A brilliant examination of the enigmatic Russian revolutionary about whom Winston Churchill said “few men tried more, gave more, dared more and suffered more for the Russian people,” and who remains a legendary and controversial figure in his homeland today.
Although now largely forgotten outside Russia, Boris Savinkov was famous and notorious during his lifetime both at home and abroad as a terrorist, a scandalous novelist, a friend of epoch-defining artists like Modigliani and Diego Rivera, a government minister, an advisor to Churchill, and, finally, as Soviet Russia’s most prized political prisoner, one who made headlines around the world by claiming that he accepted the Bolshevik state, whereas, in fact, he had staked his life on a secret plan to strike one last blow against the tyrannical regime.
Neither a “Red” nor a “White,” Savinkov forged his own place in history. His life, which he dedicated to transforming his homeland into a uniquely democratic, humane and enlightened state, challenges many popular myths about the Russian Revolution, and demonstrates that the paths Russia took during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the tyranny of communism, the authoritarianism of Putin—were not the only ones written in her historical destiny. Savinkov’s goals remain a poignant reminder of how things in Russia could have been, and how, perhaps, they may still become someday.
Written with novelistic verve and filled with the triumphs, disasters, dramatic twists and contradictions that defined Savinkov’s life, this book shines a light on an extraordinary man who tried to change Russian and world history.
Vladimir Alexandrov received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton. He taught Russian literature and culture at Harvard before moving to Yale, where he is B.E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of The Black Russian as well as books on Bely, Nabokov, and Tolstoy, and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.