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).
STALIN, JOSEPH (IOSIF) VISSARIONOVICH (Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili) (6 December 1878–5 March 1953). The Soviet military and political leader of the civil-war era and subsequent long-term dictator of the USSR, Joseph Stalin, was born into the family of an impoverished cobbler in the eastern Georgian town of Gori. He was raised by his pious mother after his alcoholic father deserted the family; was educated at the local (Russian-speaking) church school; and at the age of 16, as a star pupil, won a scholarship to the Georgian Orthodox Seminary in Tiflis. He was expelled from the seminary in 1899, by which time he had become attracted to Marxism, and thereafter spent his life working for the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (which he joined in 1898) as a “professional revolutionary.” In the case of Stalin (although at this time he was chiefly known as “Koba,” after a fictional Georgian hero, only adopting the soubriquet “Man of Steel” at a later date), as a follower of the Bolsheviks, this meant organizing armed militias, inciting strikes, spreading propaganda, and raising money through bank robberies (“expropriations”), holdups, ransom kidnappings, and extortion. Such activities were frowned upon by the Mensheviks, who were dominant in the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party, but were defended by V. I. Lenin, who valued Stalin’s work highly.
“Koba” was arrested and imprisoned and/or exiled on seven occasions before the First World War. (There is some evidence that he was in the employ of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, in this period, but this may have been a diversionary tactic on his part and does not necessarily signify treachery to the party.) During periods of liberty he was elected, at its Prague conference, to the first Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) (17 January 1912), helped found the party newspaper Pravda (“The Truth”), and became the Bolsheviks’ chief spokesman on the nationalities question (apparently as a consequence of his ethnicity, rather than any significant interest on his part in Marxist theories about nationalism). Following his final arrest by the tsar’s police (on 23 February 1913), Stalin remained in exile in Siberia (in the remote district of Turukhansk, northern Eniseisk guberniia).
Stalin was liberated on 2 March 1917, following the February Revolution, and returned to Petrograd, where he was elected to the Russian Bureau of the RSDLP(b) (12 March–31 April 1917) and worked on the editorial board of Pravda. He was also elected to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, on 18 March 1917. In those capacities, alongside L. B. Kamenev, Stalin professed a defensist attitude with regard to the war—something unsurprisingly passed over in histories written during his dictatorship in the USSR—and urged qualified support for the foreign and military policies of the Russian Provisional Government, although he rapidly accepted Lenin’s rejection of these policies upon the Bolshevik leader’s arrival back in Russia in early April 1917. Thereafter, Stalin (who from June 1917 was also a member of VTsIK) undertook numerous assignments on Lenin’s behalf, including arranging the latter’s flight from Petrograd in the aftermath of the July Days. However, he was only cautiously supportive of Lenin during the party debates on the seizure of power prior to the October Revolution, although he did follow Lenin’s line in the debates on peace of early 1918 that led to the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).