Dmitry Bogrov

Bogrov in 1910.

Dmitry Grigoriyevich Bogrov (1887 – 24 September 1911) (Russian: Дмитрий Григорьевич Богров) was the assassin of the Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin.

Born Mordekhai Gershkovich Bogrov (Russian: Мордехай Гершкович Богров) into a family of Jewish merchants in Kiev (Russian Empire), Bogrov, while simultaneously acting as an anarchist revolutionary, had been an agent of the Okhrana secret police since 1906, informing on the activities of Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Democrats and anarchists.^[1]

On 14 September 1911, Dmitry Bogrov shot the Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, in the Kiev Opera House, in front of Tsar Nicholas II and two of the imperial princesses. Stolypin died four days later. This act was committed ostensibly in order to decapitate a successful and popular conservative reform movement and thus hasten violent revolution. However, it has been alleged that Bogrov was permitted to act at the behest of extreme right-wing elements in the Tsarist secret police who detested Stolypin because of his agrarian reforms and his flair for parliamentary government. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn extensively investigates and gives full credit to this conjecture in his historical novel August 1914.)

Bogrov was tried by the district military court. Despite the plea of Stolypin's widow to the court to save Bogrov's life (she said that taking the young man's life would not bring her husband back), Bogrov was sentenced to death and executed by hanging on September 24 [O.S. September 11] 1911 in the Kiev fortress of Lysa Hora.

Significantly, the investigation of Stolypin's assassination was later discontinued at the express order of Nicholas II.

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