The Martyrdom of Illness: Mariia Spiridonova in Siberian Imprisonment, 1906–17

Abstract

Abstract: In the summer of 1906 at the age of twenty-one, Mariia Spiridonova, a Russian Socialist Revolutionary (SR) assassin was transported with five other convicted female SR terrorists by railway from Moscow to the Nerchinsk prison complex in eastern Siberia. Only Spiridonova was known as a martyr-heroine to opponents of tsarism across the empire, however, because national newspapers had published her story of physical abuse by police and Cossacks at the time of her arrest. Patterning themselves after an earlier generation of populist terrorists in the 1870s and 1880s, male and female SR terrorists in the revolution of 1905–07 attempted to kill government officials whom the SR party accused of oppressive actions against helpless civilians. Although SR terrorists expected to sacrifice their own lives as compensation for committing political murder, the tsarist government commuted the women’s death sentences to penal servitude for life. In Siberian imprisonment, Spiridonova and her five terrorist comrades followed the tradition of preceding generations of revolutionaries by joining a ‘socialist collective’ or ‘commune’ of political prisoners with a code of conduct and a shared economy. Male and female socialist prisoners lived by such compacts to prepare themselves for the future revolution and to deepen the political consciousness of their fellow inmates by personal example. Only Spiridonova among the women ‘politicals’ took no visible role in upholding the prison commune but rather lived in semi-isolation as an invalid throughout her eleven years in the Nerchinsk complex. Suffering from tuberculosis, Spiridonova, who had anticipated a martyr’s death on the scaffold, seemingly succumbed to the martyrdom of chronic illness. Yet the fall of the tsarist autocracy in February 1917 did not just liberate Spiridonova from penal servitude but simultaneously restored her health, her energy and her drive to engage in radical politics. Her pattern of revolutionary behaviour thus alternated between active and passive self-sacrifice, the tuberculosis that enhanced her legend of martyrdom apparently waxing and waning according to the degree of her personal freedom.