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Boris Savinkov | |
|---|---|
Борис Савинков | |
 Savinkov in 1917 | |
| Born | Boris Viktorovich Savinkov 31 January 1879 |
| Died | 7 May 1925 (aged 46) |
| 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 the Russian Provisional Government commissar to the Seventh Army, and then to the Southwestern Front. It was there that he met Lavr Kornilov and recommended to Alexander Kerensky that he be promoted during the 1917 summer offensive. Savinkov was later the 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.
- ^ Volkogonov, Dmitri (1994). Lenin: Life and Legacy. Translated by Shukman, Harold. London: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-00-255123-6. Quoted on p.72
- ^ Heinrich Ioffe. What Was. To the 130th Anniversary of the Birth of Boris Savinkov