Dora Brilliant

Dora Brilliant

Dora Brilliant (* 1879 or 1880 in Cherson ; † October 1907 in Saint Petersburg ) was a Russian revolutionary around the turn of the 20th century and a member of the Social Revolutionary Party .

Dora Wladimirowna (Wulfowna) Brilliant (married Tschirkowa) was born in 1879 or 1880 into a Jewish merchant family in Cherson. She attended high school in Kherson, then midwifery courses at Jur'ev University . In 1902 she joined the Russian PSR ( Party of Social Revolutionaries ) and first became a member of the Kiev Committee, then the so-called Combat Organization. This is how Boris Savinkov remembers them:

“It was then that I made the acquaintance of Dora Brilliant in Kiev. Dora Vladimirovna Brilliant had been recommended for combat work by Pokotilov, who still knew her from Poltava. I found Dora Brilliant on Žiljanskaja Street, in a student room. She was up to her neck in the work of the local committee, and every minute her room was full of comrades who came and went on conspiratorial matters. From our first meeting, Dora Brilliant appeared to me to be a man who was fanatically devoted to the revolution. He was small, with black hair and huge, equally black eyes. She has long dreamed of changing the nature of her job and moving from committee work to combat work. Her whole demeanor, the will that emerged from every word to work in terror, convinced me that the organization in her person would acquire a valuable and devoted employee. "

On July 15, 1904 she was involved in the assassination of the Russian interior minister WK Plehwe in Petersburg , and on February 4, 1905 in Moscow in that of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov . At the beginning of December 1905 Dora Brilliant was arrested in Petersburg, in October 1907 she died mentally ill in the Petersburg Peter and Paul Fortress .

Web links

• http://stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/alexis/alexis_brilliant.html (English)