Maria Spiridonova's "Last Testament"

Abstract

Maria Spiridonova is one of the Russian Revolution's most interesting and important, yet tragic and little-known figures. A prototype revolutionary terrorist in late Tsarist times, she became a leader of the radical agrarian socialist Left SR party after the October 1917 Revolution and was the joint Bolshevik-Left SR nominee for the presidency of the Constituent Assembly. However, after she masterminded the assassination of Count Wilhelm Mirbach, the German Ambassador to Soviet Russia, in July 1918, the Bolsheviks forced her into oblivion. Spiridonova spent most of the remaining twenty-three years of her life in exile or in Soviet prisons and labor camps. For all intents and purposes, she had disappeared. Only now do declassified documents permit fascinating glimpses into this unknown period of her extraordinary life. I happened across one such document in the former KGB archives. Written on scraps of paper in a Moscow prison during the first half of November 1937, when Spiridonova was convinced she had only days left to live, this document, Spiridonova's known written communication, can aptly be called her last testament.' The document, transcribed by KGB staff soon after it was composed, runs to 102 typed pages. It demonstrates that at a time when formerly prominent survivors from all of Russia's revolutionary parties, including the Bolshevik party, were succumbing to grisly Stalinist torture and confessing to fabricated crimes, Spiridonova (whose forced suffering was as inhuman as anyone's), courageously, powerfully, and with extraordinary precision rebutted charges of leading a national conspiracy against Soviet power. Moreover, in the testament she reflected on, among many other things, the horrors she had recently experienced in Stalin's prisons; her life in exile between 1930 and 1937 (and the complex, little-known history of the Left SRs after 1917); the rationale for and efficacy of terror as a weapon in Tsarist times and under Stalin; her feelings about Stalin's revolution from above; and her enduring hopes for Soviet Russia's future. Beyond this, her testament, portions of which are included below, provides a unique glimpse into the process and dynamics of interrogations during the Great Purges. Born the daughter of a minor, nonhereditary Tambov noble in 1884, Spiridonova