b): “You will soon find yourself in the hands of your Cheka, you are probably already in her hands. That’s where you want to go” 67. The response to Spiridonova’s letter was the brochure Em. Yaroslavsky’s “Theotokos Mary of the Three Hierarchs” (M. 1919), which was clearly inferior to the “Spiridonian manifesto” in emotional and propaganda intensity and hardly surpassed it in the power of argumentation.

The Revolutionary Tribunal in the case of the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion met on November 27, 1918. Of the accused, only Spiridonova and Yu. V. Sablin were present; the rest had either already been shot or were “on the run.” Spiridonova, having made a brief statement that she refused to take part in the trial of one party against another, left the hall. Sablin joined her. After a 10-minute break, the tribunal decided to continue the hearing of the case in the absence of the accused. After hearing the written testimony of Dzerzhinsky and the indictment of N.V. Krylenko, the revolutionary tribunal sentenced Spiridonova and Sablin, “taking into account their special services to the revolution,” to imprisonment for a period of 1 year. But already on November 29, 1918, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided to apply an amnesty to them and release them from prison 68.

Spiridonova was released from prison in early December 1918. A picture of the deep decomposition of her party appeared before her: the departure of the revolutionary communists and populist communists, who created their own parties, from the left Socialist Revolutionaries; cessation of the functioning of a number of print media; more frequent cases of leaving the party; the growth of contradictions between the “tops” and “bottoms” of the left Socialist Revolutionaries. She immediately went to the Second Council of the PLSR and made a stormy speech there. The final resolution reflected the content of this speech. It said that “the peasantry boldly declared a holy revolt, the peasantry boldly rebelled throughout the republic.” Demands were put forward to abolish the Council of People's Commissars and transfer its functions to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee; abolish the Cheka; stop grain and other requisitions from peasants. The resolution ended with a characteristic call: “Down with the Bolshevik oligarchy!” 69.

With the appearance of Spiridonova in the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, extensive work unfolded, as Steinberg recalled. The Central Committee of the PLSR, located in a remote area of ​​Moscow, began to establish old connections. Spiridonova worked tirelessly: she received visitors, listened to reports, and drew up instructions. All its activities were aimed primarily at consolidating the party 70. In public speeches, she continued to attack the Bolsheviks and their policies towards the peasantry. One of its main theses was that Soviet power does not exist, but the autocracy of the Bolsheviks takes place. Spiridonova called for the overthrow of the Bolsheviks, but was forced to admit that the Left Social Revolutionaries did not have sufficient forces for this. At the Moscow conference of the Left Social Revolutionaries in December 1918, she said: “The apparatus of our party is very imperfect, and we ourselves will not be able to organize this. Our job is to throw out a slogan. The wave will come from below" 71 . On February 6, 1919, speaking at the Dux plant, she said that the Bolsheviks ruled irresponsibly and uncontrollably 72 .

The second time Spiridonova was arrested by the Cheka on February 18, 1919. She was again placed in the Kremlin, and the rest of the Left Social Revolutionaries (more than 50), arrested at the same time as her, were sent to Butyrka prison 73 . In letters released into the wild, Spiridonova reported on her moral and physical torment, scolded N.I. Bukharin, considering him an “informer” who distorted her statements at rallies: “I was really “emotional”, I screamed “a continuous cry.” After all, this hooliganism, robbery of the people and their sacred revolutionary rights is being done not in the Krasnov despotism, but in the Lenin-Bukharin despotism, which for me still makes the difference, that’s why I “shout.” In the Krasnov despotism I would only act. It’s no wonder to be “emotional” when talking about thousands of executed peasants” 74.

On February 24, the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal, having recognized the validity of Spiridonova’s accusation of counter-revolutionary slander against Soviet power and taking into account her “morbidly hysterical” state, decided to isolate her from political and social activities for one year “by confining her to a sanatorium with providing her with the opportunity to have healthy physical health.” and mental work" 75. By that time, Spiridonova’s condition had worsened, her hemoptysis resumed, and on March 9 she was transferred to the Kremlin hospital, and a week later she was placed in a room on the third floor of the same building. On March 27, the Central Committee of the PLSR decided to organize her escape, and already on April 3, the Left Social Revolutionaries announced its successful implementation. The case was helped by 22-year-old security officer N.S. Malakhov. The Central Committee of the PLSR reported that “Comrade. Spiridonova, despite her greatly weakened health after the “sanatorium,” immediately began party work” 76 .

Meanwhile, the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party was still in a state of crisis, its local and central bodies were in a semi-legal position. Those who carried out underground work became known as “Spiridonists,” although Spiridonov did not support them in everything. She herself lived illegally under a false name (Anufrieva) in 1919-1920. in Moscow, sometimes finding the opportunity to go to meetings with peasants, including in his native Tambov. She wrote a lot for the illegal Left Socialist Revolutionary press 77 . In the summer of 1919, despite the objections of the group led by Spiridonova, the Central Committee of the Left Social Revolutionaries adopted the “Theses of the Central Committee of the PLSR,” which rejected “methods of armed struggle against the existing power of the Bolsheviks” and any actions “tending to disorganize the Red Army” 78 .

However, while occupying left-wing positions in the Central Committee of the PLSR, Spiridonova still did not join the ultra-left “activists” who, together with “underground anarchists,” created the terrorist organization “All-Russian Headquarters of Revolutionary Partisans.” Spiridonova, actively engaged in anti-Bolshevik propaganda among workers and peasants, was never inclined to participate in terrorist actions against leaders of the RCP (b) and the Soviet state. Indicative in this regard is a letter found by security officers from one of the “activists.” Describing the state of affairs in the PLSR, a certain “Nikolai” reported: “The current composition of the Central Committee: Kamkov, Karelin, Steinberg, Trutovsky and Marusya, and Samokhvalov. Of these, the majority are compromisers, and only Samokhvalov will probably be with us. Marusya takes a middle position - active in words" 79 .

In the spring of 1920, the Central Committee of the PLSR made another attempt to unite local organizations on the platform of renouncing armed struggle with Soviet power and again failed. As a result of the disagreements that arose, he separated from the Central Committee independent center- “Committee of the Central Region”, which stood in the old tactical positions. The Central Committee of the PLSR actually ceased to exist as a single body. In July 1920, the Central Committee of the RCP (b) refused legalization to a group of members of the Central Committee of the PLSR, led by Steinberg. In October 1920, a group of left Socialist Revolutionaries, previously part of the majority of the Central Committee of the PLSR, I. D. Bakkal, S. F. Rybin, Y. M. Fishman, O. L. Chizhikov and I. Z. Steinberg, announced the creation of the Central organizational bureau and appealed to all left Socialist Revolutionaries to unite on the platform of renouncing armed struggle against Soviet power 80 . Spiridonova, still maintaining an irreconcilable position towards the Bolsheviks, was part of the “active” minority of the Central Committee of the PLSR and remained in an illegal position.

On the night of October 26, 1920, Spiridonova was arrested by security officers for the third time. They took her, sick with typhus, from her apartment (75 Tverskaya Street). Kamkov, who was on duty at the patient’s bedside that evening, was also arrested. Given her painful condition, Spiridonova was kept under house arrest for about a month, and then transferred to an infirmary for security officers in Varsonofyevsky Lane. At the beginning of 1921, negotiations between the Left Socialist Revolutionary leaders and the Cheka began regarding the release of Spiridonova, but then the Kronstadt rebellion broke out and the matter was postponed. Her friend Izmailovich was constantly near the patient. Six months passed in “absolute isolation.” On July 4, they were offered to move to the Prechistensky psychiatric hospital. Spiridonova was given sleeping pills and transported by car to a new place. In the hospital, she refused to eat and starved for 14 days, including 10 without a sip of water. K. Zetkin, who came to Moscow for the International Women's Congress, spoke with L. D. Trotsky about the release of Spiridonova and her going abroad. However, he said that this was impossible, because Spiridonova represented a danger to Soviet power 81 .

Spiridonova was released in accordance with the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) dated September 13 and the resolution of the Presidium of the Cheka of September 15, 1921 82. The condition for her release was a guarantee from the Chairman of the Central Organizing Bureau (COB) of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Steinberg, and the Secretary of the COB, Bakkala, that she would never engage in political activities. Upon release, she and Izmailovich went to a village near Moscow. The environment in which they had to live for two years in a private house in Malakhovka under the control of the Cheka was far from “sanatorium”. Izmailovich even turned to the Red Cross on June 11, 1922 with a letter in which she asked to transfer Spiridonova to the Tagansk prison for government support.

In 1923, Spiridonova tried to escape abroad 83 and for this she was sentenced to three years of exile, which she, together with Izmailovich and Mayorov, served until February 1925 in the Kaluga state farm colony. After a joint hunger strike from January 9 to January 21, 1925, all three were sent to Samarkand 84. There, Spiridonova worked in one of the agricultural institutions, working 13-14 hours a day for a modest salary, which was added to the allowance from the OGPU (6 rubles 25 kopecks) given to political exiles. In letters to friends, she described the local nature and living conditions, showed great interest in the activities of foreign socialists, and in her free time read French classics in the original. At the end of 1925, the OGPU invited her to change her place of exile, which ended in 1926, but Spiridonova refused and remained in Samarkand until 1928.

The situation became more complicated after she was fired from her job, and soon, together with Kakhovskaya and Izmailovich, she was transferred to Tashkent. In the fall of 1929, Spiridonova’s illness worsened again, and doctors advised her to change the climate. Former Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who knew about her fate, demanded her transfer to Moscow. Such permission was received, and at the beginning of 1930 Spiridonova and her faithful friend Izmailovich appeared in the capital. Moscow doctors advised her to go to Crimea. She stayed at the Yalta Tuberculosis Institute until the end of 1930, living there as a private individual and paying a large sum of money for her upkeep. When there were not enough of them, in order to save money, Izmailovich decided to return to Tashkent, while Spiridonova remained in Yalta, leading a meager existence 85 .

A new wave of persecution of former socialists in the early 1930s fell mainly on the Mensheviks. But the Socialist-Revolutionaries also suffered. Spiridonova was recalled to Moscow, arrested and put in prison 86. January 3, 1931 A special meeting of the OGPU board sentenced her under Art. 58 clause 11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR to 3 years of exile. Spiridonova had to serve this term, which was later extended for another 5 years, in Ufa. Her friends Izmailovich and Kakhovskaya also ended up here. Spiridonova enjoyed relative freedom and worked as an economist in the credit planning department of the Bashkir office of the State Bank. She no longer posed any political threat. The only dangerous thing was her name, thoroughly forgotten in the country, but often mentioned in socialist circles abroad.

At a meeting of the Berlin Federation of Anarchists on April 24, 1924, the famous anarchist E. Goldman, who visited Spiridonova in Moscow in 1919, called her “one of the most courageous and noble women the revolutionary movement knows” 87 . In Paris in 1924, the “Spiridonova-Kakhovskaya committee” appeared, which set as its goal the removal of her friends abroad 88 . In 1925, anarcho-syndicalists published postcards with their image in Germany 89 . “Committees (named after Spiridonova) to help imprisoned revolutionaries in Russia” were created in the second half of the 20s in New York, Berlin, Paris and other cities abroad 90.

The last, fatal arrest in Spiridonova’s life was carried out during a kind of “final blow” campaign against former socialists, organized by the NKVD in 1936-1937. On the eve of the bloody purge, the Bolshevik Party remembered all its surviving political opponents. By the order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs N. I. Ezhov “On operational work against socialist revolutionaries” dated November 13, 1936, the heads of the NKVD departments of the territories, regions and republics were informed in detail about the “intensification” of the subversive activities of the former Socialist Revolutionaries (both right and left) , aimed at rebuilding their party and organizing a widespread insurgency. This order also mentioned Spiridonova, who allegedly led the Left Socialist Revolutionary underground in the country together with Mayorov and Kakhovskaya from Ufa. Yezhov set the task of identifying all Socialist Revolutionary groups and individual terrorists, and introducing experienced agents into the Socialist Revolutionary environment. Particular attention should have been paid to the exiled Socialist Revolutionaries as the most dangerous organizers of anti-Soviet actions.

Arrests of former Socialist Revolutionaries began throughout the country. In February 1937, Spiridonov was also taken into custody. In the Ufa prison she was treated cruelly and cynically. She behaved very stoically and allegedly said to one of the investigators: “Skin! When you were just born, I was already in the Revolution" 91. During the preliminary investigation by the NKVD of Bashkiria, which in 1937 was headed by A. A. Medvedev and V. S. Karpovich, Spiridonova was charged with preparing an assassination attempt on members of the government of Bashkiria and K. E. Voroshilov, who was planning to come to Ufa.

Soon Spiridonova was transferred to Moscow. On January 7, 1938, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced her under Article 58 (paragraphs 7, 8, 11) of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR to 25 years in prison. She had to serve her last sentence in life in the Oryol prison. But three and a half years later, shortly before German tanks burst into Oryol, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR changed its verdict, imposing capital punishment on Spiridonova. This happened on September 8, 1941. And on September 11, the sentence was carried out 92.

The result of the political biography of Maria Spiridonova could be the words about her from the encyclopedia, which then, in the 20s, served as a kind of epitaph for a still living person, but already a “deceased” political figure: “Her extreme expansiveness, nervousness, and tendency to exaggeration greatly harmed her and her political activities. But the name of “Marusya”, tortured by the Tsar’s executioners, will forever remain in the annals of the Russian revolutionary movement; associated with him is the image of a girl who selflessly stood up as an avenger for the desecrated peasantry” 93 .

1 See, for example, Steinberg I. Maria Spiridonova. Lnd. 1935; Acker Sh. The Role of Maria Spiridonova in the Russian Revolution, 1917 - 1918. -American Association for Advancement of the Slavic Studies, 20th National Convention (November 18 - 21, 1988). Honolulu. 1988; etc.

2 Ileshin B. The fate of Maria Spiridonova. - Week, 1989, N 27; M. A. Spiridonova (bibliographic information). - News of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 1989, No. 9.

3 State Archives of the Tambov Region (hereinafter referred to as GATO), f. 1049, op. 5, d. 485, l. 37 rev; f. 117, op. 23, no. 47, pp. 1, 2; op. 29, d. 48, l. 1.

4 Vladimirov V. Maria Spiridonova. M. B. g., p. 34.

5 Soviet historical encyclopedia. T. 13, stb. 751; Spirin L. M. The collapse of one adventure. M. 1971, p. 26.

6 Chernov V.M. Notes of a Socialist Revolutionary. PhD 1. Berlin - Pg. - M. 1922, p. 277.

7 GATO, f. 272, op. 1, d. 399, l. 4 rev.

8 Vladimirov V. Uk. cit., p. 19.

9 He received five bullets, died 24 days later and was buried in the village. Berezovka. In 1917, local peasants dug his remains out of the grave, burned them and scattered them to the wind (Tambov Provincial Gazette, 14.II.1906; Chernov V.M. Uk. soch., p. 310).

10 Vladimirov V. Uk. cit., p. 32, 37, 85. Spiridonova’s two torturers were soon shot dead by Socialist Revolutionary militants.

11 Vladimirov V. Uk. cit., p. 26, 88, 93.

12 Spiridonova M. From memories of the Nerchinsk penal servitude. M. 1926, p. 13.

13 Vladimirov V. U k. op., p. 117, 118.

14 Ibid., p. 131 - 132.

15 This letter from the Shlisselburgers and Spiridonova’s response to them were published in St. Petersburg in the newspaper “Mysl” (5.VII. 1906).

16 Izmailovich A. From the past. - Hard labor and exile, 1924, No. 1, p. 163-165; Schoolboy M. Life of a former terrorist. M. 1930, p. 92.

17 Spiridonova M. Uk. cit., p. 16, 32, 33. I. Z. Steinberg, speaking on March 3, 1928 at a meeting of the Jewish Labor Union named after. G. A. Gershuni" (USA), spoke about the close spiritual connection between Spiridonova and Gershuni, about the right of the left Socialist Revolutionaries to trace their ancestry from Gershuni (Banner of Struggle, Berlin, 1929, No. 24 - 26, p. 7).

18 Suitcases G. Nerchinsk hard labor. M. 1930, p. 73.

19 Bitsenko A. In Maltsevskaya women’s prison. - Hard labor and exile, 1923, No. 7, p. 192.

20 Kakhovskaya I. Days and years. In the book: Study and cultural work in prison and hard labor. M. 1932, p. 164.

21 Radzilovskaya F.N., Orestova L.P. Maltsevskaya women’s prison. In the book: In women's penal servitude. M. 1932, p. 27, 47.

22 Sobol A. Notes of a convict. M. - L. 1925, p. 94.

23 Figner V.N. Complete. collection op. T. 3. M. 1932, p. 228 - 231.

24 Pirogova A. Ya. At women's hard labor. In the book: In women's penal servitude, p. 201, 203.

25 Transbaikal worker, Chita, 30.III; 17.V.1917.

26 Spiridonova M. Uk. cit., p. 29.

27 Protocols of the III Congress of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Moscow, May 25 - June 4, 1917). Transcript report M. 1917, p. 212, 270; Gusev K.V. Socialist Revolutionary Party: from petty-bourgeois revolutionism to counter-revolution. M. 1975, p. 147.

28 Lenin V.I. Complete. collection op. T. 32, p. 430. He first mentioned Spiridonova in the article “The Victory of the Cadets and the Tasks of the Workers’ Party” (written on March 28, 1906), where, when explaining the concepts of “dictatorship of the revolutionary people” and “military-police dictatorship”, he cited as an example the fact of torture of Spiridonova (Lenin V. I. Complete collection. T. 12, pp. 319 - 322).

29 The Case of the People, 12.IX.1917.

30 Proletarian Revolution, 1927, No. 4, p. 106.

31 The People's Case, 17.IX.1917.

32 Lenin V.I. Complete. collection op. T. 35, p. 152.

33 Our way, 1917, N 2, p. 34.

34 News of the Central Executive Committee and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, 19, 23.IX.1917.

35 Znamensky O. V. All-Russian Constituent Assembly. L. 1976, p. 174.

36 See Lenin V.I. Complete. collection op. T. 34, p. 138.

37 Dispersal of A.I. All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in the first months of the dictatorship of the proletariat. M. 1977, p. 98.

38 Krupskaya N.K. Memories of V.I. Lenin. M. 1957, p. 319.

39 Acceleration A.I. Uk. cit., p. 130.

40 Protocols of the First Congress of the Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Internationalists). B. m. 1918, p. 35 cl.

41 Ibid., p. 35 - 37.

42 News of the Petrograd Soviet, 17.12.1917.

43 Protocols of the 1st Congress of the PLSR, p. 34.

44 Banner of Labor, November 11, 1917.

45 Protocols of the 1st Congress of the PLSR, p. 34 - 35.

46 Reed J. 10 days that shocked the world. M. 1957, p. 247.

47 News of the Petrograd Soviet, 17.12.1917.

48 All-Russian Council of Peasant Deputies, Pg., 17.XII. 1917.

49 All-Russian Constituent Assembly. M. -L. 1930, p. 9.

50 Cause of the people, 12.1.1918.

51 News of the Petrograd Soviet, 17.12.1917.

52 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Biographical chronicle. T. 5, p. 195.

53 Vladimirova V. Left Social Revolutionaries in 1917 - 1918. - Proletarian Revolution, 1927, No. 1, p. 112.

54 Mints I. I. Year 1918. M. 1982, p. 94.

55 Banner of struggle, Pg., 24.IV.1918.

56 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Biographical chronicle. T. 5, p. 419. The assassination attempt on Eichhorn did take place. Spiridonova’s close friend Kakhovskaya took part in its organization (see Kakhovskaya I.K. The case of Eichhorn and Denikin. In the Denikin occupation of 1919 - 1920. In the book: Paths of Revolution. Berlin. 1923, p. 191ff.).

57 Letter from M. Spiridonova to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Pg. 1918, p. 24.

58 Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers', Peasants', Soldiers' and Cossacks' Deputies, Moscow, July 4 - 10, 1918. Transcript. report M. 1918, p. 58 - 59.

59 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Biographical chronicle. T. 5, p. 594, 596, 603.

60 Red Book of the Cheka. T. 1. M. 1989, p. 268.

61 Ibid., p. 269.

62 Quoted. by: Spirin L.M. The collapse of one adventure, p. 35, 52, 81, 54, 55.

63 MBSK. From the history of the Moscow Extraordinary Commission, 1918 - 1921. M. 1978, p. 79.

64 Malkov P. Notes of the commandant of the Moscow Kremlin. M. 1963, p. 228-237. Spiridonova, in an Open Letter to the Central Committee of the RCP (b), reported that “sent”, as she put it, Ustinov tried to persuade her to abandon political activity.

65 Gusev K.V. Socialist Revolutionary Party, p. 272.

66 Spirin L. M. Classes and parties in the civil war in Russia. M. 1968, p. 202 - 203.

67 Letter from M. Spiridonova to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, p. 20, 21.

68 Red Book of the Cheka. T. 1, p. 294 - 295.

69 Vladimirova V. Left Social Revolutionaries in 1917 - 1918, p. 137 - 138.

70 Steinberg I. Op. cit., p. 239.

71 Shestak Yu. I. Bankruptcy of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. - Bulletin of Moscow University, series 9, History, 1973, N 2, p. 41.

72 Pravda, 13.II.1919.

73 Golinkov D. L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR. T. 1. M. 1980, p. 242.

74 The Kremlin behind bars (underground Russia). Berlin. 1922, p. 26.

75 Pravda, 25.II.1919.

76 Bulletin of the Central Committee of the PLSR, 1919, No. 3.

77 Steinberg I. Op. cit., p. 254.

78 Gusev K.V., Yeritsyan Kh.A. From compromise to counter-revolution. M. 1968, p. 313.

79 From the history of the Cheka (1917 - 1921). Sat. doc. M. 1958, p. 358.

80 Shestak Yu. I. Bankruptcy of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, p. 43 - 44.

81 Steinberg I. Op. cit., p. 275.

82 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Biographical chronicle. T. 11, p. 501. This is a mention of Spiridonova, dated no later than September 17, 1921, the last in the Biochronicle. Lenin, having familiarized himself with the certificate from the secret department of the Cheka, wrote on it the inscription “To the archive.”

83 Golinkov D. L. Uk. op. T. 2, p. 105. There is much that is unclear in this fact of Spiridonova’s biography. It is known that the Cheka received information about the preparation of an escape, and on January 11, 1922, a search was carried out at her place in Malakhovka. Before this, her guarantor I.Z. Steinberg was arrested as a precautionary measure (The Kremlin behind bars, pp. 16 - 17).

84 Banner of Struggle, Berlin, 1925, N 9 - 10, p. 19.

85 Steinberg I. Op. cit., pp. 284 - 288.

86 Ibid., pp. 289 - 295.

87 Banner of Struggle, 1924, No. 3, p. 11.

88 Ibid., No. 2, p. 14.

89 Ibid., 1925 - 1926, N 14/15, p. 26.

90 Ibid., 1929, N 24 - 26, p. 12, 26 - 28.

91 Aznabaev K.K. I endured everything... and I believe in my people. - Ural, 1989, N 1, p. 167.

92 Together with Spiridonova, Kh. G. Rakovsky, D. D. Pletnev, F. I. Goloshchekin and other Soviet and party workers were shot, whom the administration of the Oryol prison and the NKVD did not find the opportunity, unlike criminals, to evacuate to the interior of the country (Returned names. T. 1. M. 1989, p. 96).

Maria Aleksandrovna Spiridonova (1884-1941), Russian political activist, Socialist Revolutionary. In 1906 she killed the pacifier of the peasant uprising in the Tambov province. G.N. Luzhenovsky was sentenced to eternal hard labor (Akatuy). In 1917, one of the leaders of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the ideological leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary uprising. Arrested and amnestied by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Repressed and shot.

Spiridonova Maria Alexandrovna was born in Tambov on October 16, 1884 in the family of college secretary Alexander Alekseevich Spiridonov. Mother, Alexandra Yakovlevna, ran the household. Maria had two sisters, Evgenia and Yulia, and a brother, Nikolai. Maria received a good home education and immediately entered the 2nd grade of the gymnasium.

After completing a full course at the Tambov Women's Gymnasium, Spiridonova went to work as a clerk in a noble assembly.

In Tambov there was a strong organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, organized by its leader, V.M. Chernov, who served exile here in 1895-98.

Spiridonova, still in the 6th grade of the gymnasium, joined the fighting squad of the Socialist Revolutionaries (1900). The first arrest of Maria Spiridonova followed on March 24, 1905 for participating in a demonstration.

On January 16, 1906, on instructions from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Spiridonov at the station shot provincial councilor Luzhenovsky, a cruel pacifier of the peasant uprising, with a revolver.

Spiridonova was arrested, severely beaten, and then violated.

Spiridonova managed to smuggle a letter to freedom, in which she openly spoke about the execution of Luzhenovsky’s sentence and the bullying and mockery of her by the police. The letter was published in the Rus newspaper and made a strong impression on the Russian public.

The police arrested Maria's sisters, suspecting them of taking her letters from prison. Later, Spiridonova's party friends tracked down the two rapists and shot them.

During the investigation, the trial, while awaiting the verdict and on death row, Spiridonova behaved unusually courageously. With her behavior she made a very strong impression on all the people around her.

The death penalty was replaced by eternal hard labor, and Spiridonova was sent to Nerchinsk hard labor in the Akatuevsky prison.

At this time, about 30 Socialist Revolutionaries and several Social Democrats and anarchists were in cells in Akatui. There was a fairly liberal regime in prison. Political prisoners read books, lectures and held debates. Spiridonova learned a lot from communicating with prominent and educated Socialist Revolutionaries Gershuni and Sozonov.

Before the February Revolution, Spiridonova was transferred from prison to prison several times. And everywhere she persistently educated herself and read a lot.

After Spiridonova returned to Moscow and then to Petrograd in the conditions of revolutionary upsurge, she quickly gained political weight among the left Socialist Revolutionaries and became their ideological leader. She often spoke at rallies and called for the transfer of full power to the Soviets. By September 1917, Spiridonova was elected deputy chairman of the Petrograd city committee of the AKP and a deputy of the Petrograd Soviet. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, thanks in no small part to her energy, became the most massive faction of the AKP.

Regarding the issue of power, the main issue of the historical moment, the views of Maria Spiridonova practically coincided with the views of Vladimir Lenin. At the Democratic Conference, convened by the Provisional Government with the aim of stabilizing the situation in the country and creating a coalition government, Spiridonova, like the Bolsheviks, opposed cooperation with right-wing parties. She called for an armed seizure of power by the people (read Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries).

The Left Social Revolutionaries sided with the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution and directly participated in hostilities.

At the II All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries also spoke together with the Bolsheviks and voted for documents that supported the completed coup. Before the congress, Lenin met with Spiridonova and discussed joint tactics with her.

On November 18, 1917, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries formalized themselves as an independent party - the PLSR (Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries). They entered the Council of People's Commissars and received several ministerial posts. Spiridonova, by decision of the party, remained to work in its Central Election Commission.

Maria Spiridonova played one of the decisive roles during the Bolsheviks' dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. And before the start of the Constituent Assembly, the Left Social Revolutionaries supported the Bolsheviks’ ban on the Cadet Party, taking one of the steps towards the start of the civil war.

Socialist Revolutionary Victor Chernov was elected Chairman of the Constituent Assembly. The right Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Cadets formed a strong majority at the Constituent Assembly. However, the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries first staged a wild obstruction of the Chairman and speakers, and then left the congress altogether. Spiridonova was one of the most violent participants in the hooligan shouting and screaming. Lenin silently observed for some time what was happening “from behind the scenes” and left. Having assessed the situation and the balance of forces, he went to write a decree dissolving the Constituent Assembly. Then sailor Zheleznyakov said the famous: “... Disperse, the guard is tired!”

The next day, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, and the protest demonstration was shot by the Bolsheviks. Two right-wing deputies were also killed.

Maria Spiridonova played a historically very negative role in the October Revolution and the events that accompanied it. The February Revolution brought her freedom. But she, a “freedom fighter,” became one of the most active funeral workers of the democratic gains of the February Revolution. Kerensky, Chernov and other moderate leaders of the Social Revolutionaries supported the establishment of a liberal capitalist system in Russia, although they were socialist-revolutionaries. They did not set themselves and their comrades the goals of usurping power and willingly cooperated in the government with moderate representatives of right-wing parties. Moreover, a prominent representative of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who had accumulated significant experience in Duma work, Alexander Kerensky headed the Provisional Government, and former Socialist Revolutionary militant Boris Savinkov became the head of the War Ministry. However, with the return of Spiridonova, the split in the Socialist Revolutionary Party between the right and the left deepened. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, through populist demagoguery, managed to get many of their deputies into the Soviets and the Constituent Assembly. Maria Spiridonova herself was an outspoken populist. She delivered her speeches in a state of extreme emotional excitement. She lit up, turned on, excited crowds of listeners with the radiation of her colossal internal energy. She, like torches, threw slogans into the crowd that were impossible to implement in practice. But the mentality of the Russian peasant and worker at that time worked precisely for such shallow but bright populists. Many new, inexperienced members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party followed Spiridonova.

Spiridonova, having become the leader of the left Social Revolutionaries and being an ultra-left revolutionary, provided the Bolsheviks with serious support from the peasants. Along the way, she deprived Alexander Kerensky and Viktor Chernov of a significant part of the party support.

The “divorce” of the left Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks began to mature from the beginning of 1918. With the Decree on Land, the Bolsheviks allegedly adopted the Socialist Revolutionary program for the socialization of the land, but in reality they nationalized it, depriving the peasants of all freedom. Disagreements between the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who supported the peasants, and the Bolsheviks grew as the latter implemented the policy of war communism. The Bolsheviks openly robbed the peasants, which could not but cause opposition from the Left Social Revolutionaries. Spiridonova and her associates advocated truly Soviet power and the primacy of the Soviets as its governing bodies. The Bolsheviks, with the help of various tricks, brought the Soviets under their strict party control. The policy of supporting the peasantry by the Left Social Revolutionaries strengthened their influence on the bulk of the country's population. So at the V Congress of Soviets, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were represented by 30 percent of the deputies (at the IV - 20 percent). The size of their party also grew rapidly. Lenin was very concerned about this rapid growth in the influence of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The “fellow travelers,” having played the historical role assigned to them by the Bolshevik leader, became a serious obstacle to the implementation of his plans. Perhaps, Gavriil Popov put forward a plausible hypothesis about the conscious and planned break of the Bolsheviks with the left Socialist Revolutionaries (G. Popov. How the Bolsheviks defeated the Soviet regime. Izvestia, July 8, 1998). This article provides a characteristic excerpt from the story of L.B. Krasin about Lenin’s conversation regarding his plans for the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries: “Telling me about this supposed way out of the situation, he added with a smile: “In a word, we will make an internal loan among the comrades of the Socialist-Revolutionaries ... and thus we will preserve both innocence and capital we'll buy it." Thus, Lenin, with the constant support of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, decided to provoke the Left Socialist Revolutionaries into an armed uprising against the Bolsheviks, terrorist attacks in order to have a plausible reason for their removal from the political arena.

The final split in the coalition of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries occurred after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. The Left Social Revolutionaries considered this agreement a betrayal of Russia's national interests. Spiridonova, however, supported the Brest Peace Treaty, but remained in the minority in the Central Committee and at the PLSR congress.

And Yakov Grigorievich Blyumkin, who killed the German ambassador, actually did not suffer for this particular action. After a short break during the civil war, he voluntarily came to the Bolsheviks, gave testimony that satisfied them, and continued his work in the Soviet punitive authorities (OGPU). Yakov Blumkin was shot on Stalin's orders in 1929 for his connection with Leon Trotsky. Such tolerance towards the former Left Socialist Revolutionary Party on the part of the Bolsheviks may be connected with the probably unconscious assistance that he provided to the Bolsheviks in the defeat of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party.

After the July confrontation with the Bolsheviks, Maria Spiridonova was sentenced to one year in prison, but was immediately amnestied and released (November 29, 1918). Lenin still remembered the help that Maria Spiridonova provided him in carrying out the October Revolution and subsequent retention of power.

There were quite a few Left Social Revolutionaries among the commanders and commissars of the Red Army. In July, a corresponding order from Lenin followed, and Trotsky and Stalin staged a bloody “cleansing” of former allies in the Red Army. The Left Socialist Revolutionary Party was destroyed. At the VI Congress of Soviets it was represented by only 1 percent of deputies. The Bolsheviks and Lenin established their complete dictatorship, eliminating the last political competitor from the political arena.

Upon release, Maria Spiridonova continued her agitation and struggle against the Bolsheviks. She was arrested again on February 18, 1919. But Lenin remembered very well the help provided to the Bolsheviks by Spiridonova during the October Revolution. Therefore, Spiridonov was again sentenced to only a symbolic punishment - a year of sanatorium treatment.

The Left Social Revolutionaries organized her escape. She went underground and continued to engage in party work.

Spiridonov, or, as she was affectionately called in the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, Marusya, was needed by the Socialist Revolutionary Party as a symbol, as faith in the revival of the party, in its future victory.

On the night of October 26, 1920, Spiridonova, who was sick with typhus, was arrested for the third time in her apartment. Given her painful condition, Spiridonova was kept under house arrest for about a month, then transferred to the infirmary. “Marusya” was released in September 1921 under a guarantee from the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party to cease her political activities. For two years, Spiridonova, together with her faithful and unchanging friend Izmailovich, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Izmailovich accompanied her everywhere in exile), lived in Malakhovka near Moscow under the control of the Cheka. From Malakhovka, Spiridonova tried to flee abroad. But the Bolshevik power is not the imperial power, under which the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and the Populists illegally scurried back and forth across the border. Spiridonova was detained and exiled for three years to a Kaluga state farm colony, and then sent further away to Samarkand.

In 1930, Stalin’s security officers, who were gaining strength, remembered the legendary Marusya. She was again sentenced to three years of exile. Then they added five more. Spiridonova served this exile in Ufa, working conscientiously as an economist in the local branch of the State Bank. She no longer even thought about any kind of struggle with the Bolsheviks or political activity in general.

In exile, she married her old party comrade, member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, Ilya Mayorov. It would seem that the elderly woman, a former famous revolutionary, had finally found peace and happiness in her old age. Her significant contribution to the victory of the Bolsheviks and the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, it would seem, should have outweighed her short-term and unsuccessful struggle with the Bolsheviks. But that was not the case. In February 1937, Spiridonova was arrested again, sentenced to 25 years, and then shot in 1941 along with her husband as German troops approached Orel, where she was imprisoned. Her burial place has not been found. Maria Spiridonova was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the USSR in 1990.

The tragic fate of Maria Spiridonova, the legendary female revolutionary who set out on the path of terror from her youth, is a direct message from the depths of history to all ideologists and practitioners of terror and bloody revolutions.

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Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova is a woman of an amazing, tragic fate. She was born in 1884 into a noble family in the Tambov province. As a high school student, she joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and actively participated in the revolution of 1905. In 1906, fulfilling the decision of the Tambov Socialist Revolutionary organization, she mortally wounded in the city of Kozlov the Black Hundreds G.N. Luzhenovsky, who led punitive expeditions in her homeland during the first Russian revolution. A military court sentenced the girl to death, which was replaced by indefinite imprisonment, which she served in the Nerchinsk penal servitude.

The February Revolution of 1917 freed Spiridonova from punishment, and she became one of the organizers of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, and after the formation of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party in November 1917, she joined the Central Committee and became its de facto leader.

After the October coup, Spiridonov was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a delegate to the III-V All-Russian Congresses of Soviets. She sharply opposed the Brest Peace Treaty. She criticized the Bolsheviks for their punitive policy, for their departure from the ideas of the socialist revolution, and demanded that the ruling party change its policy.

In July 1918, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries took up arms against the Bolsheviks. Their performance was suppressed. Spiridonova was arrested on July 6, 1918 at a meeting of the V All-Russian Congress of Soviets, held at the Bolshoi Theater. During interrogation at the Investigative Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 10, 1918, she testified: “I organized the murder of Mirbach from beginning to end... Blumkin acted on my instructions.” On November 27, 1918, the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced her to imprisonment for a period of 1 year. By resolution of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of November 29, 1918, she was amnestied and released from custody.

On February 10, 1919, Spiridonova was arrested by the Cheka on charges of anti-Soviet activity and on February 24, 1919, by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal, “due to a painful and hysterical state,” she was sentenced to “isolation from political and public life” for 1 year.

On April 2, 1919, Spiridonova managed to escape from the Kremlin, where she was kept in isolation, after which she hid under the name Onufriev in Moscow. On October 20, 1920, she was detained by the Cheka authorities and placed for treatment in the Cheka infirmary, and on June 5, 1921, according to the doctors’ conclusion, she was transferred to the Prechistensky psychiatric hospital.

After the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) of September 13, 1921, Spiridonova was released from the hospital under the guarantee of the left Socialist Revolutionaries I. Z. Steinberg and I. Yu. Baikal.

In subsequent years, Spiridonova was arrested by the OPTU-NKVD and served

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In February 1919, during her second arrest, Spiridonova, while imprisoned in the Kremlin, repeatedly tried to contact the “will”, her party comrades. She wrote letters and, through the Left Socialist Revolutionaries being released from arrest or her, as it seemed to her, propagandized guards, sent them to secret addresses known to her. These letters, as a rule, ended up in the Cheka, where, after careful analysis, some of them were sent to the addresses indicated by Spiridonova, while others were used against her during the investigation. These letters, which are part of the investigation, outline her views on the policies of the Soviet government and the Bolshevik Party, and also discuss questions about the situation of the working class, the peasantry, violations of human rights in Soviet Russia and other current issues of that time.

In November 1937, Spiridonova, having been arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and then transferred to the NKVD of the USSR, wrote a voluminous letter to the 4th department of the GUGB, in which she covered many issues from the history of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, gave characteristics to its individual members, and told about her attitude to the Soviet government, the Constitution of 1936, to the problem of applying the death penalty, and also described the illegal methods of investigation used by NKVD investigators. The presence of such letters to M.A. Spiridonova was reported in domestic and foreign historiography. Currently, Spiridonova’s documents are being prepared for publication by the Russian Political Encyclopedia (ROSSPEN) association. We bring to your attention the publication of part of a letter from M.A. Spiridonova dated November 13, 1937. Spelling and syntax have been preserved. Only obvious typist errors were corrected.

To the 4th DEPARTMENT of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR.

If the question was solely about my personal fate, then even now, after 9 months of pre-trial detention with all the ensuing consequences, I would prefer not to say or write anything, leaving the final liquidation to gravity or to my extremely unlucky star conclusions and endings.

But, as the People’s Commissar of the BASSR BAK told me in Ufa, my former comrades continued to depend on my position, and therefore in Moscow I was extremely looking forward to the opportunity to speed up the investigation, and through no fault of my own it dragged on for another three months in Moscow. In Ufa, the investigation immediately after the arrest took such forms, and later, in the process of tireless interrogation, it took on such color that the possibility of any participation in this investigation was almost excluded for me.

At the first meeting with my investigator, deputy chief. (WITH) MIKHAILOV, I was very unequivocally offered the choice of putting “carrot or stick” in the context of my pre-trial detention, depending on my behavior during interrogation. “Whip,” I answered, offended to the core.

The entire six months of the Ufa investigation can be described as a sad game or farce on the theme of “The Taming of the Shrew.” When they managed to recognize some particularly sensitive or “impatient” place in my psychology, they pressed it three times, four times. So, for example, after some difficult incidents that happened to me in the Tsar’s dungeon at the beginning of 1906, I was left with an irreconcilable attitude towards personal searches. We must do justice to both the tsarist prison regime and the Soviet prison. Before my arrest, after those (1906) events, all the years of long-term imprisonment were inviolable, and my personal dignity was never hurt in particularly sensitive areas. In tsarist times, I always felt over me the invisible and unspeakable, but very tangible protection of the people; in Soviet times, the top of the government, the old Bolsheviks, with the inclusion of LENIN, spared me and, isolating me in the process of struggle, always very tightly along with. by this they took measures so that not a shadow of bullying would be inflicted on me. The year 1937 brought a complete change in this regard, and therefore there were days when I was searched 10 times in one day. They searched me when I was going to and from the treatment center, for a walk and from a walk, for interrogation and from interrogation. They never found anything on me, and that’s not why they searched me. To get rid of the groping, which was practiced by one guard and infuriated me, I screamed at the top of my lungs, struggled and resisted, and the warden covered my mouth with a sweaty hand, with the other hand he pressed me against the guard, who groped me and my panties; in order to get rid of this disgrace and a number of others, I had to starve, since otherwise there was simply no

I was arrested by the Soviet government 5 times. In 1918 8/VII, in February 1919, in September

Lupekin German Antonovich (1902-1940), native of Kyiv, Ukrainian, member of the Bolshevik Party since 1921.

He began his career in 1916 as a mechanic's assistant in the workshops of the city of Kyiv. From 1918 to 1920 he served in the Red Army. Since 1921, he worked in state security agencies in various operational positions. In 1932-1934. was the head of the secret political and economic departments of the GPU of the Belarusian SSR. In 1935, head of the SPO UNKVD of the Leningrad region. From January to April 1937, People's Commissar of the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, then head of the NKVD of the Irkutsk Region. In 1938, head of the NKVD for the Rostov region. He had the rank of senior major of state security. On November 13, 1938, he was arrested by the GUGB of the NKVD of the USSR as a member of an anti-Soviet conspiratorial organization in the NKVD and on January 28, 1940, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.

For gross violations of the law during the period of G. A. Lupekin’s work in the NKVD, a review of his case and rehabilitation were denied.

The editors do not have the opportunity to publish this voluminous (102 typewritten pages) letter from Spiridonova in its entirety and therefore considered it necessary to shorten some of the insignificant text. The text in which Spiridonova talks in detail about her life in exile, correspondence with party comrades, and challenges the absurd accusations of the investigation has been shortened.

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1920, in September 1930 and in February (8/II) 1932. In total, I was imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for 6 years, in exile for about 12 years. Since 1920, the GPU never let me out of their hands.

During each arrest, I answered all questions during interrogations with complete frankness.

I didn’t even understand and still don’t understand why I need to deny anything.

After all, if I did something, then I did it according to my conviction, a conviction dear to me, how could I renounce it under pain of reprisals? What a shame? I gave exhaustive testimony in the Mirbakh case.

At the trial in 1919 and 1918, I behaved so boldly and defiantly that the hall (the Communists) was buzzing with indignation, it would have torn apart. But that’s what I thought, that’s what I said. And then I was angry. It was the same at the royal court, which sentenced me to hanging, when the chairman of the court, an old general, covered his ears and shook his head, unable to listen to too impudent speeches.

But that’s how I am, both in life and in politics, that’s how I was and that’s how I’m going to the grave now.

I have never had the habit of hiding in the bushes and avoiding answering. After all, it was me, when the cannons were firing from the Kremlin to the Three Hierarchs and back, that my comrades from the Central Committee sent in July 1918 with a response to the Fifth Congress. After all, couldn’t I answer with my head when the hand was hot? After all, on July 9, over 200 people were shot, led by ALEXANDROVICH. s.r. and it was with us, l.s.r., that the use of the death penalty began.

And if now I knew behind me the underground struggle against the Soviet government, I would talk about it with the former insolence. After all, I would lead it in accordance with my views, with my convictions and faith, so why would I refuse this fight? Since I led it, I did not consider it a shameful and dirty deed, I would not have met the final retribution for it without repenting and crawling. For what? I pay firmly for what I have done. That’s why now I’m so humiliated and mortally offended by the accusations being made that I disarmed a long time ago and didn’t fight. The reasons for this were internal and external. You know the external reasons yourself.

All the years of my exile, supervision was kept over me, and therefore over MAYOROV, IZMAILOVICH and KAKHOVSKAYA, because We lived all 12 years of exile together, sometimes only dividing into different apartments, it was very thorough. There was one similar to him only behind GOTZ, as we heard. In Samarkand and Tashkent, especially in Samarkand, it was carried out on the street so demonstratively that I became a popular person in the city.

Four young men in riding breeches followed me, sat on the threshold of the bank and surrounded the house with almost half a platoon. There was special supervision in the house, and at work too.

In exile we had 2 informants (at V. Wed.), as we figured out later. They came to me and knew everything about us. I also had a special informant who later repented of this to me with screams and sobs, but I knew who she was much earlier than her repentance and did not consciously expel her.

In Ufa, supervision was set up more subtly and delicately after my lamentations in Moscow in 1930, when we were filtered here for 4 months, but still, in Ufa, supervision was vigilant, letters were illustrated, visitors were recorded - at the service supervision was strict, even to the point of surprise.

One day I came across a piece of paper on the typist’s desk, entitled: “list of consultants in the room where the MAS is located.” And in the room of us, consultants, now we are called inspectors, there were about 15 people sitting.

A fair number of them were dragged to the GPU for conversations, and I always unmistakably guessed, based on completely invisible signs to a prying eye, who exactly was called in to question me.

The communists reported on my conversations with them as part of party discipline, and MIKHAILOV, with a series of questions to me, now confirmed this intuitive knowledge of mine about each communist speaker with whom I spoke. I noted this to MIKHAILOVA. He did not hide the fact that this was exactly what happened: “I knew about what you said about RADEK on that same day.”

And most of all I loved talking with communists. Ufa is a city of ordinary people, old-regime and white. He, of course, disguised himself and hunkered down, but his lack of culture and savagery are still great.

She didn’t like to talk to ordinary people and was afraid to compromise them. She wasn’t afraid to compromise the communists, and they were much livelier and more interesting. I looked at my neighbors, employees in the Department, where they had been sitting in a small company for the last three years, as if they were willing and unwilling spies. Where and how to carry out major underground work? Life under an eternal glass bell.

Alexandrovich Vyacheslav Alexandrovich (Dmitrievsky P. A., “Pierre Orage”) (1884-1918) - left Socialist Revolutionary. After the October Revolution, during the period when the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were part of the Soviet government, he was deputy chairman of the Cheka and ex-officio head of the Department for Combating Crimes. He took an active part in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion in Moscow. In July 1918, he was arrested by the Cheka and sentenced to death.

Mayorov Ilya Andreevich (1890-1941), native of the village. Gordeevka, Sviyazhsk district, Kazan province, from the peasantry, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1906. Member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1917.

After the October Revolution - a member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture. He took part in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion in July 1918. After the liquidation of the mutiny, he went into hiding. November 27, 1918 The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced him in absentia to 3 years in prison. He was soon arrested, served his sentence, and then exiled to Samarkand. Then the period was extended for another 3 years with a transfer to Tashkent. In 1930 he was arrested by the OGPU, served in Butyrskaya prison and in 1931 exiled to Ufa. While in exile he married M.A. Spiridonova. In 1931-1937 worked as an economist and planner at the Ufa Canning Sales Base.

In February 1937, the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was arrested on charges of active anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on January 8

1938 The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced to 25 years in prison. On September 11, 1941, according to the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was shot.

Kakhovskaya Irina Konstantinovna (1888-1960), native of the city of Tarashcha, Kyiv province, from the nobility. In 1905 she joined the Bolsheviks, in 1906 she joined the maximalists, that is, the extreme trend of populism. In 1908, the military district court sentenced her to 20 years of hard labor. In Maltsevskaya women's prison she became friends with M.A. Spiridonova.

After the October Revolution, at the 2nd Congress of Soviets, she was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and headed the organizational and propaganda department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In the summer of 1918, the Central Committee of the PLSR was sent to underground work in Ukraine. On July 30, 1918, she participated in the murder of German Field Marshal Eichhorn, for which she was sentenced to death by hanging by a German military court. She escaped from prison, after which she prepared the murder of General Denikin, but due to the illness of all the participants in her group with typhus, it was not possible to carry out the murder.

In 1921, the Cheka was arrested in Moscow and exiled to Kaluga for 3 years, and then exiled to Central Asia. In the fall of 1930, she was exiled for 3 years to Ufa, where she first worked in a children's labor commune, and then as a planner-economist at Bashmeltrest. In February 1937, she was arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir ASSR on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on December 25, 1937, by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1948, she was arrested again by state security agencies. She was declared incapable of work and returned to Kansk as an indefinite exile.

Izmailovich Alexandra Adolfovna (1878-1941), a native of St. Petersburg, from the nobility, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, participated in the unsuccessful assassination attempt on the Minsk governor P. G. Kurlov. In February 1906, she was sentenced by a military court to death by hanging, which was replaced by indefinite hard labor. She served her sentence at the Nerchinsk penal servitude, where she became close to M. Spiridonova. After the October Revolution, she participated in the creation of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party and was elected to its Central Committee. She was repeatedly arrested by the Cheka-OGPU, and served her punishment in prisons and exile. In 1930 she was exiled to Ufa, where she worked as an economist-planner in a municipal bank. On February 8, 1937, she was arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on December 25, 1937, by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He served his term in Oryol prison. On September 11, 1941, she was shot by verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.

Gots Abram Rafailovich (1882-1940), a native of Moscow, from a merchant family, member of the militant organization of the AKP, member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. After the February Revolution, leader of the Socialist Revolutionary faction in the Petrograd Soviet. Since June 1917, Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, elected by the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. During the October days he was a member of the “Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution” and was one of the organizers of the cadets’ performance in Petrograd.

In 1920, he was arrested by the Cheka for terrorist activities and in August 1922, the Supreme Revolutionary Court under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced him to death, which was commuted to 5 years in prison. Then he was in exile in Simbirsk and was sentenced to 2 years. In 1937, he was arrested on charges of terrorist activity and on June 20, 1939, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He died on August 4, 1940 in Kraslag (Krasnoyarsk Territory).

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Internal reasons:

1. A huge spatial separation from the main ideological backbone - KAMKOV, SAMOKHVALOV, etc., a gap in the time of personal communication at 16-17 years old and the absence of illegal correspondence created complete uncertainty in the moods and thoughts of friends.

The political physiognomy of a number of my closest comrades is now unclear to me: KAMKOV, SAMOKHVALOV, TRUTOVSKY. The isolation from life thanks to the snail-like attachment to one city and the supervised position is absolutely exceptional.

We don't know the village at all. But our emphasis was on the village and our entire struggle with the communists was because of the village and reflected the mistakes and failures of the mood of the village.

When the party was defeated and physically removed from the country’s accounts completely (everyone was in prison) and we ceased to be condensers of village sentiments, our leadership and our work ceased.

Without working with and for the masses, without connection with the masses, our existence turned out to be unthinkable, and we melted away. At the party congress in April 1918, based on a superficial count, we recorded 73 thousand members; there were actually more, but now it might be. there are 50 people

A huge part (peasants, workers and soldiers) went to the Bolsheviks immediately after our break with the Bolsheviks, some part, having broken away from us, hid (that’s why I really don’t want you to publish me as a center, a terrorist), not going anywhere having gone, and small fragments gradually dissolved from prisons and exiles into Soviet citizenship, having been preserved by 1932 as museum curiosities among only a few dozen people, some of whom were already newcomers in the form of the students of 1924.

3. Lack of any agreement with each other on issues of programs and tactics. During this time, historical conditions have changed so much that a reassessment of values ​​is imperative. None of this was done, and without this there could not and cannot be any talk of any restoration of the party and organizational work.

I think every one of us is left.s.r. has its own independent look in great contrast with the look of its neighbor, also a lion. s.r. MAYOROV and I had a lot of different things, but both were too lazy and reluctant to even agree on this, because... this entire area of ​​mental life has ceased to be relevant.

We always lived as if in a common cell and never had the opportunity to have separate personal conversations, and he once wrote me a note that a major political disintegration seemed to be brewing among us. It was necessary to talk and explain. They never gathered before the arrest. In Ufa, I don’t remember a single programmatic and tactical conversation with any leftist. And it seems like it should. The leader, the center of gravity, the “leader” and now, such a disgrace and shame, there were no such conversations. And this is in the presence of the fact that with all the Ufa lions. Wed, besides our four, I met for the first time in Ufa.

I have little personal knowledge of party activists, because... During the period of the open existence of the party, I was completely absorbed in Soviet revolutionary work, which took days and nights, and party representation at the top of the CPSU (b) (daily meetings with SVERDLOV in the Small Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the person of three - me, SVERDLOV and AVANESOV and with LENIN, sometimes with other security officers), I did absolutely no party work. In the underground, naturally, the leader is strictly undercover. In prisons I always sat isolated from my comrades, twice in the Kremlin and in other places only with IZMAILOVICH, later with MAYOROV and IZMAILOVICH. All the more so, I should talk to the new acquaintances, feel out what they know and how they think. And just like that, I didn’t need it.

Because we didn’t work in the party sense, talking, just talking, which is what we’ve always been passionate about. r. without advancement in life, which was obviously known, they seemed to me a depraved activity, they irritated me painfully, and I was sometimes rude and impolite if someone pestered me. I called it masturbation. And so out loud once, I once cut off the Menshevik in Ufa ASHIPTZU, cat. Now he is in prison in Ufa.

And if the organization UF was really true. regional committee, then an indispensable categorically imperative prerequisite for this would be preliminary discussions of the current moment in the context of opposing one’s program and tactics to it. How could it be otherwise? Why fence the regional committee and the struggle, in the name of what and for whom?

In relation to other comrades scattered throughout the Union, the same attempts should have been made to reach agreement on general political issues. Such coarsening, such primitivism, as soon as the slogan “get rid of the Bolsheviks, take their place” could not and does not exist in any of the most rabid groups or parties.

Kamkov (Katz) Boris Davidovich (1885-1938), native of the village. Kobylino, Soroca district, Bessarabia province, from the family of a doctor. Member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1904, for which he was persecuted by the tsarist government. Was in exile. In 1911 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Hamburg with the title of Doctor of Law.

After the February Revolution he returned to Russia and in April 1917 was elected to the Petrograd Soviet. At the 1st All-Russian Congress of Soviets he was elected to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In November 1917, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. Deputy of the Constituent Assembly for the Petrograd District. In July 1918 he took part in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion. After the rebellion was liquidated, he went into hiding. In Ukraine he participated in the creation of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, and at the end of 1918 - beginning of 1919 he stood at the origins of the PLSR of Lithuania and Belarus. Subsequently, he was repeatedly arrested by the Cheka-OGPU authorities on charges of anti-Soviet activity, and was in exile. On February 6, 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD in the Northern Territory as an active participant in the Socialist Revolutionary terrorist organization and on August 29, 1937, by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was sentenced to death.

Mikhail Davidovich Samokhvalov (1892-1942), a native of the city of Novozybkov in the former Chernigov province, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1911. Member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1917. He was arrested by state security agencies in 1923, 1930 and 1935, and was in exile. In 1936-1937 worked as a construction technician in a repair and construction office at the Ostyak-Vogul district executive committee.

In February 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD in the Omsk Region on charges of terrorist activities and on January 25, 1938, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. While serving his sentence, he died in prison on June 14, 1942.

Trutovsky Vladimir Evgenievich (1889-1937), a native of Krasnograd in the former Poltava province, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, since 1917 member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. In December 1917, he joined the Council of People's Commissars and served as People's Commissar for City and Local Government. In March 1918, he resigned from the Council of People's Commissars. In July 1918 he took part in the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion. After the rebellion was liquidated, he went into hiding. November 27, 1918 The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced him in absentia to 3 years in prison. He was subsequently arrested and, after serving his sentence, in April 1923 he was deported to Turkestan. Then he was repeatedly arrested by the OGPU, and was in exile in Orenburg, Shadrinsk, Chelyabinsk region, and Kazakhstan.

On February 7, 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD of Kazakhstan on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on October 4, 1937, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.

Avanesov (Martirosov) Varlam Alexandrovich (1884-1930), native of Armenia. Member of the RSDLP since 1903, Bolshevik since 1914. He took an active part in the revolutionary movement. After the February Revolution of 1917, member of the Presidium of the Moscow Soviet. During the days of October, he was a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee.

From 1917-1919 secretary and member of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, member of the All-Russian Commission for the Repair of Railway Transport, member of the board of the People's Commissariat of State Control, chairman of the All-Russian Commission for Evacuation at the Service Station. In 1919, he was approved as deputy head of the Special Department and a member of the Board of the Cheka. In 1920-1924. member of the Board of the All-Russian Cheka, deputy people's commissar of the Russian Communist Party, representative of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Rabkrin in the All-Russian Cheka, then deputy people's commissar of foreign trade. Since 1925, member of the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council. In 1922-1927 member of the USSR Central Executive Committee. Died 1930

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For this there should have been, if not a conference, then at least active live correspondence. This didn't happen. There must have been an exchange of illegal letters. This didn't happen either.

VITALIN lies, showing that he brought me a letter. I never received a single illegal letter from KAMKOV and never had the opportunity to write to him. Some books seemed to be coming to us from him, but as the investigation says, they did not reach us. Of course, the book is a myth. It must be admitted that these possibilities were not particularly looked for, since the agreement on the revaluation of values ​​did not have any actual significance.

There were no visits to each other.

During the summer of 1936, DRAVERT, while riding on a steamboat, met in Gorky with GOLBERG and SELIVANOVA, and in Kuibyshev with PODGORSKY. And not for organizational purposes, but for comradely personal purposes. He is lying about the organization.

If the investigation does not believe this, after all, there have been only two such meetings, too few for an exchange and installation of a new program. Where is the smell of some new program, in whose testimony?

Even MAYOROV, what a shame, writes about the restoration of capitalism, if only MIKHAILOV showed me this paragraph between the closed lines correctly. And I would have lived with him in friendship and love until the last day, if he had slipped to the right cf. and I would now maintain dogmatic camaraderie with everyone, without grinding it to pieces!!

4. The experience of Trotskyists, Decists, Smirnovites and all others, especially Trotskyists, in order to fight Soviet power, should have been extremely convincing, directly determining the rejection of such attempts.

The Trotskyists had more connections with the working masses, and they still do. In Ufa, for example, workers of a garment factory were arrested - Trotskyists, several dozen railway workers-Trotskyists, etc. The Trotskyists were party members, they used the entire apparatus of the Soviet government, offices, apartments, cars, airplanes, telephones, countless business trips and money, all the richest , a well-coordinated state apparatus.

And yet they failed and are failing so shamefully and terribly. They had the opportunity to agree on a common program of future and present actions and distribute forces. They had the opportunity to freely implement their tactics. And yet nothing came of it.

None of this happened and there is no lion. s.r. and one would have to be too much of an idiot to make any attempts to fight in their completely determined situation.

5. The main condition for the existence of any party or group and its work is communication with the masses.

The fragments of the party have this connection. s.r. not available since 1922. Since 1922 I have considered the Lev party, cf. deceased. In 1923-24 This is already agony.

And without hopes for Sunday, because the working and peasant masses now will not succumb to any slogans of the most seductive nature.

If they go to war with the imperialists now, it will be submission to the most severe necessity, an act of self-defense, forced by the terrible great enemy of the Union and the working people. Our working masses are now absolutely incapable of proactive voluntary military retreats, struggles, and uprisings.

They were too tired from such a struggle, and even if they felt very bad, they still would not move on it now.

Sociological laws and historical examples prove this.

We need to heal old wounds and bruises, recover, give birth to children, balance life over the years, shaken as if by an earthquake. The masses are now very wisely doing this. But there is another, much more powerful reason for this than the one just noted; the workers of the Union have no need for aggressive actions and in the fight against Soviet power. They have ample opportunities to organize their lives and improve it without resorting to aggressive struggle, especially now, after the successfully carried out collectivization and the publication of the new Constitution.

And due to the economic well-being that is definitely growing from year to year, workers will certainly not need to follow any slogans of any party.

6. Let us assume abstractly for a moment that the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, having limited itself to the slogan “get rid of the Bolsheviks, take their place,” would use all means to fight the Soviet regime in order to overthrow it. They would have faced an army of 20-30 million people among their 40 members. I consider the party activists of the All-Union Communist Party and the Komsomol, Kr. The army and the NKVD and the active layers of workers and peasants would completely and completely stand up against them with the support of the majority of the rest of the Union. Our young statehood currently has such economic power and such an organized defense apparatus that an attempt to shake it, not only overthrow it, but especially the current

Vitaly Simen Samoilovich, born in 1897, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1915, since 1918 member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party.

He was repeatedly arrested by the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD, kept in prisons, and was in exile. From 1933 to September 1935 he served exile in Arkhangelsk, after which he was transferred to Ufa. During interrogation in the 4th department of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR on April 10, 1937, he testified that he brought Spiridonova a letter from Arkhangelsk from Kamkov to Ufa, which allegedly talked about the intensification of the Left Socialist Revolutionary work.

Dravert Leonid Petrovich, born in 1901, native of Kazan, member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1925, for Left Socialist Revolutionary activities, a Special Meeting of the OGPU Collegium sentenced him to 3 years in a political isolation cell, in 1928 - to exile for 3 years in Kazakhstan, in 1931 - to exile for 3 years in the Urals, then to Bashkiria .

In 1937, he worked in Ufa as an economist at the Bashkir office “Zagotskot”. In Ufa I met with M. A. Spiridonova several times. In February 1937, the NKVD of the Bashkir ASSR was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities. On June 17, 1937, investigators arranged a confrontation between Dravert and Spiridonova, at which he testified that M.A. Spiridonova in Ufa was allegedly engaged in active anti-Soviet activities and, in particular, gave instructions for the organization of the Bashkir Regional Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party . M.A. Spiridonova wrote down in response to this in the protocol of the confrontation: “I deny this testimony of Dravert.”

Goldberg (not Golberg) Boris Konstantinovich, a left Socialist Revolutionary, and his wife, Selivanova Anna Antonovna, born in 1890, a native of Petrograd, a left Socialist Revolutionary, were repeatedly arrested by the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. They served exile in Ufa and other places. In 1936-1937 lived in Gorky, worked at a car plant.

2 Podgorsky Nikolai (it was not possible to establish other data), a left Socialist Revolutionary, served exile in Ufa, then lived in the city of Kuibyshev.

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mi insignificant powers that a lion possesses. s.r. and all other socialist parties, it would only be pitiful and ridiculous.

And from this point of view, I do not understand the aggressiveness and fervor with which the protective organs set about eliminating the remnants of socialism. parties. It's like an elephant chasing a fly like a mosquito.

I think in ten years, when Kirovshina will be forgotten and all suspiciousness will subside and... the main thing is that the Constitution will unfold in life. You may have to say to yourself: it was in vain that we destroyed so many people and such a people; we could have been useful both then and now.

I say destroyed, because the use of 25 or 10 years of isolation in my eyes is equivalent to the death penalty, and I personally consider the latter a more humane measure.

How, after 17 years of imprisonment and 12 exiles, again bars, a castle, isolation from life, the sun, nature and people, from hot work, an eternal top, rude and evil guards, picking in the anus and vagina (what was now happening to me 2 times in Butyrka), again these terrible long aimless days and years and now without any justification for this torment by any guilt or idea... No, show humanity this time and kill right away.

7. At this historical moment, in the event of an attack on the Union of fascist imperialists, Lev. Wed adhere exclusively to a defensist position.

Based on this position, there should be no place for any organizational struggle against Soviet power, which is why there was none.

XIX. The external and internal reasons given here can be classified as formal argumentation.

The party is laying down its arms in groups, having become convinced of the complete futility and inconsistency of its struggle.

Actually, based only on these arguments, the group could come up with a legal formalization of its disarmament, which, in fact, had already been established since the physical liquidation of the party; it spent these years in prisons, and then scattered into exile. I have an argument and essentially it is silent, if I can, I will say it at the end.

XX. I think it is precisely due to the small number of lions. Wed the investigation arose a suspicion that, due to their small size, they may have decided to unite with the other. Again we have to argue only from psychology and logic. I declare that I am right, cf. I didn't unite. KOROTNEV's testimony is false. Even conditionally assuming that they are not false, his conversation with me without any further exchange of opinions and thoughts is an empty matter. But he didn’t come up with anything else.

Where did the center, terror, local, insurrection, etc. come from?? All these formidable and new tactics had to be agreed upon. But neither I nor the GAUP had a single such letter, not to mention any messenger. Where is any document?

I did not unite with the rights. Wed not only because they didn’t offer it to me. PLEKHANOV pestered me in Tashkent, I turned him off, and this was completely confirmed by the investigation of 1930, but because I categorically do not accept them.

I would never change the Bolsheviks for them, because they are frock coats and tail coats, talkers and wafflers, who managed to let the country and people slip out of their hands when he came to them with his eyes closed, with amazing trust and with a huge charge of creativity enthusiasm.

That they became stronger and smarter after that time? There is no reason to assume this.

I don't believe in their creativity or their organizational abilities. Even assuming that by some miracle these permanent conspirators and whisperers would overthrow the current government, they would not be able to cope with the matter, and in addition they could still open the door to war, which guards every crevice of the Union.

The investigation (the whole idea of ​​​​this accusation grew before my eyes) claims that on the state farm, where in 1924 they brought in 2 weeks from Inner to rest the Central Tsekists, and where we lived, we had the beginning of the blocking (So in text).

There I had, in fact, my first meeting with the rights. Wed Having previously arrived from Chita, upon leaving hard labor in 1917, I immediately began to split the party, relations immediately became sharply hostile and I was hooted and bullied heavily. And I hated them all and not only didn’t talk, but didn’t even bow to them, which is why I didn’t know any of them.

We exchanged opinions at conferences where KAMKOV and I in Leningrad won a large share of Leningrad from me. of the proletariat, even later in Moscow. And in October we stood on opposite sides of the barricades, and blood had already been shed between us.

At the state farm we met in a different position. They talked and argued a lot. They are pretty

Korotnev Igor Alexandrovich, born in 1903, native of St. Petersburg. In 1923, while a student at Leningrad State University, he joined the student group of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries. On May 10, 1924, by resolution of the Special Meeting of the OGPU Collegium, he was sentenced to 3 years in a concentration camp. In April 1927, he was exiled to the Narym region for 3 years. Released from exile early. By resolution of the Special Meeting of the OGPU Collegium of September 3, 1929, he was exiled to Semipalatinsk for 3 years.

Since 1932, he lived in Ufa, worked as a senior economist at the Bashkoopinsoyuz, where he repeatedly met with M. A. Spiridonova. In February 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on charges of counter-revolutionary terrorist activities. On May 19, 1937, a confrontation was held between Korotnev and Spiridonova, at which he testified that she was allegedly engaged in active Socialist Revolutionary activities. Spiridonova denied everything and did not admit any charges.

Plekhanov Ivan Andreevich, right Socialist Revolutionary, in 1929-1930. served exile in Tashkent, and was also exiled to Arkhangelsk and other places.

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but they gloated over the fact that we were also in the bag. We could not agree on any point other than criticism of the communists. They were still of an allied orientation, they still felt their throats tighten with excitement at the word Establish. The Assembly, the same old Menshevism that destroyed them, on the question of social. reforms, etc.

So we soon fell behind in the exchange, and the wives were very offended by our discussions, because instead of rest and treatment in a short 2 weeks there was noise and arguing to the point of hoarseness and great excitement.

I began to hold on myself and delay MAYOROV, and we were hospitable old-timers towards each new arriving couple. I became friends with GOTZ. He is a charming person, interesting, kind and gentle and a good friend. There was no blocking then or later.

2) I didn’t recognize the Mensheviks before, and I still don’t recognize them now, and I wouldn’t unite with them for any program in the world, because they are incapable of implementing any.

This layer of the intelligentsia is absolutely revolutionary, MIKHAILOV proves the blockade with m-kas, that l.sr. DOBROKHOTOVA is married to Mr. TSEDERBAUM. But the bed block cannot be considered political, and the result is only the good boy Leva.

3) By denying the bloc with the right-wing cf., I categorically and indignantly deny the accusation that I am involved in the center. He, too, was born before my eyes in the investigative cell, where I heard about him for the first time and not on the first day or even month, because he was still in the retort.

No matter how inclined I might be, out of friendly pity and the still-living love for my close friends and comrades, to explain and justify them, I still consider it a low fall for B. D. KAMKOV to testify against me about my participation in the Center and even more so Low fall is the same testimony of I. A. MAYOROV, my beloved friend and husband. Whether there is such a center, whether KAMKOV has given his consent to join it, I do not undertake to either affirm or deny. I am inclined to think that he does not exist at all, and I am also inclined to think that KAMKOV is slandering himself, seeing that there is no other way out of the loop. Both of them, MAYOROV and KAMKOV, can be opportunists of the big hand. I, too, can be an opportunist in the interests of the cause (we did not talk about this with Lenin because of the Brest-Litovsk Peace), but in my personal behavior I categorically deny this method.

If I'm political. KAMKOV’s physiognomy is not clear enough after 16 years of separation and I still don’t fully know who he is now, maybe he really united with the rights, wed, then I am 100% responsible for MAYOROV, he is not a participant in any center, just like me. He gave false testimony.

And how and how he must suffer, getting stuck in lies further and further. And why is this necessary?

By denying my participation in the center, I naturally deny the terror center, the locals, etc.

4) I am against terror against the Bolsheviks and Lev. Wed, it was never practiced against them. In history, we are very guilty that we squandered his idea, but he was not a lion. Wed, having gone to the anarchists. We responded for his provocation by putting the entire party in prison, p.ch. There was no real underground organized then in 1919. On his part, this in relation to our party was a major provocation and defeat of the party. Not a single secret or overt resolution accepted terror against the Communist Party [as] a method of struggle.

It’s hard for me to talk about this, because you are always afraid that you will be caught for adjusting, but I must say - regardless of your attitude towards us in /evaluation of interpretation and/ actions (So in the text), we consider you comrades in goals, and Therefore, we allow terror only against fascists.

This is the main point.

For reasons of formal order against terror in the Soviet country, I will note two.

First: in tsarist times, the bureaucracy was in the last century, and always was, so mediocre and alive that talented rulers were rare and populists with terrorist tactics, starting with the Narodnaya Volya, it was at these rulers that they hurled their dynamite thunder. We did not recognize the terror that is now accepted in the tactics of the Trotskyists, removing not personal workers, but those in certain positions, this is some kind of motiveless terror of the Odessa anarchists, which we condemned and despised, they beat the “bourgeoisie” by throwing bombs in cafes . That is why I am outraged by the accusation of an attempt on BULISHEV’s life. A very mediocre size and no matter how much we change it, I know it’s much larger than him, why would he be removed, since tomorrow a better one would replace him (So in the text)?

Therefore, the murder of PLEVE gave spring to politics, the congress, the conference, the insolence of the radical press, etc. and made a hole in the inventory of their camarilla for several years, until STOLYPIN was found and targeted, who began to strangle the revolution in 1907.

Now this would be useless, because the country is full of talented workers from top to bottom. You probably know better than me how, without much strain, in place of one worker removed for some primitive reason, you immediately find a replacement and the fabric comes to life again, overgrown with new energy.

Dobrokhotova Alexandra Sergeevna, was a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. Together with her husband Levitsky (Tsederbaum) she served exile in Ufa.

Levitsky (Tsederbaum) Vladimir Osipovich (1883-1938), native of St. Petersburg. At the end of the 90s, under the influence of his brothers Yu. O. Martov and S. O. Ezhov, he joined the Social Democratic movement. In 1903 he joined the Mensheviks. He was repeatedly arrested by the Tsarist secret police.

In 1917, he was a member of the Moscow Menshevik Committee and was a supporter of Menshevik participation in the Provisional Government. Member of the editorial board of the newspaper “Forward” and “Workers’ Newspaper”. In December 1917 - January 1918 he was kept in the Peter and Paul Fortress along with other Mensheviks. In the fall of 1919 he left the party. Then he was repeatedly arrested and exiled. On February 22, 1938, he died in Ufa during another investigation.

Bulashev Zinatulla Gizyatovich (1894-1938), native of the village. Karashids of the Ufa region of Bashkiria. Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Delegate to the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). In the fall of 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on charges of counter-revolutionary bourgeois-nationalist activities. In February 1937, a number of left Socialist Revolutionaries arrested in Bashkiria testified during the investigation that “on the personal instructions of the former member of the Central Committee of the PLSR Spiridonova M.A.” they were preparing an assassination attempt on Bulashev 3. G.

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And second: Soviet power is so cruel and, I would say, reckless of human life, dealing with terror, that you need to have a lot of immorality to resort to terror now. Under the Tsar, only the terrorist himself and someone who accidentally got involved disappeared. Neither ancestors nor descendants were touched. Fellow members of the organization answered in the order of articles about the code of laws, etc., when they came across them at their work. And now MIKHAILOV told me that he imprisoned my sisters in Tambov, when my terror on the water was written out with a pitchfork. I saw two sisters once upon arrival from hard labor in 1917, and the third also once in 1929. Short meetings after 12-24 years of separation, of course, did not create closeness. I corresponded extremely formally and rarely with one sister (she is 70 years old). Didn't contain any. All are old women, all very older than me. One is already 70 years old. One is sick with cancer, and a quarter of her muscular surface has been removed by surgery. When I sit down, not one has come to see me on a date. When ZELIKMAN asked me if I wanted to serve exile in Tambov, I said I didn’t want to. And now they have to answer for me. They threaten MAYOROV with the same thing.

For KIROV, the number of people published on two huge newspaper pages of Izvestia were shot; for the attempt on Lenin, 15 thousand people were shot by the Chekists, the communists and security officers told me this.

What kind of faith in the correctness of one’s tactics and in oneself, reaching the point of delusions of grandeur, one would have to have in order to decide to pay for the death of one, two responders or leaders with so many human lives. Who am I to take upon myself [the right] to control the lives of hundreds of people, because they only live once in the world.

This moment alone is enough to abandon such a method once and for all; it would no longer be terror, but a vile adventure and provocation, as I regarded Nikolaev’s speech. What pushed them is alien to us. We never aspired to power as such and left power from the Council of People's Commissars and others on our own initiative. And we also don’t have the frenzy and embitterment of the Trotskyists, why should he?

When in 1919-20 we anyone raised the issue of terrorism, I stated that I would consider this as a provocation and would immediately make all organizational conclusions regarding the issue raised. And so it was, the person who raised this question turned out to be a provocateur. And the time was hot. The whole party sat, and my beloved friends sat with them, the prison was declared hostages.

XXI. Now comes the hard part.

1) When I remember how BAK wrinkled his face in disgust at my mere hint and how he said, “who would believe you,” I still cannot begin to speak. I had to start from the first page about this, I broke myself for 4 days to even finish with this. Only with one foot already on the other side of life do I force myself to speak.

I admit my guilt in that I did not come forward with the legal formalization of our disarmament. What I write about the external and internal reasons for our not working, I had in my head in ’33, ’34, ’32 and ’36.

Back in 1930, I applied something similar (So in the text) to the current MAYOROVA and KAKHOVSKAYA from Crimea with IZMAILOVICH who left me. Collectivization finally convinced me of the need to completely lay down hands, not to mention weapons, that is, struggle. Already in 1930, I began to see that of the main moments that divided us, namely the replacement of Soviet power with communist power, as I wrote in the underground labor newspaper in 1920, this moment was fading into history, and broad sections of the masses were entering the ruling apparatus.

The Red commanders, soldiers from the Far East, who were with me at the Tubin Institute in Yalta, helped me a lot. In this tuba institute there were almost exclusively communists and security officers. And I received information from them about the life of the entire Union. In my isolation from life, I could repeat back in 1925 that six months in Yalta in 1930 from III to IX moved me forward enormously.

But in 1930 we were arrested. I was brought from Yalta to Moscow, my comrades from the four at the same time from Tashkent. And, of course, during the investigation, I answered all the investigator’s questions, didn’t say anything about my moods, and with ANDREEVA, in conversations that were very good and to the point, I kept to the usual manner, telling her, “What do you want us to do with the nettle that you they stuffed our pants, sitting on it, solemnly testifying to you of their loyalty, what will you believe, the nettle or us?

2) Every year the meaninglessness of the outcast existence, its unjustification especially in relation to the BELOSTOTSKYS and others, who, after all, did nothing harmful to the Soviet government at any time, was felt more sharply, but the everlasting lock held tightly.

We had a tradition and a certain mode of behavior. It was considered a disgrace and selfishness to go to the authorities that shot our comrades, declaring their loyalty. On-

Zelikman Naum Petrovich, born in 1901, native of Novomoskovsk, Dnepropetrovsk region. In July 1933, he was appointed plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU in Bashkiria. On December 15, 1934, by order of the NKVD of the USSR, he was appointed head of the NKVD for the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Major of State Security. On March 2, 1939, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to death.

Andreeva-Gorbunova Alexandra Azarievna (1888-1951), native of the village. Kelchin, Sarapul district, Vyatka province, from the family of a religious minister. Member of the Bolshevik Party since 1905. She was subjected to repression by the tsarist government for her revolutionary activities. After the October Revolution, she worked in public education authorities in the city of Slobodsky, Vyatka province. Since 1919 in the Intelligence Department of the Red Army. In October 1921, she was transferred to work in the Cheka and appointed to the position of assistant to the head of the Secret Department of the Cheka. Subsequently, she worked as deputy head of the Secret Department of the GPU and assistant to the head of this department of the OGPU. In 1937, assistant to the special authorized representative of the NKVD of the USSR. In 1938 she was retired. On December 5, 1938, she was arrested by the NKVD of the USSR on charges of anti-Soviet terrorist activities and on May 4, 1939, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. While serving her sentence, she died on July 17, 1951 in the Mineral ITL. In 1957 rehabilitated.

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It should be noted that, according to observations, very often it was the morally unstable comrades, with a strong bias towards philistinism and towards observing their own interests, who made their individual statements. The authorities usually forgave them, released them from prison or exile, and sometimes provided, if necessary, some other protection. We called it selling ourselves for a warrant for galoshes and an apartment, covered the name of a departed comrade with contempt, and he left forever from our sight.

It was this tradition that determined our communication. They had already become narrow, they were already a lifeless form, and with pain and difficulty, but they continued to drive all the left.s.r.

And how can I, the main keeper and creator of these traditions, come out with the opposite. That's how the style stayed.

But this style determined a lot and was very harmful. He defined permanent opposition, anti-Soviet conversations among themselves, a certain oppositional tone, as a habitual reflex when discussing issues of the current moment, etc. If we completely legitimately abandoned questions of our program and tactics, then we were greedily interested in current life and newspaper reports, and the exchange of opinions on newspapers was the main topic at our meetings. The political side of the country's life and its entire life constituted our life.

When the charter of agricultural industries came out, and collective farms received their legal registration and land cadastre, I became completely unbearable. I read these charters and projects up and down, made amendments and was sad and sad. And then not a word to anyone.

During the service, the manager asked me why she was so gloomy, I showed him the newspaper, and I blurted out, “It’s my business.”

3) With the release of the Constitution, we had a conversation for one minute - if only they would allow us to issue a bulletin, in a small number of copies for the exchange of opinions and so that everything would be fully plowed. s.r. They spoke about their position, attitude towards the current moment and overestimated the end. This would make it possible to reach an agreement before self-liquidation, since I am convinced that the vast majority of n/fragments would confirm what I am saying now. Moreover, I would have expressed myself in the newsletter then more fully and frankly than now, without thinking that my thoughts would be explained away with nettles, as I think now. But, of course, we soon realized that a green garden was not for us, and with the words of this song I formulated the attitude of the Constitution towards us to the comrades who came to us.

You continue to be so afraid of us that you can’t find a better place for us under the new Constitution than isolation wards. I attribute the defeat and exile most of all to this reason.

4) What stopped me, of course, was that if we were to make a statement about disarmament, no, I say incorrectly, “we”, because this was never said out loud - what stopped me was what you already had The situation at the meeting of those disarming was not at all the same as before. You suffered so many disappointments and were so shamelessly and often deceived that it was difficult for you to maintain your former trust and cordiality in statements of loyalty, and it became legitimately natural for you to regard statements as double-dealing. For me this would be unbearable.

5) And then your condition for disarmament is the imprisonment of all old comrades who did not come with statements. This is not clear to me. After all, they were also passive, like me. In my opinion this is more harmful than beneficial. And I was definitely incapable of organizing this with my comrades, who could be contacted if there were other comrades who for some reason did not come to us, and therefore would have considered those imprisoned as strikebreaking.

So you would say that I did not disarm, as you will say now.

6) And by the way, I am a greater friend of the Soviet government than tens of millions of the most loyal ordinary people. And a passionate and effective friend. Although he has the courage to have his own opinion. I think you are doing better than I would have done.

Your policy of war and peace is completely accepted by me (as of all the leftists I know), I have never taken industrial policy under fire from my criticism, I completely agree with collectivization. I agree with all the progressive tempo and structure, it’s not worth listing.

7) I only disagree with the fact that the death penalty remains in the modern system. Now the state is so strong that it can build Socialism without the death penalty. This article should not exist in the legislation. She can stay for the war and nothing more. In peacetime, our protective apparatus has a power that is not and has never been equal in the world. Was it really so strong among the Assirovylonians in one of their periods? And now there is no need at all to have this arch-bourgeois means of defense in your arsenal. The best minds of humanity, the passionate work of thought and heart for entire centuries, called the need to destroy e-institutions their crown and result. Honor, gil-

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otina, rope, bullet, electric. chair - medieval. Our revolution of 1905 took place entirely under the slogan of abolishing the institution of the death penalty, but dying, as if covered with a white wing by this very slogan (So in the text), bleeding itself. It is curious that Magantsev, a legislator, a thinker, a prominent lawyer, hung with orders, a teacher of two kings, who stood for the death penalty all his life, towards the end of his life [realized] that the death penalty is harmful socially and politically and must be abandoned.

The essence of the denial of the death penalty remains the same under all conditions under governments of all stripes.

One can and should kill in a civil war while defending the rights of the revolution and the working people, but only when there are no other means of defending the revolution at hand. When there are such powerful means of defense as you have, the death penalty becomes a harmful institution, corrupting incalculably those who apply this institution.

I always think about the psychology of thousands of people - technical performers, executioners, executioners, about those who escort convicts to death, about a platoon shooting in the semi-darkness of the night at a bound, disarmed, maddened man. We can’t, we can’t do this. We have apple blossoms in our country, we have science and movement, art, beauty, we have books and general education and treatment, we have sun and raising children, we have truth and next to this is this huge corner where cruel, bloody things are happening. In connection with this question, I often think about Stalin, because he is such an intelligent man and seems to be interested in the transformation of things and hearts!? How can he not see that the death penalty must be ended? Here you are, lion. Wed, they started this death penalty, we would have ended it, only by reducing it in size to one person in the person of me, as an undisarmed person - as you call me. But we need to end the death penalty.

8) And I would also adjust your prison regime and your penal system. It should be different in a socialist country. We definitely need more humanity. The worst thing about imprisonment is the transformation of a person into a thing. Tolstoy, who never spent time in prison, spoke about this remarkably in his novel “Sunday.” Everything else is just an application. Nobody thinks about it. And they would have to. During these 9 months, despite all my isolation, I have still gained so much and seen enough bad things that I am suffering from the itch to speak out, but which of you would be interested in this?

9) My guilt for not legally formalizing our non-struggle, our disarmament, is aggravated by the fact that, given the lack of disunity and fragmentation, individual leftist r.s. perhaps they continued to consider themselves obligated to undertake and organize something, whereas with this or that publication this could no longer be the case.

I would like to justify myself a little by the fact that without human equipment, without a program and tactics, without mutual coherence, a party cannot exist, and it did not exist, and everyone understood this and, most importantly, I was convinced that you knew this well. But even for self-destruction, especially if it had only a formal meaning, it was necessary for the fragments to contact, write off or gather together, which was all impossible. Without this, there would have been only an arbitrary attack from us 4, a coup d’etat (coudeta), which the comrades might not have taken into account, and you would have considered such a liquidation insufficiently authoritarian.

XXII. Coming to Moscow, I really hoped to have the opportunity to talk briefly with someone at the top, especially with someone who knew me personally.

Due to the apparent lack of such an opportunity, I have to write instead of just saying it once and without any resonance, because I wouldn’t want many people to know and read this. Now I have to write: - The Ufa investigation (MIKHAILOV) offered me, if I “confess” to the center, terror, etc. - to give me the opportunity to assign to us each employee in the case with the condition of full agreement with my distribution, which creates, from my words and release of a number of persons. KARPOVICH went further. At the beginning of August, during my second continuous interrogation vigil, he invited me to take the blame for everyone and he would then release 40 people. I would only have to confirm that I am the only inspirer, initiator and leader, and if it weren’t for me, no crime could have been born, all 40 would have done nothing. I refused.

I have a question. Is this an individual technique or a generally accepted method. In both cases, this is definitely not an acceptable method. It leads to Azerism in the full sense of the word and darkens the prospects of our future, which must increasingly unlearn and cleanse itself from the dark skills and heritage of the past, and not live by them.

There are too many traces of these dark skills in my case, and if not for them, I would not have had to die.

If now, at least a little, this death pushes this dark legacy into the past, then it was

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that would be good. It would be good to get those who told the story to admit back to their lies for the sake of the investigation. So that the truth will prevail. Everything that I have said regarding the charges brought against me is true, I swear on my life.

M. SPIRIDONOVA.

Central Election Commission FSB. D.N. 13266. T. 3. M. 1 -132. Original. Typescript.

This amazing woman was one of those who, until October 1917, were called fierce fighters for the people's happiness. Of those who longed for the overthrow of the autocracy and a revolution, after which Russia would finally gain freedom. But when the desired thing happened, her ardent comrades immediately put her in prison and kept her there for almost a quarter of a century. Before the execution...

For four days she hunted for her victim, spending the night at railway stations, where, according to assumptions, the train carrying the provincial councilor Gavrila Luzhenovsky could stop. The adviser, of course, will go out onto the platform to stretch his legs, and then... Maria was convinced: even if he was in the crowd, she would manage to get closer - well, who would suspect the pretty schoolgirl of anything? And indeed: a little girl, rosy-cheeked from the frost, in a flirtatious hat, is walking around, looking quite like a girl, except for her knee-length chestnut braid. From her, and from her mischievous, teasing look, an experienced man could immediately understand: uh, my friend, what kind of child is this? Young lady! And she has very, you know, playful fantasies in her head...

She overtook Luzhenovsky at the Borisoglebsk station. He stood on the platform, surrounded by accompanying Cossacks. Maria chose a more comfortable place - the platform of the carriage, took a revolver from her fur muff and fired. She jumped to the ground and shot again. The resulting commotion allowed her to fire three more bullets. And all five hit the target: two - in the adviser’s stomach, two - in the chest, one - in the hand. I saved the sixth for myself. However, as soon as she brought the barrel to her temple, one of the guards stunned her with a powerful blow.

First they beat her with rifle butts, then they grabbed her by the legs and dragged her, causing her skirts and other clothes to slide down to her armpits, completely exposing her body. They called a cab driver, and the Cossack officer Avramov, wrapping his braid around his hand, lifted the captive into the air and threw her into the sleigh.

She, stunned, was brought to the police headquarters, stripped naked and thrown onto the stone floor of a cold cell. Here Avramov and assistant bailiff Zhdanov tortured her until midnight: they whipped her with whips until the skin peeled off, which was then torn off in pieces and cauterized the wounds with burning cigarettes, the heels of their boots fell on the soles of her stiff legs... They found out a little: she identified herself as a 7th grade student from Tambov women's gymnasium Maria Alexandrova, who carried out the death sentence imposed on Luzhenovsky by the Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party for the criminal beating and torture of peasants during the riots.

It was decided that same night to send the terrorist to Tambov, to the provincial prison. They literally loaded her into the carriage - she did not regain consciousness, she was delirious. Pod'esaul Avramov locked himself with the girl in the compartment, posting a guard in the corridor and explaining to his subordinates that he would continue the investigation. Therefore, they say, if screams are heard, do not pay attention. But no one heard the screams - reason did not return to the exhausted, mutilated prisoner, and, taking advantage of this, the drunken man caressed her until dawn: he hugged her hips, kissed her, groped her groin and stroked her breasts, whispered banal nonsense. And finally, he raped me. Then, later, Maria complained to the prison doctor: they said she discovered signs of syphilis. The doctor, having examined the reddened rash, reassured: “You were mistaken...”

The news that on January 16, 1906, an attempt was made on the life of the provincial secretary Luzhenovsky was published by many newspapers. It was reported that Maria Spiridonova (her real name was revealed), a Socialist Revolutionary, from a wealthy noble family, formerly the first student of the gymnasium, 21 years and three months old, is in in terrible condition. The face is a bloody mask. And, as she herself says, “My head hurts a lot, my memory has weakened, it’s difficult to express my thoughts logically, my chest hurts, sometimes my throat bleeds. One eye sees nothing". The right ear is deaf. There is no living area on the body, only scars and bruises.

Luzhenovsky did not survive. In April, unknown avengers finished off Avramov, and in May, Zhdanov. The Social Revolutionaries took responsibility for eliminating the scoundrels. They decided to morally support Maria Alexandrovna, who was awaiting trial - imprisoned in the same provincial prison, Vladimir Volsky, a Socialist Revolutionary from hereditary nobles, on the advice of his comrades from the outside, suddenly began sending her ardent love letters; he probably convinced himself that he was crazy about Maria . His messages were filled with passion, longing of the heart, romantic admiration and tender dreams of the hour when they, undoubtedly created for each other, would unite in a reverent embrace. Most likely, she also believed in it, and a reciprocal feeling flared up in her soul. Spiridonova asked her superiors for a meeting with Vladimir, while Volsky applied for permission to marry. Of course, they were refused, citing the fact that Volsky was already married, and his energetic vows that his wife had left him four years ago had no weight.

It’s curious: they met eleven years later, in May 1917, and... did not experience the same attraction. They were two complete strangers, indifferent to each other.

But let's go back to the beginning of the century, to Tambov. The investigation was completed, and the military district court sentenced Spiridonova to death by hanging. However, oddly enough, it was he who found mitigating circumstances and unexpectedly replaced the gallows with indefinite hard labor in Nerchinsk. The path there ran through the Pugachev tower of the Butyrka prison in Moscow, where other desperate social revolutionaries were kept - each of them, in different parts of the empire, for some reason certainly attempted to assassinate the governor. But, perhaps, liberal newspapers wrote so enthusiastically only about Spiridonova: “You are a symbol of a still young, rebellious, fighting, selfless Russia. And this is all the greatness, all the beauty of your dear image.”

She tried to escape from hard labor three times - to no avail! She was released by A. Kerensky, Minister of Justice of the Provisional Government, on March 3, 1917. Eleven years later, she returned to the capital and into active politics, became close to Lenin, which N. Krupskaya later recalled: “Some room in Smolny... Spiridonova is sitting on one of the dark red sofas, Ilyich is sitting next to her and somehow gently and passionately convinces her of something.” The famous and authoritative Socialist Revolutionary Spiridonova often supported the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks supported her. But she categorically did not accept the way they acted, which she was not slow in openly declaring in an indignant letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. You, she argued, have perverted our revolution! Your policy is a complete deception of the working people! Your numerous bureaucrats will eat up more than the bourgeoisie! “Unheard of abominations are happening to workers, peasants, sailors and the frightened man in the street,” Maria Alexandrovna was indignant!

The response to the furious denunciations was a hasty decision of the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, dated November 27, 1918: to subject M. A. Spiridonov to prison for one year. True, two days later the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, taking into account her “special services to the revolution,” announced an amnesty. An attempt to calm down the inflexible convict failed; she continued to speak temperamentally at workers’ rallies. A summary of her speech at the Dux plant, made by some employee of the Cheka for a report to the top, has been preserved: “The workers are strangled, tied hand and foot, forced to obey decrees, which are issued by a bunch of shady individuals led by Lenin, Trotsky... All commissars are scoundrels, growing fat on exorbitant salaries. Scoundrels enroll in the Communist Party in order to receive better rations, better clothes, galoshes...” And each accusation, the security officer honestly noted, caused noisy applause.

Naturally, Spiridonova was arrested again, now “for counter-revolutionary agitation and slandering the Soviet regime.” The Revolutionary Tribunal decided to isolate her for a year “by confinement in a sanatorium.”

The sanatorium turned out to be a narrow nook next to the guardhouse in... the Kremlin, damp and dank, the guards looked in on the prisoner almost every minute: is she sitting? Lying down? Perched on the bucket out of natural necessity? This didn’t bother them, and neither did the prisoner. But the thick, suffocating smoke of terry, rushing into the nook when the door swung open, plunged her into persistent cough. Maria Alexandrovna resumed profuse hemoptysis - blood simply flowed from her mouth non-stop. In addition, her arms were numb, her legs did not obey her, and she was terribly cold. The men from the guardhouse became worried: “Amba! He’ll leave now!” - and called the paramedic. She called the orderlies, and the dying Maria ended up in the hospital for a short time.

She was lucky - with the help of a compassionate guard from the Ryazan peasants, she escaped. She hid in Moscow for a year and a half, but it was only a short respite. The GPU, as Spiridonova bitterly admitted, no longer let her out of its clutches. When she, struck down typhoid fever, but managed to hand over to her party comrades a list of safe addresses, manuscripts of evil articles and codes, she was arrested again, punitive sanctions followed one after another. Spiridonova was put in a psychiatric hospital under the name “Onufrieva” and such an unbearable situation was created that her mind began to cloud. In order not to break, she declared a two-week dry hunger strike and lay motionless with an emaciated face and eyes frozen in an expression of melancholy and horror. The doctors said she was dying. And only then was she released under the condition: from now on - no articles for underground newspapers, no politics! No public speaking! From now on, Spiridonova must deal only with her own health, undermined by typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy and nervous disorder. Appropriate conditions will be created for her.

Maria Alexandrovna was sent to Malakhovka near Moscow along with her long-time and faithful friend from hard labor, A. Izmailovich. For two, according to the inventory, they had: two old skirts, one old wadded trousers, one torn jacket, two old padded jackets, one wadded blanket, a knitted hat, one torn towel, an enamel plate and two iron mugs, three wooden spoons, one pan... They lived from hand to mouth, but under the obvious supervision of the local Cheka, which was accumulating “compromising evidence” against them. If only the unfortunate women knew that the poor “Malakhov’s seat” will very soon seem like paradise to them.

However, fate gave Spiridonova a short joy - in Samarkand, where she and A. Izmailovich were exiled without trial, Maria Alexandrovna found a “beloved friend and husband” and married Ilya Andreevich Mayorov, a member of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. A member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, the author of the draft law on the socialization of the land, he was also repressed - for disagreement with the methods of collectivization. The two persecuted people formed a family, which included the old father of Mayorov, the 17-year-old son of Ilya Andreevich, as well as two helpless friends of Spiridonova - former political prisoners. Mayorov somehow did not gravitate toward family chores; Maria Alexandrovna took upon herself all the worries about food, clothes and shoes, who also managed to send parcels to needy like-minded people: jam to Suzdal, raisins to Solovki, money to Kazan and Tula. .. The energy that came from God knows where, drowning out the sticky diseases, helped her spin like a squirrel in a wheel. It seems that she again felt young, desired, unique, because the person closest to her was nearby, seemingly not noticing how decrepit she was... I think she was grateful to him for this “myopia.” And in Ufa (now they were exiled here) I got two jobs so that I could not only buy forgotten white bread, milk, and sugar on holidays.

When they were all arrested again in February 1937, the investigator, not without malice, told Maria Alexandrovna that a significant amount of money had been seized from Mayorov - he was hiding odd jobs from his wife. This did not offend her, did not outrage her - such a trifle in comparison with the torture to which she was subjected in the prison of the Bashkir NKVD, accusing her of preparing an assassination attempt on Voroshilov. The interrogations continued for two or three days without a break, with swearing and assault. They were not allowed to sit down, which is why Spiridonova’s legs turned into something log-shaped, black and purple in color, and did not fit into her boots. Seeing how unpleasant personal searches were for her, they searched her incessantly - the guard even reached into the anus and vagina and looked for something there with a clumsy finger.

Once they arranged confrontation with Mayorov and read his confession out loud: yes, he was plotting a terrorist attack against Stalin, and Spiridonova knew about it. It was a monstrous absurdity; none of them had ever had such an idea.

Ah, Ilyusha! - she whispered reproachfully. - It would be better if you cheated on me with a dozen women, with a whole harem, and not like this... What a low fall!

She had no idea that her husband made this fantastic “confession” under torture by rats.

Early January next year The military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR approved the sentence: M. A. Spiridonova - 25 years in prison, Mayorov - 10 years. Maria Alexandrovna did not hear the sentence - she became deaf.

The historian V. Lavrov, who these days has traced her life path through archival documents and for the first time compiled a book of horror from them, provides terrible testimony: on September 11, 1941, prisoner M. Spiridonova, held in the Oryol NKVD prison, was “transported to a special room where specially selected persons from among the prison staff put a cloth gag into the convict’s mouth and tied it with a rag so that he could not push it out.” Then they announced to her: “In the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics... Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova... to subject to the highest degree punishment - execution without confiscation of property in the absence of it.”

On this day, 157 similar sentences were pronounced. 157 people (including I.A. Mayorov) were taken by truck to the Medvedevsky forest, which is ten kilometers from Orel, which the Germans were approaching. The day before, security officers dug up trees here with their roots. The executed people were pushed into the resulting pits, trees were placed on top, earth was poured in and compacted...

The burial site has not yet been found.