Irina Kakhovskaya

Irina Konstantinovna Kakhovskaya
Born	August 27, 1898 or August 15, 1887 Tarascha, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	March 1, 1960 Maloyaroslavets, Kaluga Oblast, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union
Citizenship	Soviet Union  Russian Empire
Occupation	Revolutionary, memoirist, translator
Parents	Konstantin Kakhovsky (father) Augusta Fedorovna (mother)

Irina Konstantinovna Kakhovskaya (August 15, 1887, Tarascha, Kiev Governorate – March 1, 1960, Maloyaroslavets, Kaluga Oblast) was a Russian revolutionary, a representative of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, organizer of the assassination of the commander of the occupation forces in Ukraine, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn in 1918, niece of the Decembrist Pyotr Kakhovsky.^[1]

Biography[]

She was born into the family of a land surveyor and a national teacher. From August 28, 1897 to May 25, 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.^[1]

Since 1905, she was carried away by revolutionary ideas after she heard the speech of Maxim Gorky. Thanks to her acquaintance with Alexandra Kollontai, for some time she supported the ideas of social democracy and became the secretary of the Bolshevik Party in Saint Petersburg. Soon Kakhovskaya changed her views and joined the ultra–revolutionary Union of Socialist Revolutionary Maximalists. In the summer of 1906, she carried on revolutionary propaganda among the peasants in the villages of the Samara Governorate.^[1]

On April 28, 1907, the first arrest took place by the Metropolitan Security Department. The Petersburg Military District Court on March 7, 1908 sentenced her to hard labor for a period of 20 years. When the verdict was approved, the term was reduced to 15 years. She served her sentence first in the Novinsky Women's Prison in Moscow, then was sent to the Maltsevskaya Prison of the Nerchinsk Penal Servitude, where she arrived on July 16, 1908. The famous "Six" Socialist Revolutionaries (Maria Spiridonova, Anastasia Bitsenko, Revekka Fialka, Lydia Yezerskaya, Sanya Izmailovich, Maria Shkolnik) were already in the Nerchinsk Penal Servitude, who made a triumphant train journey across Russia. With some of them, she remained friends for many years.

Kakhovskaya described the prison situation as follows:

At first, my thoughts were filled with images of friends and nature, dreams of escape. We wrote long letters to friends that had to be torn at once, or sat endlessly solving algebraic or geometric problems, all to avoid thinking, to kill time and prepare ourselves for a night's sleep, which we hoped would be filled with beautiful dreams.

— Margaret Maxwell. Narodniki Women: Russian Women Who Sacrificed Themselves for the Dream of Freedom^[2]

To support her daughter, Kakhovskaya's mother moved to Siberia, who illegally handed letters to political convicts. In 1914, Irina Kakhovskaya was amnestied. After the 1917 Revolution, she, together with Maria Spiridonova, took part in the creation of the Chita Committee of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries.^[3] She also participated in the split of the Socialist Revolutionary Party into left and right wings, joining the first. At the Second All–Russian Congress of Soviets, she was a member of the presidium from the left–wing Socialist Revolutionaries.

After the Central Committee of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party authorized the "terrorist fight", she joined the Militant Organization Under the Central Committee. In 1918, Irina Kakhovskaya, together with her friend and party member Boris Donskoy, was preparing an attempt on the life of Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, who led the military occupation in Ukraine, as well as on Hetman Skoropadsky. 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. The historian Margaret Maxwell wrote that for a revolutionary his murder was a tragic necessity that can only be atoned for by his own death.^[4] On July 30, 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 the 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.^[3] 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 January 24, 1919, after several campaigns in support of her liberation.

In 1919, she was arrested by extraordinary commissioners, but after 2 months she was released thanks to the intervention of Lenin, as it became known that she was plotting the murder of Denikin, an enemy of both parties. Denikin's murder never took place due to the fact that her assistants fell ill with typhus. In Rostov, where the assassination attempt was to take place, Irina continued to promote the ideas of Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

After arriving in Moscow, she suffered from typhus, was arrested in 1921 and exiled to Kaluga in 1922, where she wrote memoirs, which were published in Berlin in Russian and German, and then in Paris with a foreword by Romain Rolland.

In March 1925, Kakhovskaya was arrested again, who was accused 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 meeting at the Collegium of the United State Political Administration 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 the Volga, and from there she was transferred to Samarkand, where she joined up with Maria Spiridonova and Alexandra Izmailovich, who were previously exiled there. At the end of the term of exile, Kakhovskaya, Izmailovich and Spiridonova lived with them in Tashkent, earned a living by technical translations from English, and gave private lessons.

In the early 1930s, Kakhovskaya was arrested again and exiled to Ufa.^[3] In February 1937, Kakhovskaya was arrested again and on December 25, 1937, at a closed court session of the visiting session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on the fabricated case of the All–Union Socialist Revolutionary Center, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. After a short stay in the Yaroslavl and Vladimir Prisons, in 1939, she was sent to the Krasnoyarsk Camp, where for 7 years she worked exclusively in general work: forestry and agricultural work.

She was released in February 1947, lived in Kansk, where she was last arrested in early January 1948, was held in Krasnoyarsk Prison, after which in 1949, she was returned to Kansk as an exile.

In total, she spent forty–five years in prison and exile. In 1954, she was released from exile, in 1955, she moved to Maloyaroslavets, where she was engaged, among other things, in translating the fairy tale by Antoine de Saint–Exupery "The Little Prince" (unpublished). In 1957, she was rehabilitated in the 1937 case. She died in 1960 from liver cancer.

Family[]

Father – Konstantin Kakhovsky (? – 1890).

Mother – Augusta Fedorovna.

Memories of Irina Kakhovskaya[]

The theorist of Socialist Revolutionary Maximalism Grigory Nestroev wrote:

"Doesn't she impress you as a saint? – a social democratic Menshevik woman I knew asked me more than once – What faith! What dedication! You know, she very often has no money to travel to the workers behind the Shlisselburg Outpost, and she walks almost 10 miles on foot from the Petersburg Side. Only the first Christians believed so, and perhaps the first Russian socialists. Now there are few of those who would walk on foot. Look at her face: pale, calm, breathing deep faith in the triumph of socialism...

And these words were true. <…> For her simplicity, for her sincerity, for her deep faith in the triumph of the workers' revolution, which was passed on to her listeners, she was treated with deep respect and appreciated as a best friend".^[5]

Selected works[]

• Irina Kakhovskaya. Memories of a Terrorist. Moscow: Radical Theory and Practice, 2019 – 236 Pages;
• Kachovskaja I. K. Attentate auf Eichhorn und Denikin: Erinnerungen — Berlin: Skythen, 1923 — 111 S.

References[]

Sources[]

• Yaroslav Leontiev. Zhanna D'Ark From Siberian Wells
• Margaret Maxwell (1990). Narodniki Women. Russian Women Who Sacrificed Themselves for the Dream of Freedom. New York: Pergamon Press.