# Dora Brilliant

Dora Vulfovna Brilliant (Russian: Дора Вульфовна Бриллиант; 1880–1907) was a Ukrainian socialist revolutionary. She manufactured bombs for the SR Combat Organisation, which used them to carry out assassinations against the interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich.

## Biography

Dora Brilliant was born into a Ukrainian Jewish family in Kherson, in 1880. Despite her family refusing to provide her with an education, Brilliant went to school on her own initiative, going on to train in midwifery.
After participating in a political demonstration, Brilliant was internally exiled to Poltava, where she met the revolutionary socialist Grigory Gershuni. Through him, Brilliant joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (PSR) after it was founded in 1902. She operated the party's clandestine press, distributing its literature throughout the country. In 1904, she joined the SR Combat Organization, under the recommendation of Boris Savinkov. She then dedicated herself fully to revolutionary activism. Her comrades from the time reported that she appeared to be extremely depressed. She restricted her activities to the service of the organisation, for which she manufactured improvised explosive devices. She was not personally interested in political theory; to Brilliant, terrorism represented the essence of the socialist revolution. She was motivated to join the combat organisation mainly by idealism.
Her first mission in the SR Combat Organization was to assassinate interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve. She and Savinkov posed as a married couple and rented a flat together with Praskovya Ivanovskaya and Yegor Sazonov, who posed as their servants. Brilliant demanded to be the one to throw the bomb, but Savinkov overruled her, as he believed women should not commit terrorist acts if men were there to do so. He ordered Brilliant and Ivanovskaya to leave town before the attack, which deeply upset Brilliant. The assassination went ahead, with the SR Combat Organisation killing the interior minister in 1903.
After the death of a comrade in an accidental explosion while manufacturing a bomb, Brilliant made another bomb intended for the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, in another operation directed by Savinkov. On 2 February 1905, while Brilliant kept watch, the intended assassin Ivan Kalyayev failed to carry out the attack, as the duke's family had come with him. The assassination was ultimately carried out on 4 February, when Kalyayev threw Brilliant's bomb under the duke's carriage, killing him.
Brilliant cried when Savinkov informed her that Alexandrovich had been assassinated, feeling personal responsibility for the attack. Brilliant struggled to reconcile her advocacy of terrorism with her own personal morality. Although she repeatedly requested permission to carry out such terrorist attacks, she never fully accepted the act of killing. Savinkov believed that this cognitive dissonance was explained by her wanting to be on an equal footing with her comrades that undertook dangerous tasks and by her desire for martyrdom, as she believed terrorism was only justified by self-sacrifice.
Following the arrest of 17 members of the Combat Organisation in March 1905, Brilliant initially managed to escape capture. Kalyayev refused to give up his comrades, including Brilliant, to the police, allowing her to continue making bombs for the SR combat organisation. But later that year, she was arrested for her part in the assassinations of Plehve and Sergei Alexandrovich. She was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where she experienced a mental breakdown. She died in prison, in 1907. In his memoirs, Savinkov said that "death [came as] a liberation for her".

## Legacy

Brilliant became known as one of the most prominent female terrorists of the 1905 Russian Revolution. In the 1905 novel Teni utra, Mikhail Artsybashev modelled one of the characters after Dora Brilliant. In the 1909 novel The Pale Horse, Boris Savinkov gave a fictionalised account of the assassination of Alexandrovich, portraying Brilliant through the character of Erna. In the 2004 film adaptation of Savinkov's novel, The Rider Named Death, Erna was played by Kseniya Rappoport, who bore a resemblance to Brilliant.