Plot synopsis

Maria Spiridonova (1884-1941), Russian politician, leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1906, she killed the Tambov provincial councilor G. N. Luzhenovsky for brutally suppressing peasant unrest, and was sentenced to lifelong hard labor. In 1917-18. was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and its presidium. Spiridonova led a rebellion against the Bolsheviks on July 6, 1918, after the suppression of which she was arrested again, and then amnestied by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. From the beginning of the 1920s, she was repeatedly subjected to repression. She was shot in the fall of 1941 near Orel.
Already at the age of 20, Maria Spiridonova was considered the most famous Russian terrorist of the 20th century. The legendary revolutionary figures Grigory Gershuni (one of the main founders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party) and Yegor Sozonov (who killed the Minister of Internal Affairs Plehve in 1904) wrote to her from the Shlisselburg Fortress to the Tambov prison: "You have already been compared to tortured Russia. And you, comrade, are undoubtedly its symbol."
After committing the murder, Maria Spiridonova was sentenced to death, which was later replaced by life imprisonment. However, after the February Revolution of 1917, the new authorities released her.
In 1926, the Criminal Code of the RSFSR was adopted, in which medicine was considered as one of the measures of social protection for the first time. The first prisoner to be subjected to the influence of Soviet punitive psychiatry was Maria Spiridonova.

Commentaries

Сценарии телесериала «Исторические хроники с Николаем Сванидзе», с 1913го по 1933 год. [Scénarios de la série télévisée « Chroniques historiques avec Nikolaï Svanidzé », de 1913 à 1933], Marina ZHUKOVA, Амфора, 2014

- Screenplay

Selected in the following festivals or events :

- Historical Chronicles with Nikolay Svanidze, (kinoglaz.fr), 2026

Photos, videos, texts

Maria SPIRIDONOVA (Мария Александровна СПИРИДОНОВА) 1884-1941