Cole, she was, along with Alexandra Kollontai, one of the most prominent women leaders during the Russian Revolution,[5] leading the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to initially side with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and then to break with them.

From 1918 on, Spiridonova faced repression from the Soviet government, as she was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, briefly detained in a mental sanitarium, and sent into internal exile, before being shot in 1941.

In September 1905 she applied for training as a feldsher (a health care professional similar to a physician assistant) but was rejected due to her political record.

Luzhenovsky, also a local leader of the Union of the Russian People (the most important branch of the Black Hundred), was known for his harsh suppression of peasant unrest in the district, and the SR committee in Tambov had "passed a death sentence on him".

[10] Secret letters from Spiridonova in prison to her sister Yulia, a fellow SR, had been seized by police on 19 February and were summarized by the Tambov deputy prosecutor in a report to the national authorities.

The Shesterka were transported by train from Moscow to the Nerchinsk katorga, a system of penal labor colonies in Transbaikal (east of Lake Baikal and near the border of China).

Their slow journey lasted around a month and turned into a kind of triumphal progress:[15] the train was met at every stop by growing crowds of sympathizers.

Each time, although she was suffering from a serious recurrence of tuberculosis, Spiridonova would get up from her couch, greet the audience with smiles and patiently answer their numerous questions, expounding the SR political program.

Here the rules of detention were somewhat stricter, though not so extreme as in "the regimes of punishment and mistreatment that 'politicals' endured elsewhere" (including beatings, floggings and isolation in dark, freezing cells).

Kakhovskaya was a descendant of Decembrist revolutionary Pyotr Grigoryevich Kakhovsky, who had been hanged in 1826 for assassinating Saint Petersburg Governor Mikhail Andreyevich Miloradovich and another Grenadier officer.

[19] In April 1911, 28 female inmates, including Spiridonova, were transferred back to Akatuy where the conditions of their detention were further worsened and they were forced to work in a bookbindery.

[22] As the head of the Peasant Section of the VTsIK, Spiridonova appeared almost exclusively focused on winning the approval of the soviets and enforcement of an SR-inspired law of land socialization, constituting agrarian reform.

On 18 January 1918, at the inaugural meeting of the Constituent Assembly, both the Left SRs and the Bolsheviks proposed Spiridonova as their candidate for the chair, but centrist SR Víktor Mikhailovich Chernov was elected instead.

Late in the spring of 1918, Bolshevik military detachments were formed to conduct forced requisitions of grain in a desperate effort to stave off famine in the cities amidst economic collapse.

[22] "The brutal Bolshevik grain-procurement policy and the devastating impact on the peasantry of the Soviet government's vast territorial and increasingly onerous economic concessions to Imperial Germany" caused widespread discontent in the countryside and the Peasant Section of the VTsIK was overwhelmed with complaints and protests.

[25] Unity between Left SRs and Bolsheviks turned to rivalry over the future of the revolution and a competition ensued for control of the 5th Congress of Soviets, scheduled to begin in Moscow on 4 July 1918.

At the time of Mirbach's assassination, the Left SRs enjoyed undoubted military superiority in the Moscow area and within the Cheka, but they "showed no inclination to press home" this advantage: they appeared "much less interested in seizing power themselves than they were in calling for a popular uprising to force the Bolsheviks to change their policies.

"[28] For his part, Lenin, far from fueling a new conflagration with Germany, used Mirbach's assassination as a pretext for the suppression of the Left SR organization, the terrorist attack being immediately portrayed as a straightforward uprising against Soviet power.

[29] Lenin promptly summoned Jukums Vācietis, the commander of the Latvian Riflemen, now headquartered in the outskirts of the capital, and secured their support; albeit not immediately available, they were the only military forces capable of effectively opposing the units controlled by the Left Social Revolutionaries.

Spiridonova became the voice of a radical faction of the Left SRs opposed to any accommodation with the "Communist" regime (as the Bolsheviks now styled themselves) and she publicly denounced the government for having betrayed the revolution with its policies and actions.

[34] Instead of a sanitarium, Spiridonova was actually confined in a small holding cell inside a military barracks in the Kremlin, where her already frail health rapidly deteriorated.

Alexandra Izmailovich was transferred from Butyrka prison and charged with nursing her, along with the party co-leader, Boris Kamkov, then possibly Spiridonova's romantic partner as well.

At the time, large numbers of moderate socialist and liberal leaders were permitted or obliged to emigrate to the West (including the two Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to whom Spiridonova had been entrusted).

In the mid-1920s, Spiridonova had also married her fellow exile Ilya Andreevich Mayorov [ru],[40] a Left SR leader of peasant origin and erstwhile Deputy People's Commissar for Agriculture.

[41] In 1937, Spiridonova was arrested yet again, with several former party comrades including her husband, her teenaged stepson, her invalid father-in-law, Alexandra Izmailovich, Irina Kakhovskaya and the latter's aged aunt.

[42] In November 1937, she wrote a long letter to the 4th Section of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) within the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from her cell, protesting against the prison treatment inflicted on her, contesting the correctness of the judicial procedure and rejecting every single charge.

However, she concluded what was later called her "last testament" with a vibrant heart-felt plea against capital punishment, twice abolished in the aftermaths of the February and October Revolutions and twice re-established by subsequent governments despite vehement protests from the Left Social-Revolutionaries: I only disagree with the fact that the death penalty remains in our system.

I think constantly about the psychology of thousands of people, about those dealing with technical questions, the executioners, members of the firing squads, those who conduct the condemned to their deaths, about the platoon of soldiers shooting in the semidarkness at the bound, defenseless, and half-crazed prisoner.

We have apple blossoms in our country, we have motion and science, art, beauty, we have books and universal education and health care, we have the sun and children to raise, we have truth.

On 11 September 1941 (three months after the German invasion of the USSR), Spiridonova, Izmailovich, Mayorov and over 150 other political prisoners (among them Christian Rakovsky and Olga Kameneva) were executed by order of Stalin in the Medvedevsky Forest massacre.