Boris Savinkov

In the early 1920s, Savinkov led the People's Union for Defense of Motherland and Freedom (NSZRiS) from bases in Poland and Paris, running intelligence networks inside Soviet territory and supplying information to Polish, French, and British services. The introduction of the NEP in 1921 eroded his popular base, but his organization continued planning terrorism, sabotage, and armed uprisings.

In May 1922, the OGPU launched Operation Syndicate-2. Devised by Artur Artuzov, the plan centered on creating a fictitious underground anti-Soviet organization inside the USSR, the "Liberal Democrats" (LD), and using it to lure Savinkov onto Soviet soil. The OGPU arrested and turned Savinkov's close associate Leonid Sheshenya at the border, then had him send a letter to his relative Fomichev, a Savinkov operative, reporting that a powerful anti-Soviet group in Moscow needed a leader. Taking the bait, Savinkov dispatched his trusted deputy Aleksandr Dikgof-Derental to investigate; Dikgof-Derental was shown the OGPU's staged LD organization and returned to Paris urging Savinkov to visit personally.

In August 1924, Savinkov crossed the Soviet border with his lover Lyubov Dikgof and her husband. Arrested by OGPU agents in Minsk, he was taken to Moscow. On August 29, the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death, but Savinkov declared in court: "I unconditionally recognize Soviet power and no other." The All-Union Central Executive Committee commuted the sentence to ten years' imprisonment. The trial served as propaganda: Soviet power had compelled even its old enemy to acknowledge its legitimacy.

On May 7, 1925, Savinkov died after falling from a fifth-floor window at the Lubyanka. The official account ruled it suicide, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, citing former Chekist Artur Pryubel, recorded that four OGPU agents threw Savinkov from the window. Separate testimony held that Yakov Blyumkin wrote Savinkov's supposed suicide note. His burial site remains unknown.

Operation Trust continued until 1927, also succeeding in luring British agent Sidney Reilly into the Soviet Union for capture. It is regarded as one of the most sophisticated counterintelligence sting operations of the twentieth century.

Savinkov's first chapter in history was as the de facto commander of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's Combat Organization (BO). In June 1903, having escaped from exile in Vologda and made his way to Geneva, he joined the SRs and was immediately inducted into the BO under Yevno Azef. Given the codename "Pavel Ivanovich," Savinkov was dispatched to St. Petersburg to conduct surveillance on targets.

The BO's first major operation was the assassination of Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve, a figure reviled for enabling the Kishinev pogrom and spearheading repressive policies. To facilitate the operation and protect his identity, Savinkov adopted the persona of "Arthur MacCullogh," a wealthy British bicycle-firm representative, living in an expensive flat with Dora Brilliant (posed as his mistress) and Egor Sazonov (posed as his lackey). After multiple failed attempts and the accidental death of bomb-carrier Pokotilov, Sazonov succeeded on July 28, 1904, throwing a bomb at Plehve's carriage. The assassination dramatically boosted the BO's prestige, and Savinkov was acknowledged as Azef's second-in-command.

The next target was Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the Tsar's uncle and Governor-General of Moscow. Savinkov returned to Russia in October 1904 to lead the operation, with Ivan Kalyayev as the designated bomb-thrower. On February 15, 1905, Kalyayev aborted his attack when he saw the Grand Duke's wife and children in the carriage. Two days later, on February 17, Kalyayev struck when the Grand Duke was alone, killing him. Kalyayev was captured and hanged. The assassination marked the zenith of Savinkov's terrorist career.

The BO, however, suffered a devastating blow in early 1905 when informant Nikolai Tatarov triggered mass arrests. Savinkov narrowly escaped abroad. In May 1906, while organizing the assassination of Admiral Chukhnin in Sevastopol, he was arrested and sentenced to death, but escaped from prison with the help of a naval officer and fled via Romania to Western Europe.

When Azef was exposed as an Okhrana agent in late 1908, the BO was dissolved. Savinkov, who had vigorously defended Azef, faced accusations of complicity. He attempted to revive the Combat Organization until 1911 but organized no successful terrorist acts, then withdrew from politics and turned to literature.

It was in this period that Savinkov, writing as "V. Ropshin," produced his most significant fiction. The Pale Horse (1909), a thinly veiled autobiographical account of the Grand Duke Sergei assassination, offered an unflinching psychological anatomy of the terrorist. The title, drawn from Revelation ("and his name that sat on him was Death"), suffuses the novel with apocalyptic overtones. Savinkov depicted the terrorist as a Nietzschean strongman tormented by self-disgust and doubt. The novel caused a sensation in Russia and abroad (Winston Churchill read it), but SR comrades attacked it as a betrayal of the revolutionary cause, an exercise in "moral Azefism."

What Never Happened (1912–1913), a more ambitious novel tracing the revolutionary movement since 1904 through the story of a single family, expressed a profound disillusionment with terrorism and the revolution itself. Its protagonist is a "repentant terrorist," and the work gave literary form to Savinkov's conclusion that he had failed as a revolutionary and that the Russian revolutionary movement had been defeated. Savinkov's fiction stands as the most intimate literary record of the ethical and psychological foundations of revolutionary terror, constituting a distinctive current within early twentieth-century Russian modernist literature.

Returning to Russia in April 1917 after eight years in exile, Savinkov immediately joined the Provisional Government as commissar of the 7th Army and was soon elevated to chief commissar of the entire Southwestern Front. He campaigned vigorously for war to victory and publicly backed General Lavr Kornilov's July 8 decision to reintroduce the death penalty at the front. His energetic restoration of military discipline impressed War Minister Alexander Kerensky, who appointed him Assistant Minister of War in late July, effectively placing the day-to-day running of the military apparatus in Savinkov's hands.

In this period Savinkov envisioned a governing triumvirate: Kerensky would supply democratic legitimacy, Kornilov military order, and Savinkov himself the revolutionary will and capacity for action. He was instrumental in persuading Kerensky to replace General Brusilov with Kornilov as Supreme Commander, and became the government's most consistent advocate for Kornilov's program of restoring army discipline.

On August 22 (O.S.), Kerensky dispatched Savinkov to Stavka at Mogilev to negotiate with Kornilov. The central item was the transfer of a cavalry corps to Petrograd to impose martial law and preempt an anticipated Bolshevik rising. Both sides reached agreement, but when Kornilov moved his troops, Kerensky denounced the maneuver as a coup and dismissed him on August 27. Savinkov was appointed Military Governor of Petrograd and tasked with defending the capital, but, disagreeing with Kerensky's abrupt about-face, he resigned on August 30. Kornilov, for his part, told an intermediary he did not trust Savinkov either, leaving him distrusted by both camps.

The SR Central Committee summoned Savinkov to a disciplinary hearing on the Kornilov affair. He refused to appear, declaring the party had lost 'all moral and political authority.' On October 9, 1917, the SRs expelled him. The most famous terrorist of the revolution was now politically isolated: a hinge moment that pushed him toward the military-conspiratorial methods he would employ against the Bolsheviks.