A DON JUAN BORGIA

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 12185, 9 July 1925, Page 5

A DON JUAN BORGIA

A WRECKER OF MEN AND WOMEN BOLD, BAD, AND UGLY From. Moscow Reuter’s Agency learns that Boris Savinkoff, the famous revolutionary, has committed suicide by throwing himself from the fifth floor of his prison. This act followed upon the refusal of Dzerj insky, the head of the secret police (Cheka) to release him. Savinkoff was one of the most remarkable of the many morbid and brilliant characters which the revolutionary movement in Russia produoed. He lived for power and adventure,, and stopped at nothing to gain his ends. • In the Czar’s days, Savinkoff was a leading terrorist, and was an organiser of assassin ation, a desperate man if ever there was one. Later he was a Minister in the Kerensky Government, and subsequently took part in counter-revolutionary activities. He organised and led bands of “whites” in the field, and shot many Bolsheviks with his own hands. HAVOC AMONG BOTH SEXES A temperamental magalomanaic with a passionate love of romance, a welleducated man and a gifted speaker, an ardent politician and a theatrical egoist, he exercised considerable personal magnetism over men and women, particularly the latter. He was as remorseless as a Borgia, and as adventurous as a Don Juan. Few people have directly made more broken hearts and broken heads than Savinkoff did. , Yet he was a small man physically, and not at all good looking. After he escaped from) Bolshevik Russia he lived for a long time as an exile in Paris, paying frequent visits to London. BACK TO INTRIGUE But exile did not suit this reckless character. Last August he was seized (or pretended to be seized! with the idea that those who loved Russia must recognise the Soviet Power. Thereupon he came to -an arrangement with the Bolshevik authorities abroad that he should cross the frontier, be formally arrested and tried and sentenced—and, after a while liberated. Up to a point this programme was carried out. At the trial in Moscow, Savinkoff. ns doubtless prearranged—revealed all his secret anti-Bolshevik conversations with the Allied statesmen. His sentence of death was commutr ed to a term of imprisonment for 10 years. PEERING THROUGH DUNGEON BARS He hoped to be released soon, according to the nlans agreed upon. But the Bolsheviks deceived him—as he had deceived so many others. Thev lured him into Rnssin, and then kept him securely under lock and key. No doubt they had good grounds for their distrust. Savinkoff imagined that once in Russia, he would mould men and affairs to suit his own ends. AMBITION O’ERLEAPS ITSELF His ambition knew no bounds; his aim was no less than to become the new ruler of Russia —the second Lenin. Onoe be leernttliat he had been deceived he preferred extinction to existence. and leapt from a window-sill 60ft to death And so ended one of the bravest it not one of the most sensational and unscrupulous characters which the Great War and its consequences brought into prominence.