Irina Konstantinovna Kakhovskaya
Ирина Константиновна КаховскаяLeft SR who organised the 1918 assassination of the German field marshal Eichhorn in Kiev and spent decades in Soviet prisons and exile
In 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the assassination of German occupation commander Hermann von Eichhorn in Kiev; her attempt to kill Hetman Skoropadskyi failed.
A grandniece of the Decembrist Pyotr Kakhovsky, she joined the SR Maximalists after 1905 and in 1908 was sentenced to hard labour, which she served at Nerchinsk alongside Maria Spiridonova. After the October Revolution she went with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and sat on the presidium of the Second Congress of Soviets. When the Left SR leadership resumed terror against the Brest-Litovsk peace in 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the killing of Field Marshal Eichhorn in Kiev; her attempt on Hetman Skoropadskyi failed, and the Germans sentenced her to death but released her in January 1919. From 1921 she passed through Soviet exile, the 1937 "All-Union SR Centre" trial and the Krasnoyarsk camps, was released in 1954 and spent her last years keeping alive the memory of Spiridonova and Izmailovich.
Career timeline
- 1906–1914SR Maximalist; arrested 1907; hard labour at Nerchinsk
- 1917–1918Left SR; member of the presidium of the Second Congress of Soviets
- 1918–1919Left SR combat organisation; organised the Eichhorn assassination; sentenced to death by the Germans, released
- 1921–1954Arrests and exile; ten years in 1937; Krasnoyarsk camp