United States or Namibia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It was all done in the most matter-of-fact way possible. As he had told Arithelli when they had talked up at Montserrat, one only kissed the hands of a Marie Spiridonova. And he was sending bouquets as to some mondaine of the vanished world and of his youth. He shrugged and walked slowly on.

Entreaties, reason, appeal! Have we not tried them? Now we have only one weapon left retaliation. Sometimes we are able to avenge our martyrs. The two fiends who guarded Marie Spiridonova were shot by the members of her Society. She was only a girl too about the same age as you.

How shall we justify men calling themselves Socialists and proletarian revolutionists, who ally themselves with such men as these, but imprison, harry, and abuse such men and women as Bourtzev, Kropotkin, Plechanov, Breshkovskaya, Tchaykovsky, Spiridonova, Agounov, Larokine, Avksentiev, and many other Socialists like them?

Yet the law provided that these estates should be divided among the peasant communes to be tilled by the peasants on a co-operative system." Spiridonova protested against the attitude of the Bolsheviki toward the peasants, against dividing them into classes and placing the greater part of them with the bourgeoisie.

They naturally insisted that the peasants constituted a distinct class, co-operating with the proletariat, not to be ruled by it. Even Marie Spiridonova, who at first joined with the Bolsheviki, was compelled, later on, to assert this point of view. It is easy to understand the distrust of the Bolsheviki by the Socialist parties and groups which represented the peasants.

On July 16, 1918, Marie Spiridonova, in an address delivered in Petrograd, protested vehemently against the manner in which the Bolshevik government was departing from the policy it had agreed to maintain with regard to the land, and going back to the old Social Democratic ideas.

Second, as Marie Spiridonova abundantly demonstrated at an All-Russian Soviet Conference in July, 1918, the Bolshevik government did not honorably live up to its agreement with the Socialist-Revolutionists of the Left.

When the Bolsheviki came into power they sought first of all to split the peasant Socialist movement and gain the support of its extreme left wing. For this reason they agreed to adopt the program of the Revolutionary Socialist party. It was Marie Spiridonova who made that arrangement possible. It was, in fact, a political deal.

The latter did not believe in the theories or program of the Socialist-Revolutionists of the Left, but they wanted their political support. The union could not long endure; the differences were too deeply rooted. Before very long the Bolsheviki were fighting their former allies and the Socialist-Revolutionists of the Left, like Marie Spiridonova, for example, were fighting the Bolsheviki.

But the Left Social Revolutionaries, led by the hysterical but flamingly honest Spiridonova, are alone in having no scruples or hesitation in the matter, the more responsible parties fearing the anarchy and consequent weakening of the revolution that would result from any violent change.