The Case of the “White Guard Spy” Lidofiria Aspirinskaya: Based on the Materials of the Vyatka GubChK

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Based on unpublished sources from the funds of the Central State Archive of the Kirov region, the article analyzes the judicial and investigative cases of 1919 against L. P. Aspirinskaya on charges of espionage, T. V. Kobelev, I. A. Chernyshev, accused of crimes of office and counterrevolution. In 1919, a number of persons were arrested in Vyatka on charges of espionage, these cases are still classified. The case of L. P. Aspirinskaya, which is in archival access, is especially valuable: upon arriving at the evacuation in Vyatka, she was arrested. Her arrest led to a number of investigative measures against other persons. These cases were initiated by the Vyatka GubChK at a time when A. V. Kolchak’s spring offensive was expected on the Eastern Front of the Civil War. The purpose of the work is to use the example of judicial and investigative cases against L. P. Aspirinskaya, T. V. Kobelev and others to indicate the factors that influenced the lives of individual “random” people in the era of social cataclysms. The theoretical basis of the study was the anthropological approach. L. P. Aspirinskaya tried to survive in the conditions of the Civil War without her father and husband, looking for new survival strategies for herself. In conclusion, the author emphasizes that the study of such topics makes it possible to get to the problems of gender history, as well as to reconstruct the image of the Soviet man. This publication may be of interest to researchers studying early Soviet society, the Civil War in Russia, the history of Soviet regional government bodies, as well as Soviet special services.