Maria Spiridonova
Russian assassin
Died when: 56 years 330 days (682 months)Star Sign: Libra
Maria Alexandrovna Spiridonova (Russian: ????´? ??????´??????? ???????´????; 16 October 1884 – 11 September 1941) was a Narodnik-inspired Russian revolutionary.In 1906, as a novice member of a local combat group of the Tambov Socialists-Revolutionaries (SRs), she assassinated a security official.
Her subsequent abuse by police earned her enormous popularity with the opponents of Tsarism throughout the empire and even abroad.
After spending over 11 years in Siberian prisons she was freed after the February Revolution of 1917, and returned to European Russia as a heroine of the destitute, and especially of the peasants.
She was the only woman other than Alexandra Kollontai to play a prominent role during the Russian Revolution, leading the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to initially side with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and then to break with them.
From 1918 on, she was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, briefly detained in a mental sanitarium, sent into internal exile, and finally shot in 1941.
A successful campaign was run to discredit her name and portray her as a hysterical extremist, and she was "forced into oblivion".
In 1958, when publishing the fourth volume of A History of Socialist Thought, G.D.H.Cole wrote that nothing was known of what had happened to her after 1920.
Twenty years later, Richard Stites was still uncertain whether her death occurred in 1937 or 1941.Only after the end of Stalinism and the fall of the Soviet Union did it gradually become possible to reconstruct the last decades of her life.
