Left 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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionPresidium member at the Second Congress of SovietsAfter the October Revolution, she served on the presidium of the Second Congress of Soviets.
- 1917.12–1918.11Brest-Litovsk and Germany’s eastern occupationLeft SR who organised the Eichhorn assassinationWhen the Left SR Central Committee resolved on terror against the Brest peace, she and Donskoy prepared the 1918 killing of Eichhorn in Kiev.
- 1917–1921Ukraine’s revolution and warsOrganiser of the Eichhorn assassination in KievIn 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the killing of Eichhorn in Kiev.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeDefendant in the 1937 trialIn 1937, she was tried in the “All-Union SR Centre” case.
The 1937 trial and her campaign to preserve her comrades’ memory
From 1921 onward, Kakhovskaya was repeatedly sent into internal exile, including in Kaluga, Stavropol, Samarkand and Tashkent, where she lived with Maria Spiridonova and Alexandra Izmailovich. In 1925 she was sentenced to three years in a camp for allegedly reviving the party organization and leading the student group “Revolutionary Avant-Garde”; the sentence was commuted to exile. In Tashkent, the three women supported themselves with technical translation from English and private lessons. Exiled again to Ufa in the early 1930s, they lived in a household that included Spiridonova’s husband, Ilya Mayorov, and his family.
The NKVD arrested the group in February 1937 and investigated accusations of a counterrevolutionary organization and terrorism. On 25 December, the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced Kakhovskaya to ten years in prison and five years’ loss of civil rights in the so-called “All-Union Socialist Revolutionary Centre” case. She worked in forestry and agriculture in the Krasnoyarsk camp after imprisonment in Kazan. Released in 1947, she was arrested again; in 1949 she was sent to Kansk as an exile without a fixed term. She was released in September 1954. In 1958 she sent a memoir about the final years of Spiridonova and Izmailovich to the Communist Party Central Committee, the Council of Ministers and the prosecutor’s office. Kakhovskaya herself was rehabilitated in the 1937 and 1949 cases in 1958, but her demand for full reconsideration of her comrades’ cases was not granted during her lifetime.