Irina Kakhovskaya

Irina Konstantinovna Kakhovskaya (; 15 August 1887, Tarashcha, Kiev Governorate – 1 March 1960, Maloyaroslavets, Kaluga Oblast) was a Narodnik-inspired Russian revolutionary. Grandniece of the Decembrist Pyotr Kakhovsky, she was a representative of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution: in 1918 she organized the assassination of Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, commander of the German occupation forces in Ukraine. In total she spent forty-five years of her life in prison and exile, both under the Tsarist and Soviet regimes, as well as briefly at the end of World War I in German military jail.

Biography Early life She was born into the family of a land surveyor and a national teacher. From 28 August 1897 to 25 May 1903, she studied at the Mariinsky Institute for Orphans of Noble Birth in Saint Petersburg, from which she graduated with a silver medal. Then she entered the historical and philological department of the Women's Pedagogical Institute.

After the Central Committee of the new party resolved to resume the "terrorist fight" against the implementation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Irina Kakhovskaya and her lover and party comrade Boris Donskoy were tasked with preparing an attempt on the life of Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, who led the German military occupation in Ukraine, as well as on puppet Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi's. During June, Kakhovskaya and Donskoy conducted surveillance, trying to establish the most successful time and place for the murder of the German Marshal, who was considered a ruthless tyrant. It was decided that Donskoy would kill him. Historian Margaret Maxwell wrote that a Narodnik-inspired revolutionary murder was regarded as a possible tragic necessity that could desirably be atoned for by the revolutionary's own death. On 30 July, Donskoy met a stranger who asked to show him the direction to the residence of General Eichhorn. Donskoy followed him, after a while there was an explosion: Eichhorn was killed. Kakhovskaya decided to fulfill the order to the end and kill Hetman, which was scheduled for the funeral of the German General, but Skoropadsky left the funeral before her arrival. After the failure, Kakhovskaya with two comrades went to spend the night in a country house, where she was ambushed by the Germans. She was tortured and interrogated and then sent to prison and sentenced to death. While awaiting the approval of the verdict by the Kaiser, she spent several months in the German Commandant's Office at the Lukyanovskaya Prison. During her imprisonment, the November Revolution began in Germany, but she was only released on 24 January 1919, after several campaigns in support of her liberation.

In 1919, she was arrested by the Cheka, but was released two months later thanks to the intervention of Lenin, as it became known that she was plotting the assassination of General Denikin, an enemy of both parties. Denikin's assassination never took place due to the fact that her assistants fell ill with typhus. In Rostov, where the attempt was to take place, Irina continued to promote the ideas of Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

Soviet prisons and internal exile After her return to Moscow, she too suffered from typhus and was arrested again at the beginning of 1921: despite the fact that she was already sitting in Butyrka Prison during the Kronstadt rebellion, she was found guilty of complicity in it and sentenced to exile in Kaluga in 1922.

In 1923 her memoir of the attacks on Eichorn and Denikin appeared in Berlin and was later translated into French and published in Paris with a foreword by Romain Rolland.

In March 1925, Kakhovskaya was arrested yet again under the charge not only of trying to revive the left–wing Socialist Revolutionary organization in Kaluga, but also of ideological leadership of the student organization "Revolutionary Avant–Garde". A special session at the Collegium of the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) condemned Kakhovskaya to 3 years in a concentration camp with a replacement for expulsion to Vyatka for the same period. But at the request of Ekaterina Peshkova, instead of Vyatka, she was sent to Stavropol-on-Volga, and from there she was transferred to Samarkand, where she joined up with Maria Spiridonova and Alexandra Izmailovich, who were previously exiled there. Their term of exile having been extended, in 1928 Kakhovskaya, Izmailovich and Spiridonova moved to Tashkent, where they earned a living by technical translations from English, and gave private lessons.

In the early 1930s, they were re-arrested and exiled to Ufa, Previously distributed as samizdat, it was later reported, in an abridged English translation entitled "Our Fate", in )