Born in Kharkov in 1879, Savinkov received his secondary education in Warsaw, following which he enrolled at the University of St. Petersburg.138 There he became embroiled in student disorders, including the university strike of 1899. He joined the SRs and quickly rose to a leading position in its Combat Organization, in which capacity he carried out major terrorist missions, including the assassinations of Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. In 1906 his terrorist activities came to a halt when the police agent Evno Azef betrayed him to the Okhrana. Sentenced to death, Savinkov managed to flee abroad, where he remained until the outbreak of the February Revolution, writing novels about the revolutionary underground. The war awakened in him patriotic impulses. He served in the French army until February 1917, when he returned to Russia. The Provisional Government appointed him a front-line commissar. Savinkov grew increasingly nationalistic and conservative, and, as we have seen, in the summer of 1917, while serving as acting director of the Ministry of War under Kerensky, he worked with Kornilov to restore discipline in the armed forces. Surrounded by an aura of romantic adventure, articulate and persuasive, he made a strong impression on whomever he cared to impress, including Winston Churchill.
In December 1917, Savinkov made his way to the Don, where he participated in the formation of the Volunteer Army. At Alekseev’s request, he returned to Bolshevik Russia to make contact with prominent public figures.139 His mission was to enlist those officers and politicians who, regardless of party affiliation, wanted to continue fighting the Germans and their Bolshevik minions. By virtue of his radical past and more recent patriotic record, Savinkov was ideally suited for this task. He spoke with Plekhanov, N. V. Chaikovskii, and other socialist luminaries known to follow a “defensist” line, but he had little success in enlisting them because, with a few exceptions, they preferred to wait for the Bolsheviks to collapse on their own rather than collaborate with nationalistic officers. Plekhanov refused even to receive him, saying: “I have given forty years of my life to the proletariat and it is not I who will shoot at workers even if they take the false path.”140 He had better success with demobilized officers, especially those who had served in the elite Guard and Grenadier Regiments.
His main problem was shortage of money: he was too poor even to afford a streetcar ticket. To build up a military force he had to pay allowances to his officers, most of whom were equally destitute, since no one dared to give them employment. To obtain funds, Savinkov turned to the representatives of the Allies. His private plans called for assassinating Lenin and Trotsky as a prelude to a coup against the Bolshevik regime. But he realized that the Allies did not much care who governed Russia, as long as she fought the Central Powers. Indeed, at this very time (March—April 1918) the French were assisting Trotsky organize the Red Army. Savinkov, therefore, concealed from the Allied representatives his true political objectives and presented himself as a patriotic Russian whose sole purpose was to restore Russia’s military capabilities and resume the war against Germany.
The first to help was Thomas Masaryk. The Czech leader’s motives in assisting Savinkov are obscure because in early 1918 he was negotiating with the Bolsheviks for the evacuation of his men from Russia and he could have had no conceivable interest in becoming involved in anti-Bolshevik activity. In his memoirs he writes that he had agreed to meet with Savinkov out of curiosity and was very disappointed to see a man seemingly unable to grasp the distinction between a “revolution” and a “terrorist act,” whose moral standards did not rise above the “primitive level of a blood vendetta.”141 But this could well have been hindsight. What is certain is that in April 1918 Masaryk gave Savinkov his first money, 200,000 rubles.142 A likely explanation for this transaction is that Savinkov, an expert at dissimulation, persuaded Masaryk that the money would be used to help Alekseev’s Volunteer Army build up an anti-German force in central Russia.
Savinkov also contacted Lockhart and Noulens. Lockhart reacted skeptically to Savinkov’s proposal to build an anti-German army under the very noses of the Bolsheviks, but he too came under Savinkov’s spell, and might have helped him were it not that he received categorical instructions from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour “to have nothing whatever to do with Savinkov’s plans, and avoid inquiring further into them.”143
Noulens, a leading advocate of the idea of forming on Russian territory a multinational anti-German army, proved more helpful. He found Savinkov most impressive:
