Boris Savinkov

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Boris Savinkov
Борис Савинков
Savinkov in 1917
Born	Boris Viktorovich Savinkov 31 January 1879 Kharkov, Russian Empire
Died	7 May 1925(1925-05-07) (aged 46) Moscow, Soviet Union
Cause of death	Defenestration (murder or suicide)
Education	St. Petersburg University, Heidelberg University
Occupation	Assistant War Minister in Provisional Government
Organization(s)	Fighting Organisation (1906–1911) White movement and Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom (1918)
Notable work	Memoirs of a Terrorist, The Pale Horse
Political party	Socialist Revolutionary Party (1906–1911)

Boris Viktorovich Savinkov (Russian: Бори́с Ви́кторович Са́винков; 31 January 1879 – 7 May 1925) was a Russian writer and revolutionary. As one of the leaders of the SR Combat Organization, the paramilitary wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Savinkov was involved in the assassinations of several high-ranking imperial officials in 1904 and 1905.

After the February Revolution of 1917, he became Assistant Minister of War (in office from July to August 1917) in the Provisional Government. After the October Revolution of the same year, he organized armed resistance against the ruling Bolsheviks.

In 1921, he wrote:

The Russian people do not want Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, not merely because the Bolsheviks mobilize them, shoot them, take their grain and are ruining Russia. The Russian people do not want them for the simple reason that ... nobody elected them.^[1]

Savinkov emigrated from Soviet Russia in 1920, but on August 16, 1924, he was arrested in Minsk, along with Lyubov Efimovna Dikgof and her husband A. A. Dikgof. The OGPU, with the help of agent Andrei Fedorov (who had gained the confidence of Savinkov) lured him back to the Soviet Union as part of a Syndicate-2 operation.^[2] He was either killed in prison or committed suicide.