Maria Spiridonova
16 October 1884 – 11 September 1941
was a Russian socialist revolutionary. Her assassination of a police official in 1905 was the most famous terrorist act by a woman in Russia, and her subsequent abuse by police made her a celebrated martyr. After 11 years in Siberia, she returned as a heroine of the Revolution. She led the Left SRs into alliance with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but was imprisoned for a time and incarcerated in a mental sanitarium after the Left SRs broke with the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Spiridonova was arrested by the secret police during the Great Purge of 1937 to 1939 and consigned to the forced labor camps of the Gulag, where she was summarily executed shortly after the outbreak of World War II late in the summer of 1941.