To Break Russia’s Chains: Boris Savinkov and his Wars against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks by Vladimir Alexandrov

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Break Russia’s Chains: Boris Savinkov and his Wars against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks by Vladimir Alexandrov Ben Phillips To Break Russia’s Chains: Boris Savinkov and his Wars against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks. By Vladimir Alexandrov. New York: Pegasus Books. 2021. xiv+562 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978–1–64313–718–6. Boris Savinkov (1879–1925) is one of the most enigmatic characters in the history of revolutionary Russia. In a remarkable career spanning some three decades, he achieved fame and notoriety first as a leading member of the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party’s terrorist underground, then as a novelist and memoirist, as a minister in the Provisional Government of 1917, and lastly as a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks during the Civil War and in emigration. He was lionized in his lifetime, vilified after his death (at least in the Soviet Union), and, since 1991, has been the subject of renewed scholarly and popular interest. As the new biography under review here suggests, interest in Savinkov shows no sign of subsiding. Based on extensive and original archival research, Vladimir Alexandrov’s To Break Russia’s Chains is an impressive work of scholarship, not to say a hefty tome. [End Page 732] It is also accessibly and engagingly written, with a novelistic flourish befitting its dashing terrorist-littérateur protagonist. It comprises eleven chapters: the first five discuss Savinkov’s revolutionary beginnings, his terrorist exploits, his role in the Azef affair of 1908–09 and subsequent life as an indigent émigré writer up to the outbreak of the First World War. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with Savinkov’s activities in 1917; the final four chapters detail his opposition to the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, during the Civil War, and prior to his eventual downfall at the hands of the OGPU (the Joint State Political Directorate) in 1924–25. The book is clearly intended primarily for a popular audience, but academic readers will find much to enjoy here as well, even where Alexandrov (inevitably) retreads relatively familiar ground. The book explores not just Savinkov’s revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) escapades, but also his literary activities, relations with Russia’s Silver Age artistic avant-garde, and family life. Alexandrov provides vivid character sketches of Savinkov’s accomplices and enemies alike, from Evno Azef and Aleksandr Kerenskii to the British agent Sidney Reilly. Alexandrov’s biography provides a far more balanced account of Savinkov the man than has hitherto been available: in particular, To Break Russia’s Chains is refreshingly free of the bodice-ripping speculation about Savinkov’s sex life, gambling, and substance abuse that disfigures Richard Spence’s Boris Savinkov: Renegade on the Left (Ithaca, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), previously the major (and otherwise excellent) study of his life in English. Spence’s overwhelmingly negative portrait resembles those by Soviet historians and disillusioned émigrés, who perceived Savinkov as a libertine, egotist, and adventurist in his politics as in his personal life. Alexandrov seeks to rehabilitate Savinkov, but his efforts to portray his subject as an honourable man undone by his own idealism do not always align with the evidence he adduces. On Savinkov’s political views, for instance, Alexandrov concludes that he ‘dedicated his entire life to fighting to make Russia a free, democratic republic’ (p. 502), but it is not clear how this claim can be reconciled with Savinkov’s all too evident shift towards right-wing militarism later in life, a trajectory that preceded the Bolshevik takeover by months, if not years, and which caused him to support fascism openly by the early 1920s (pp. 415–19 and passim). Similarly, not all readers will be convinced by Alexandrov’s repeated insistence that Savinkov ought not to be identified with Zhorzh, the Smerdiakovian terrorist and moral degenerate who features in his debut novel The Pale Horse (Konʹ blednyi, 1909), a resemblance noted by many readers at the time and by various scholars since. Nor is this the only aspect of the book liable to raise eyebrows. Approximately the first third of To Break Russia’s Chains recounts in detail Savinkov’s tenure as second-in-command (and later...