56 The New York Review
argues, “Savinkov embraced a model
of authorship bequeathed to Russian
literature by... Lord Byron and na-
tivized by Alexander Pushkin and
Mikhail Ler montov, all of whom re-
mained among Savinkov’s favorites.”
Betrayed by a double agent, Savin-
kov was arrested but staged a thrilling
prison escape, aided by a guard who
was a secret Socialist Revolutionary and
who tried to put other guards to sleep
by feeding them morphine- laced candy;
when that failed he had Savinkov im-
personate a guard. Savinkov then went
abroad, where he became a Russian na-
tionalist. When World War I broke out,
Chernov and other socialists declared
neutrality in this war among imperial-
ists, but Savinkov agitated against the
hated Germans. The February 1917
revolution allowed him to return to
Russia, where he joined the Provisional
Government and served in several roles,
including director of the Ministry of
War. He supported General Kornilov,
who aspired to authoritarian military
rule, and opposed the Bolsheviks both
before and after their October 1917
coup. For many years, Savinkov was the
Bolsheviks’ most implacable foe.
He joined or founded various anti-
Bolshevik groups—once again, ideol-
ogy didn’t matter. Writing to his friend
the poet Zinaida Gippius, he declared,
according to Alexandrov, that hence-
forth “he would work with anyone,
of any political persuasion.” And he
would not be fastidious about means, ei-
ther. “Dealing with Bolsheviks brought
out a cruel streak in him,” Alexandrov
concedes. The Polish leader Józef Pił-
sudski convinced Savinkov to set up an
anti- Bolshevik detachment on Polish
soil and joined forces with the rogue
general Stanislav Bulak- Balakhovich,
who conducted mass pogroms in the
Pale of Settlement. According to Alex-
androv, Savinkovcondemned the pogroms and con-
fessed that they made him feel
personally ashamed. However, he
also tried to explain—but not ex-
cuse—their origin and concluded
that “the peasant, the Red Army
soldier and the follower of Ba-
lakhovich perceives the Jew as an
enemy, as a true ally of the Reds.
From this comes the hatred—that
blind, unreasoning, spontaneous
anti- Semitism that falls like a
black spot on Balakhovich’s glory.It’s a rather qualified “condemnation.”Savinkov’s National Union for the
Defense of the Motherland and Free-
dom conducted raids into Bolshevik
territory during which, according to
Alexandrov,no method was off limits, at least
in theory, and at one point the
GPU [secret police] claimed that
captured members of the National
Union were found to have large
quantities of potassium cyanide
that they were planning to use to
poison the most loyal Red Army
units.Sergey Pavlovsky, the National Union’s
military chief of staff in Warsaw, dis-
played special brutality. Following
Savinkov’s orders, he conducted a five-
month campaign of armed attacks and
robberies during which he and his bandapparently killed more than sixty peo-
ple and “carried out bloody outrages
against Bolshevik Party members, in-
cluding torture.”
Using his charming conversational
and acting abilities, Savinkov secured
support for the White Army through-
out Western Europe, impressing Som-
erset Maugham, Churchill, and the
famous “ace of spies,” British secret
agent Sidney Reilly. Savinkov even met
with Mussolini, who suggested that the
Russian “join him in fighting commu-
nism in Italy,” Alexandrov explains.
“This was not what Savinkov came for,
but he agreed.”
Fascism may have been the only
ideology that appealed to Savinkov.
Defending Mussolini, Savinkov in-
sisted that “fascism saved Italy from
the commune” and that “the so- called
imperialism of the Italian fascists is an
accidental phenomenon that can be
explained by an excess population in
the country and the absence of good
colonies.” Still deeper reasons made
the movement attractive. “Fascism is
close to me psychologically and ideo-
logically,” he wrote. “Psychologically—
because it stands for action and total
effort in comparison to the lack of will
and the starry- eyed idealism of parlia-
mentary democracy,” and ideologically
because “it stands on a national plat-
form” and relies on the peasantry for
support.
The most dramatic events lay ahead.
Hoping to assassinate Bolshevik lead-
ers, he communicated with his support-
ers behind enemy lines. Unfortunately,
the group he trusted had been created
by the Bolsheviks to lure him back
to Russia. When Savinkov returned,
he was promptly arrested. And then,
amazingly enough, this implacable
foe of the Bolsheviks joined them. Re-
nouncing his former professed beliefs,
he proclaimed at his trial, “If you are
Russian, if you love your motherland,
if you love your people, then bow to
the workers’ and peasants’ rule and ac-
knowledge it without reservation.”
And so Savinkov became a Bol-
shevik propagandist. “This change in
Savinkov’s attitude,” Alexandrov com-
ments, “is so improbable that it could
be compared to the pope of Rome sud-
denly professing admiration for Satan.”
The shock in the West was profound.
At first Reilly defended Savinkov, but
at last he branded him “a renegade,
the likes of which world history has not
known since the time of Judas.”
The Bolsheviks treated their turn-
coat well. Commuting his death sen-
tence to ten years, they placed him in
a luxurious apartment—albeit one
within Lubyanka Prison. Even before
his public confession at his trial, Savin-
kov demanded (and received) a range
of personal comforts, including two sets
of silverware, cigarettes, books, writing
materials, and beer. After the trial, his
mistress lived with him, he met writers
and friends, and agents of the OGPU (as
the GPU was now called) took him on
excursions to the theater, restaurants,
and parks. Soviet journals published
three of his stories depicting Russian
émigrés in an unflattering light.
And then, in 1925, quite unexpect-
edly, Savinkov died at the age of forty-
six. According to the official account,
which Alexandrov believes Soviet ar-
chives confirm, Savinkov committed
suicide by leaping from a window.
Needless to say, others have rejected
this story because of its dubious source,because his mistress denied it, and
because he had told his son Victor
during a visit, “If you hear that I’ve
laid hands on myself—don’t believe it.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claimed that
a dying former agent with the Cheka,
the first Soviet secret police organiza-
tion, told him he had participated in
defenestrating Savinkov. Alexandrov
does not mention Semyon Ignatiev,
Stalin’s last director of internal secu-
rity, who recalled that, during the so-
called Doctors’ Plot of the early 1950s,
in which Jewish doctors were accused
of planning to poison Soviet leaders,
Stalin demanded that torture be used
to make the doctors confess: “‘Beat
them!’—he demanded from us, de-
claring: ‘what are you? Do you want to
be more humanistic than LENIN, who
ordered [Cheka director Felix] DZER-
ZHINSKY to throw SAV I N KOV out a
window?’”How Savinkov died is crucial to the
very purpose of Alexandrov’s book: to
exalt the Russian terrorist movement
in general and Savinkov in particu-
lar. “The [PSR] assassins called them-
selves ‘terrorists’ proudly, but what
they meant by this bears no resem-
blance to what the word means now,”
Alexandrov argues. The difference, he
maintains, is that today’s terrorists kill
people randomly and “attack almost
any national, social, or cultural group
chosen by chance and engaged in any
pastime, with the more victims the bet-
ter.... Had the Socialist Revolution-
aries known of such events, they would
have condemned them as unequivo-
cally criminal.”
As Geifman’s account demonstrates,
however, the SRs behaved similarly to
modern- day terrorists. “By 1905, terror
had indeed become an all- pervasive
phenomenon, affecting every layer of
society,” she writes, and “the PSR pro-
vided... a fresh justification for their
deeds.” In contrast to earlier terrorists,
the PSR “allowed its members to exer-
cise terrorist initiative freely and in the
periphery.” Soon enough there devel-
oped what the liberal politician Peter
Struve called a “new type of revolu-
tionary,” “a blending of revolutionary
and bandit [marked by] the liberation
of revolutionary psychology from all
moral restraints.” As the historian
Norman Naimark observed, terrorism
became for them “so addictive that
it was often carried out without even
weighing the moral questions posed
by earlier generations.” In Geifman’s
words, it entailed “robbing and kill-
ing not only state officials but also or-
dinary citizens, randomly and in mass
numbers.”
Like other recent historians, Geifman
seeks “to demystify and deromanti-
cize” the Russian terrorist movement.
Those she calls “far from impartial
memoirists”—including Stepniak and
Savinkov—created a myth of humane,
high- minded, noble, and reluctant
terrorists and of “selfless freedom
fighters.” It was common “to use lofty
slogans to justify what in reality was
pure banditry,” and often much worse.
Soon enough, sheer sadism became
routine. “The need to inflict pain was
transformed from an abnormal irra-
tional compulsion experienced only
by unbalanced personalities into a
formally verbalized obligation for all
committed revolutionaries,” Geifman
explains. Some victims were thrownNew York Review Books
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