Talk:Maria Spiridonova

Would it be too much to ask for sources here? This is a very controversial figure -- sure to become more so as time goes by and bolshevik rule passes into history. (That's a dig at the trot insult at the end of the article.)

I have heard that there WAS -- if not a "confession" -- a last testament of Spiridonova. I think I once saw a journal article discussing it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.231.244.172 (talk) 04:58, August 25, 2007 (UTC)

The date of the assassination is given as 1905 and 1906. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.180.222.5 (talk) 18:03, 11 November 2013 (UTC)Reply

We need an article on the whole Shesterka. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.180.222.5 (talk) 18:26, 11 November 2013 (UTC)Reply

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The article states that during her stay in Maltzevskaya Prison Spiridonova "was harshly treated, and was sometimes severely caned with birch rods (розги) while stripped naked". Such a statement is founded on a source in Russian I am not able to translate. It seems however inconsistent with other sources, and in particular:

• Spiridonova's own statement in her 1937 'last testament': "Having undergone certain difficult incidents in a Tsarist torture chamber in the beginning of 1906 [i.e. when she was arrested on the occasion of the assassination of Luzhenovsky (editor's note)], I was left with a inability to reconcile myself to personal searches. One must do justice to both the Tsarist and Soviet prison systems. After those events in 1906 and until my present arrest I remained inviolate and my personal dignity was never threatened in its most sensitive areas" (Rabinovich, Russian Review, pp. 431-432).
• Spiridonova's further statements as reported by Anna Geifman: "In 1906 life was free in prisons...The regime in hard labor was...very liberal"; and, moreover, about Akatuy katorga prison: " There was complete freedom. The prisoners were allowed...to walk deep into the forest for the whole day" and so on ( Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917, p. 224).

--Jeanambr (talk) 22:46, 12 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

All the reliable sources I have meantime consulted are absolutely consistent: life conditions in Maltsev were relatively mild and no reference to possible particular illtreatment of Spiridonova is ever made. Imho, the article's statement can be definitely considered a fake.--Jeanambr (talk) 20:33, 18 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

I have removed the fake and given new sourced information about the Tsarist prison treatment of Spiridonova and her women comrades.--Jeanambr (talk) 11:00, 16 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

According to her closest associates in the 20ies, Spiridonova had a “diseased brain” and is referred to as being “psychically deranged”.

(Letters from Russian Prisons, page 89: https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/4759)

Does anyone have any more information on this? What would be the best way to work it into the article?

185.107.12.99 (talk) 21:23, 19 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

The article already reads: "She was eventually rearrested, ill with typhus and suffering from an unstated nervous disorder. Following recovery in a Cheka medical facility, Spiridonova was transferred to a psychiatric prison. She was finally released to the custody of two Left SR comrades on 18 November 1921 under the condition that she cease and desist all political activity". I have just enlarged the article, also mentioning the author of the 1921 letter from Russian prisons cited above.Jeanambr (talk) 23:44, 19 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

I question the neutrality of this section. The assassination of Mirbach was not just perceived as an uprising against Soviet power, it was part of an uprising against Soviet power. Read the relevant article. PatGallacher (talk) 01:07, 24 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

The section 'Revolt against Bolshevism' is punctiliously sourced after various works by American historian Alexander Rabinowitch. If you know different statements by other reliable scholars, I think you could just add them to the article citing the source and possibly comparing them with Rabinowitch's.--Jeanambr (talk) 15:16, 24 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

I reread the section and I must confess I did not find there any statement to the effect that the assassination of Mirbach was just perceived as an uprising against Soviet power. The section relates the assassination itself and several actions by Spiridonova, just declaring the terrorist attack was immediately portrayed by the Soviet government as a straightforward uprising against Soviet power. It never states whether such characterization should be held valid or not, but only that it was used by Lenin as a pretext to get rid of the Left SRs for good. As for Rabinovitch's exact position, I should like to quote his own words from his book on the first year of Soviet rule in Petrograd, hoping they may be useful to anyone who would try and re-edit the section (and might not be in possession of the book).

By the night of 6 July, the actions of the Left SRs, beginning with Count Mirbach's assassination, were already being defined by the Soviet government as "an uprising against Soviet power," and historians have often depicted the episode that way. But is this characterization valid? Having sifted through the available published and unpublished evidence, I conclude that it was not. Upon investigation, with the possible exception of Prosh Proshian's brief occupation of the Central Telegraph Office and his behavior there, which may as well have been unauthorized, all of the Moscow Left SRs' actions following Mirbach's assassination were consistent with the objective of reshaping the policies of the Leninist Sovnarkom but not with forcibly seizing power or even fighting the Bolsheviks except in self-defense.^[1]

--Jeanambr (talk) 05:29, 26 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

The POV message ("The neutrality of this section is disputed") has been exposed at the beginning of the section for over a year with neither user PatGallacher nor anyone else intervening further in the discussion. It has thus reached, in my opinion, the condition of 'dormant dicussion', which, according to the rules of the English Wikipedia, allows the removal of the message. I therefore suggest that this should be done soon.--Jeanambr (talk) 18:22, 12 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

I have removed the POV message.--Jeanambr (talk) 21:16, 23 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Anonymous user 109.71.177.2 repeatedly edited the article, styling twice Maria Spiridonova "an early Soviet dissident". The relevant article on Soviet dissidents, which is duly linked to, reads: "Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union in the period from the mid-1960s until the fall of communism."

In my personal opinion Spiridonova's case does not fit this definition: far from being a Soviet dissident, she was at first a fervent supporter of Soviet democracy (whatever it might mean), to the point of approving the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly; she later became a strenuous and radical opponent of the Bolsheviks (and not a simple dissident); in the end, after her withdrawal from politics, she acknowledged her own defeat, she recognized the communist leadership and became a humble supporter of the construction of socialism without velleities of dissidence.

However, personal opinions, mine too, do not matter in Wikipedia, where reliable sources alone count. If a user wants to claim that Spiridonova was a forerunner of Soviet dissidents, they must report the reliable source from which this claim is taken. Failing that, their edits are subject to cancellation.

The same user above also persists in removing the words "end of Stalinism" from the following statement: “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”. Yet, it was exactly after the end of Stalinism in the 1950s that Irina Kakhovskaya was finally released and was given the opportunity to write her memoir she called Notes and Explanations ("Zapiski i Zaiavleniia"), and to send it to the Central Committee of the CPSU with the sole aim of keeping alive the memory of her slain comrades. The memoir circulated as samizdat and was later published in the West. And it was also after the end of Stalinism, and well before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that, for example, in 1976, the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia finally published a short biographical sketch of Spiridonova, after completely ignoring her in previous editions. As it is easy to see, it was from the end of Stalinism that some information about the last decades of Spiridonova’s life very gradually began to become known. I therefore believe that the wording "after the end of Stalinism" should be restored. Jeanambr (talk) 22:17, 31 May 2023 (UTC)Reply