Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

SPECIAL TRANSCAUCASIAN COMMITTEE. Also known by its Russian acronym Ozakom (from Osobyi zakavkazskii komitet), the Special Transcaucasian Committee was established by the Russian Provisional Government on 9 March 1917, to replace the authority of the deposed imperial viceroy of the Caucasus, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. Chaired (from 11 March 1917) by the Russian V. A. Kharlamov, and including representatives of the Armenian (Michael Papadjanian), Azeri (Mammad Yusif Jafarov Hajibaba oglu), and Georgian (Kita Abashidze, later Akaki Chkhenkeli) communities, it was described as the highest civil authority in Transcaucasia and claimed juristiction over those parts of the Ottoman Empire occupied by Russian forces (notably, the Administration for Western Armenia). Following the October Revolution, on 15 November 1917, it was succeeded by the Transcaucasian Commissariat and thus can in some senses be regarded as the progenitor of the various independent governments of Transcaucasia during the civil-war years.

SPIRIDONOVA, MARIIA ALEKSANDROVNA (16 October 1884–11 September 1941). One of the most vocal and most persecuted socialist critics of the Soviet government during the civil-war era, M. A. Spiridonova was born at Tambov into the family of a minor (nonhereditary) noble (a collegiate secretary) and graduated from Tambov Gymnasium for Girls in 1902. She began to train as a nurse, but joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) in 1904 and volunteered for terrorist work with its Fighting Organization. In January 1906, she gained national attention when she mortally wounded G. N. Luzhnovskii, a police inspector whom the SRs had condemned to death for the violent suppression of peasant unrest in Tambov guberniia in 1905. Despite the brutality of her act (she shot Luzhnovskii five times, point blank, in the face), she became a national hero and an international cause célèbre, as a consequence of her gender and youth, as well as the stories of her having been beaten, tortured, and even raped, which were spread by her party comrades (perhaps in the knowledge that they were not all true). After a trial in Moscow, she was exiled for life to eastern Siberia, public pressure having persuaded the authorities to commute her original death sentence.

Released from a women’s prison at Nerchinsk following the February Revolution, Spiridonova served briefly as mayor of Chita, where she symbolically dynamited the city prison. She arrived back in Petrograd in May 1917 and quickly became the leader of the left wing of the PSR (although she failed to gain a seat on the party’s Central Committee) and was subsequently the leader of the breakaway Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries. Following the October Revolution, she initially campaigned for an all-socialist coalition during the Vikzhel′ negotiations, but soon became a strong supporter of the Bolshevik–Left-SR coalition government. She was elected to the chair of the Second Congress of Peasants’ Soviets, was chair of the Peasant Section of VTsIK (at the Second, Third, and Fourth Congresses of Soviets) and was also the Bolshevik–Left-SR candidate for the chair of the Constituent Assembly, although she was defeated in that contest by the mainstream PSR candidate, V. M. Chernov. However, during the spring of 1918 she became a tenacious critic of the Soviet government, attacking the Food Army, the first stirrings of the Red Terror, and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (although she had initially supported V. I. Lenin on that issue). At the Sixth Congress of Soviets in July 1918 she (and her party) broke with the Bolsheviks.