Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Spiridonova was intimately involved in planning the assassination of the German ambassador, Count Wilhelm Mirbach, that sparked the Left-SR Uprising in Moscow. On the evening of 6 July 1918, she went to the congress venue, the Bolshoi Theater, to take responsibility for Mirbach’s killing and hoped to be allowed to speak to the delegates. Instead, she was arrested by the Cheka. She was tried in secret, on 27 November 1918, and sentenced to a year in prison, but the following day was amnestied on the recommendation of the Presidium of VTsIK. She then briefly resumed political activity (and agitation against the Soviet government, while fiercely opposing the Whites), but was rearrested in January 1919, after delivering a speech that was scathingly critical of the Soviet government. She was tried on 24 February 1919, before the Moscow revolutionary tribunal, and was sentenced to confinement in a sanatorium for a year (it being claimed at her trial, by N. I. Bukharin, that she was mentally ill), but in fact, she was placed in a tiny cell in the barracks of the Kremlin guards. She became very ill, but escaped on 2 April 1919, then lived underground until she was rearrested, on 26 October 1920. On 18 November 1921, she was released on condition that she refrain from all political activity, and there is no evidence that she broke this condition, or that she attempted to flee Russia, but she was suddenly rearrested on 16 May 1923 and sentenced to three years of exile. Her exile actually lasted, in effect, for 14 years. Spiridonova subsequently resided, under strict surveillance by the Soviet authorities, at Kaluga (1923–1925), Samarkand (1925–1928), and Tashkent (1928–1930), then was rearrested in 1930 and sentenced to three more years of exile (the term being twice extended) for maintaining illegal contacts abroad; in a sense, the celebrity of her cause had come back to haunt her. Sent to Ufa, she worked as a planner in an agricultural bank and in other economic posts.

On 8 February 1937, Spiridonova was again arrested, falsely accused of terrorist acts and of leading a “counterrevolutionary” organization. She was found guilty at a trial on 7 January 1938 and was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. She was executed by the NKVD, along with 156 other inmates of Orel prison (among them Cristian Rakovski and veterans of both sides in the civil wars) in the nearby Medved Woods on 11 September 1941, as German forces approached the city. All had been accused of “conducting defeatist activity among the prisoners and plotting to flee the prison in order to renew subversive activities.” A petition for Spiridonova’s posthumous rehabilitation in November 1958 was turned down by the Supreme Prosecutor of the USSR, but in 1990 the 1941 charges against her were rescinded, and in 1992 she was exonerated of all charges dating back to 1918 and was fully rehabilitated.

Staff of the Supreme Ruler. This was the name given to the body created by order of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, which sought to coordinate all White military forces in Siberia (usually dubbed the Russian Army and, from 21 July 1919, the Eastern Front). The institution existed from 24 December 1918 until Kolchak’s “abdication” as supreme ruler on 4 January 1920. It was based at Omsk, but from 17 November 1919, following the Whites’ evacuation of that city, was housed in a carriage of the special train carrying Kolchak and his entourage toward Irkutsk. When Kolchak divested himself of all authority at Nizhneudinsk, on 4 January 1920, and placed himself under the protection of the Czechoslovak Legion, many members of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler took the opportunity to abandon their posts and flee.

The chiefs of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler were D. A. Lebedev (21 November 1918–10 August 1919); M. K. Diterikhs (10 August–6 October 1919); and M. I. Zankevich (17 November–4 January 1920).