amnesty of all political prisoners shortly after the February Revolution allowed Spiridonova to return to European Russia in the spring of 1917. Here she was welcomed, given her reputation as heroine and martyr, into the highest level of revolutionary politics in Petrograd and Moscow.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Maria Spiridonova endorsed violence for revolutionary goals and was a leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. BROWN BROTHERS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
As a leader of the Left SR Party, Spiridonova employed the aura of her martyrdom, along with her personal charisma and oratorical skills, to sway peasants, workers, and soldiers against the Provisional Government and to popularize the October Revolution. While she did not hold an official post in the first Soviet government, a Bolshevik-Left SR coalition, she was elected chairperson of the Peasant Section of the Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of the second, third, and fourth Soviet Congresses. Indeed it was her lifelong concern for the peasants and their welfare that ultimately turned Spiridonova against the Bolsheviks.
Spiridonova had been an early supporter of Vladimir Lenin’s push to sign a separate peace with Germany, however punitive, because the Russian population was opposed to continuing the war. She adhered to this position despite her party’s objections to the “shameful” Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and withdrawal from the government in protest in March 1918. But when Russian concessions to Germany led to a food supply crisis that the Bolsheviks attempted to resolve with stringent grain-procurement measures in May, Spiridonova repudiated the treaty along with Bolshevik policy. She took a leading role in planning the Left SRs’ assassination of the German ambassador, an attempt to break the treaty and spark a popular uprising that was aborted by the Bolsheviks in July. With her party’s consequent banishment from Soviet politics, a second martyrdom began for Spiridonova. From 1920 on she lived either in prison, under house arrest, in Central Asian exile, or in sanatoria, up to her execution on Josef Stalin’s orders during the German invasion in 1941. See also: BREST-LITOVSK PEACE; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; TERRORISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1995). “Maria Spiridonova’s ‘Last Testament.’” Russian Review 54(3):424-446. Radkey, Oliver H. (1958). The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press. Radkey, Oliver H. (1963). The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule. New York: Columbia University Press. Steinberg, Isaac. (1935). Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist. tr. and eds. Gwenda David and Eric Mos-bacher. London: Methuen.
The spiritual elder (starets in Russian, geron in Greek) first appeared in the earliest days of monasticism in Asia Minor. Some elders had far-ranging reputations and attracted other monks who emulated their way of life, sought their counsel, and profited from their experience in acquiring the Holy Spirit. One of the signs of the Spirit is the gift of discernment (dio-rasis), which means, first, knowledge of the mysteries of God, and, second, an understanding of the secrets of the heart. One who has the gift of discernment can undertake the spiritual direction of others. In the opinion of some Eastern writers, the same gift allows the Spirit to work miracles through the God- bearing practitioners of perfect prayer.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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In fourteenth-century Byzantium the spiritual elder became central to the hesychast movement associated with Gregory Palamas (1296-1359). The hesychasts combined the practice of the so-called Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”) with the doctrine of theosis, or deification. Mount Athos became their chief center, and from there eldership spread to the Slavic world, producing Russia’s most famous medieval spiritual elder, Nil (Maikov, 1433-1508).
After a long period of decline, eldership revived first in Ukraine and then in Russia through the efforts of several remarkable elders: Paisy (Velichkov-sky, 1722-1794), translator of the Philokalia, a basic collection of texts on pure prayer; Serafim (Mashnin, 1758-1833) of Sarov, Russia’s most important modern saint; and Amvrosy (Grenkov, 1812-1891), the hermit model for Elder Zosima in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The popular impact of eldership is recorded in a remarkable anonymous work, The Pilgrim’s Tale. By 1900, the contemplative renaissance had reached its peak, although its creative power could still be seen in the lives of the parish priest John (Sergiev, 1829-1908) of Kronstadt and Mother Yekaterina (1850-1925) of Lesna, who worked among the poor. See also: BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; MONASTICISM; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nichols, Robert L. (1985). “The Orthodox Elders (Startsy) of Imperial Russia.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 1:1-30. Pentkovsky, Aleksei, ed. (1999). The Pilgrim’s Tale. New York: Paulist Press.
The Soviet Olympic program, which would produce more medalists than any other country from 1952 through 1992, got off to a slow start internationally. Early Soviet contacts with foreign competitors were sparse, as the Soviet Union avoided international federations in the 1920s and stayed out of the Olympics, which it regarded as a means of turning workers’ attention from the class struggle and of preparing them for war. This was paralleled domestically by the banning of bourgeois from sports societies.
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In a 1929 resolution, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union condemned what it called “record mania.” However, by the 1930s party slogans began to call for breaking bourgeois sports records.
After World War II, the Soviet Union, perhaps because it now could compete with the capitalist countries on an even footing, began an effort to do so and thereby to demonstrate the virtues of its social system. Accordingly, beginning in 1946 Soviet sports associations joined international federations, including, in 1951, the International Olympic Committee.
By 1946, weightlifter Grigory Novak became the first Soviet world champion in any sport, and in December 1948, the Central Committee explicitly stated as a goal the achievement of “world supremacy in the major sports in the immediate future.” At first the Soviet Union participated mainly in sports in which it had a good chance to win, but at the 1952 Summer Olympics Soviet athletes competed in all sports except field hockey. The Soviet Union first participated in the Winter Olympics in 1956.
The Soviet drive to surpass the capitalist countries could not always override domestic political considerations. In the late 1940s, some athletes who had competed against foreigners before the war were arrested. Purges, including executions, occurred in 1950, some as part of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign carried out by the government. Similarly, many officials and athletes had been victims of the purges of the 1930s.
REASONS FOR SOVIET SUCCESS
One likely reason for the rise of Soviet sports was the urbanization of the country. As elsewhere, sport in the Soviet Union was predominantly urban and remained so even after the Soviet government began to push rural sport in 1948. As late as 1972, it was reported that only ten of the 507 Soviet athletes at the Munich Olympics belonged to rural sports clubs. This was partly a result of rural attitudes and partly because of lack of facilities.
Another reason for Soviet successes was the relative lack of disapproval of women athletes, a phenomenon matched in Soviet society by the presence of women in heavy labor, both urban and rural. For example, Soviet domination of bilateral track and field competitions with the United States-the Soviets won eleven of thirteen from 1958 to 1975- was largely due to the superior athleticism of Soviet women, as they defeated the American women
