Leonid Kannegisser

Leonid Joachimovich (Akimovich) Kannegisser (; March 1896 – October 1918) was a Russian poet and military cadet, known for assassinating Moisei Uritsky, chief of the Cheka in Petrograd, on 30 August 1918.

Life and career

Leonid Kannegisser (also spelled Kanngießer or Kannegiesser) was born in March 1896 in Nikolaev, Ukraine, (then part of the Russian Empire), into a wealthy Jewish family. His father, Akim (Joachim) Kannegisser, was a mechanical engineer and the head of Russia's largest shipyards, the Black Sea Shipyard, and his mother was a doctor. Kannegisser graduated from a private school and in 1913 became a military cadet in the Mikhailov Artillery School of the Imperial Russian Army. Kannegisser studied economics from 1915 to 1917 at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute and was a member of Popular Socialists, a moderate left-wing anti-bolshevik political party. An admirer of Alexander Kerensky, Following his arrest, the Bolshevik authorities also arrested several members of his family and friends. A decade after Kannegiesser's execution his poems were posthumously published by Mark Aldanov in Paris in 1928. A major part of Kannegisser's literary heritage is preserved in the closed files of the Central Government Archives of Literature and Art in Moscow.