As one of the leaders of the SR Combat Organization, the paramilitary wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Savinkov was involved in the assassinations of several high-ranking imperial officials in 1904 and 1905.

In 1921, he wrote: The Russian people do not want Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, not merely because the Bolsheviks mobilize them, shoot them, take their grain and are ruining Russia.

The OGPU, with the help of agent Andrei Fedorov (who had gained the confidence of Savinkov) lured him back to the Soviet Union as part of a Syndicate-2 operation.

In 1903, Savinkov escaped to Geneva and joined the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, where he soon became Deputy Head of its Combat Organization under Yevno Azef.

When Azef was exposed as a mole for the Okhrana in 1908, Savinkov was promoted to leader of the SR Fighting Organization, which by now was no longer strong enough to conduct any serious operations.

On 30 August, however, he resigned from his post and was expelled from the Socialist Revolutionary Party due to his role in the attempted coup against Prime Minister Kerensky by General Lavr Kornilov.

Savinkov, a leader of the Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom, managed the organisation of several armed uprisings against the Bolsheviks, the most notable being in Yaroslavl, Rybinsk, and Murom in July 1918.

During the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1920, he moved to Poland, where he formed a Russian political organisation responsible for the formation of several infantry divisions and cavalry units out of the former Red Army PoWs.

Semyon Ignatyev wrote at the time of the Doctors' Plot that Stalin complained that the MGB was too humane in its interrogation of prisoners exclaiming, "Do you want to be more humanistic than Lenin, who ordered Dzerzhinsky to throw Savinkov out a window?

Up to the very end he had believed the agent provocateur to be a hero... Savinkov turned to writing mediocre novels revealing the inner emptiness of a terrorist who has lost faith in his cause.

[3] Savinkov admired Benito Mussolini, praising his nationalist and anti-Communist policies and meeting personally with him several times with the hope of gaining Italian support in his counter-revolutionary plots.