Revolutionary organizer who led the Moscow party and pioneered early Soviet diplomacy
When the bomb fell, he rushed toward it, calling out: "Calm down, nothing special, we'll sort out what this is right away."
A Bolshevik organizer who served as first secretary of Soviet Russia's earliest diplomatic mission, the Plenipotentiary Representation in Germany, before leading the Moscow party through the Civil War as secretary of the Moscow Committee from July 1918. He co-chaired the City Defence Committee with Felix Dzerzhinsky and was killed in September 1919 when anarchists threw a bomb into a party meeting at Leontievsky Lane.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1901Joined the RSDLP (Bolsheviks)
- 1902Arrested, exiled to Siberia
- 1904Escaped to Geneva, met Lenin
- 1905Participated in Moscow December Uprising
- 1918First Secretary, RSFSR Plenipotentiary Representation in Germany
- 1918–1919Secretary, Moscow City Party Committee
- 1919Co-chaired City Defence Committee with Dzerzhinsky
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Moscow December Uprising participantHe participated in the Moscow December Uprising in 1905.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionMoscow party leaderAs secretary of the Moscow Committee he led the capital's party through the civil war, and in September 1919 co-directed the City Defence Committee with Dzerzhinsky.
The Leontievsky Lane Bomb Attack
On the evening of 25 September 1919, some 100 to 120 party workers gathered on the second floor of the Moscow Committee building in Leontievsky Lane to discuss agitation and the party schools. Just after Bukharin, Pokrovsky, and Preobrazhensky had delivered their reports, a bomb thrown by anarchists through a garden window fell onto the meeting floor. Zagorsky leapt from the presidium table and ran toward the device before it detonated, calling out "Calm down, nothing special, we'll sort out what this is right away," and witnesses credited this with enabling many delegates to escape. The blast killed twelve, Zagorsky among them, and wounded some fifty-five others, including Bukharin and the future Politburo member Arvid Pelshe. Responsibility was claimed by the All-Russian Insurgent Committee of Revolutionary Partisans, the "underground anarchists" who also worked with left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Its organizer Kazimir Kovalevich and the bomber Pyotr Sobolev were shot resisting arrest, seven more anarchists blew themselves up in a dacha at Kraskovo when surrounded, and eight were executed by order of the Moscow Cheka. The attack triggered a sharp escalation of the Red Terror: Lenin sent Krestinsky a note to 'secretly prepare terror,' the next day's Central Committee plenum took up the Red Terror as its first item, and that night mass shootings of 'old regime' prisoners began across Moscow's prisons. Zagorsky and the other victims were buried in a mass grave by the Kremlin Wall, and in 1930 Sergiyev Posad was briefly renamed Zagorsk in his memory.