Gregory
Gershuni,
the son of Jewish
peasants, was born in Kovno in 1870. He trained
as a pharmacist at Kiev University and in 1898 opened his own bacteriological
laboratory in Minsk.
Gershuni was a socialist and he was a founder
member of the Workers' Party for the Political
Liberation of Russia. He was arrested by the Okhrana
in 1900 but was eventually released.
In 1901 Gershuni joined with Catherine
Breshkovskaya, Victor Chernov,
Alexander Kerensky and Evno
Azef to establish the Socialist
Revolutionary Party.
Soon afterwards he became head of the SR
Combat Organization
and was responsible for planning the assassination of the Minister
of the Interior, D. S. Sipyagin.
The following year he arranged the assassination of N.
M. Bogdanovich, the Governor of Ufa.
Gershuni was unaware that his deputy, Evno
Azef, was in the pay of the Okhrana.
In 1904 Azef secretly provided the secret police with the information
needed to arrest and try Gershuni with terrorism.
At his trial Gershuni was sentenced to death,
a sentence subsequently commuted to life imprisonment and hard labour.
In 1905 he escaped from Akatui Prison in Eastern Siberia. After
travelling via China and the USA, Gershuni arrived back in Europe
in February, 1907.
In exile Gershuni continued to argue for a
campaign of terror in order to overthrow the Tsar in Russia. He
strongly defended Evno Azef against claims
being made that he was a traitor. Gregory
Gershuni
died of tuberculosis in Zurich in 1908.
(1)
Victor
Serge, Year One of the Revolution (1930)
The
SR Battle Organization was founded by Gregory Gershuni in 1902;
its first act, in the same year, was the execution of the Minister
of Education Sipyagin by the student Balmashev (who was later hanged).
On the day after the murder, the SR party published under a similar
verdict. The arrest of Gershuni, who was delivered to the police
by Azef, caused the latter's promotion to the top leadership of
the terrorist detachment. A man named Boris Savinkov, for whom terrorism
was a vocation and whose courage was indomitable, now found himself
under the orders of the agent-provacateur. In 1904 the Prime Minister,
Plehve, fell mutilated by Yegor Sazonov's bomb. Sazonov had organized
the assassination on instructions from Azef.
(2)
Edward
Judge, Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia (1983)
Azef
sat in a very dangerous position, especially after Gershuni's arrest,
and he had to think first of his own safety. A continual series
of arrests, and a long train of assassination attempts gone awry,
could only help convince his SR colleagues that they had a traitor
in their midst. If he were found out, his game would be over, and
so, most probably, would be his life. On the other hand, if he could
successfully plan and accomplish the murder of Plehve, his position
among the SRs would be secured. Azef had little love for Plehve:
as a Jew, he could not help but resent the Kishinev pogrom and the
minister's reputed role.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
