One hundred years ago today, the Germans hanged Russian revolutionary Boris Donskoy.

Donskoy was not a Bolshevik but a Left Social Revolutionary — the party faction most closely aligned with Team Lenin. And his offense was a revolutionary crime, but one that events soon swept into irrelevancy.

In March of that same year, Russia’s revolutionary government had fulfilled its promise to exit the charnel house of World War I, ceding in exchange for peace the huge territorial gains that Germany had exacted in the bloodlands in-between empires.

These prospectively gigantic territorial gains were not long held by Berlin, whose wartime government would collapse suddenly before the year was out … but in the short interim where we lay our post, the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine are under firm German control.

The last of these stood under the authority of Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn. Donskoy, a radical sailor who had served on the Executive Committee of Kronstadt when it demonstrated against the Revolution’s initial, too-moderate Provisional Government, on July 29 assassinated the field marshal — declaring to his captors that the old Prussian warhorse had been condemned by the Left SRs for suppressing the Ukrainian revolution.

On this day..

• 1982: Frank James Coppola, "further incarceration can only lead to my being stripped of all personal dignity"
• 1970: Dan Mitrione, an American torturer in Uruguay
• 1966: James French, fried
• 1916: Nazario Sauro, Italian patriot
• 1284: Tekuder, Mongol sultan
• 1792: William Winter, Elsdon Moor gibbet habitue
• 1949: John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer
• 1932: Richard Johnson, great-grandfather of Craig Watkins
• 1888: Hugh Mottram Brooks, for the Trunk Murder
• Themed Set: Branded
• 1858: James Seale, on the heath with Thomas Hardy
• 1922: Joseph O'Sullivan and Reginald Dunne, helping spark the Irish Civil War
• 1862: Nueces Massacre