The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  No tsar, even at the height of radical terrorism, was as afraid for his life and as well protected as Lenin. The tsars traveled in Russia and abroad; they entertained and appeared frequently at public functions. Lenin cowered behind the brick walls of the Kremlin, guarded around the clock by Latvian Riflemen. When from time to time he went to the city, it was usually without prior notice. Between his move to Moscow in March 1918 and his death in January 1924, he revisited Petrograd, the scene of his revolutionary triumph, only twice, and he never traveled to see the country or mingle with the population. The farthest he ventured was to travel in his Rolls-Royce for occasional rests at Gorki, a village near Moscow, where an estate had been requisitioned for his use.

  Trotsky showed greater daring, traveling incessantly to the front to talk to the commanders and inspect the troops. He frequently changed schedules and itineraries to throw off potential assassins.

  No serious assassination attempts against the lives of Lenin and Trotsky took place before September 1918 because the Central Committee of the SR Party, the terrorist party par excellence, opposed active resistance to the Bolsheviks. Its unwillingness to resort to methods used against the tsars and their officials stemmed from two considerations. One was the belief of the SR leadership that time was on its side and that all it had to do was to sit tight and await the resurgence of democracy in Russia. The murder of the Bolshevik leaders was certain, in its view, to ensure the victory of the counterrevolution. The second consideration was fear of Bolshevik reprisals and pogroms.

  Not all SRs shared this outlook. Some party members were prepared to take up arms against the Bolsheviks, with or without the approval of the Central Committee. One such group began to form in Moscow in the summer of 1918, under the very noses of the Cheka.

  It was the custom of Bolshevik leaders, Lenin included, every Friday afternoon or evening to address workers and party members in various parts of Moscow. Lenin’s appearances were usually not announced beforehand. On Friday, August 30, he was scheduled to attend two rallies: one in the Basmannyi District, in the building of the Grain Commodity Exchange, another at the Mikhelson factory in the southern part of the city. Earlier that day news had arrived that the chief of the Petrograd Cheka, M. S. Uritskii, had been shot. The assassin was a Jewish youth, L. A. Kannegisser, a member of the moderate Popular Socialist Party. It later transpired that he had acted on his own, to avenge the execution of a friend. But this was not known at the time and fears arose that perhaps a terrorist campaign was underway. Worried family members urged Lenin to cancel his appearances, but he quite uncharacteristically chose to face danger and went to town in a car, driven by his trusted chauffeur, S. K. Gil. He first appeared at the Grain Commodity Exchange, from where he proceeded to Mikhelson’s. Although the audience half expected Lenin, there was no certainty he would appear until his car pulled into the courtyard. Lenin delivered his customary canned speech attacking Western “imperialists.” He concluded with the words: “We shall die or triumph!” As Gil later told the Cheka, while Lenin was speaking, a woman dressed in work clothes came up and asked whether Lenin was inside. He gave an evasive reply.

  As Lenin was making his way to the exit through a dense crowd, someone close behind him slipped and fell, barring the crowd. Lenin went into the courtyard followed by a few people. As he was about to enter his car, a woman approached to complain that bread was being confiscated at railroad stations. Lenin said that instructions had been issued to stop this practice. He had a foot on the running board when three shots rang out. Gil swung around. He recognized the person firing from several paces away as the woman who had inquired about Lenin. Lenin fell to the ground. Panic-stricken onlookers fled in all directions. Drawing his revolver, Gil raced in pursuit of the assassin, but she had vanished. Children who remained in the courtyard indicated the direction in which she had fled. A few people followed her. She kept on running, but then abruptly stopped and faced her pursuers. She was arrested and taken to Cheka headquarters in the Lubianka.

  Lenin was carried unconscious into his car and driven at top speed to the Kremlin. A physician was called for. By then he was barely able to move. His pulse grew faint and he bled profusely. It seemed he was breathing his last. A medical examination revealed two wounds: one, relatively harmless, lodged in the arm; the other, potentially fatal, at the juncture of the jaw and neck. (The third bullet, it was learned later, struck the woman who had been conversing with Lenin when he was shot.)

  In the next several hours, the terrorist underwent five interrogations by Cheka personnel.* She was very uncommunicative. Her name was Fannie Efimovna Kaplan, born Feiga Roidman or Roitblat. Her father was a teacher in the Ukraine. It was later learned that as a young girl she had joined the anarchists. She was sixteen when a bomb which anarchists were assembling in her room to kill the governor-general of Kiev exploded. A field court-martial condemned her to death, then commuted the sentence to lifelong hard labor, which she served in Siberia. There she met Spiridonova and other convicted terrorists, under whose influence she became a Socialist-Revolutionary. Early in 1917, benefiting from the political amnesty, she returned to central Russia, settling first in the Ukraine and then in the Crimea. By then, her family had emigrated to the United States.

  According to her deposition, she had decided in February 1918 to assassinate Lenin to avenge the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the imminent signing of the Brest Treaty. But her objections to Lenin ran deeper: “I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor,” she told the Cheka. “By living long, he postpones the idea of socialism for decades to come.” She further said that although she belonged to no political party, she sympathized with the Committee of the Constituent Assembly in Samara, liked Chernov, and favored an alliance with England and France against Germany. She steadfastly denied having any accomplices and refused to say who had given her the gun.†

  After her interrogation, Kaplan was briefly detained in the same cell at the Lubianka where the Cheka confined Bruce Lockhart, whom it had arrested in the middle of the night on suspicion of complicity: “At six in the morning [of August 31],” he writes,

  a woman was brought into the room. She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them. Her face was colorless. Her features, strongly Jewish, were unattractive. She might have been any age between twenty and thirty-five. We guessed it was Kaplan. Doubtless, the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign of recognition. Her composure was unnatural. She went to the window and, leaning her chin upon her hand, looked out into the daylight. And there she remained, motionless, speechless, apparently resigned to her fate, until presently the sentries came and took her away.

  57

  She was moved from the Lubianka to one of the basement cells in the Kremlin where the most prominent political prisoners were held and from which few emerged alive.

  In the meantime, a team of physicians attended Lenin, who was hovering between life and death, but retained enough presence of mind to make certain his doctors were Bolsheviks. The patient’s prospects were not hopeless, even though blood had entered one of his lungs. Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin’s devoted secretary, watching him, had a religious vision: the sight “suddenly reminded me of a famous European painting of the deposition of Christ from the cross, crucified by priests, pontiffs, and the rich.…”* Such religious associations soon became an inseparable element of the Lenin cult which had its beginning with tales of his miraculous survival. It was evident in the reverential description in Pravda on September 1, by its editor, Bukharin: Lenin was “the genius of the world revolution, the heart and the brain of the great worldwide movement of the proletariat,” “the unique leader in the world,” a man whose analytic skills gave him an “almost prophetic ability to predict.” He went on to give a fantastic account of what had happened immediately after the attempt by Kaplan, whom he ridiculed as a latter-day Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat:

  Lenin, shot th
rough twice, with pierced lungs, spilling blood, refuses help and goes on his own. The next morning, still threatened by death, he reads papers, listens, learns, observes to see that the engine of the locomotive that carries us toward global revolution has not stopped working.

  Such images were calculated to appeal to the Russian masses’ belief in the holiness of those who escape certain death.

  The official announcement, published on the front page of Izvestiia on August 31, signed by Sverdlov, was decidedly unchristian in tone. It asserted, without providing any proof, that the authorities had “no doubt that here too will be discovered the fingerprints of the Right SRs … of the hirelings of the English and French.” These accusations were made in a document dated 10:40 p.m. on August 30, which was an hour or so before Kaplan underwent her first interrogation. “We call on all comrades,” it went on,

  to maintain complete calm and to intensify their work in combating counterrevolutionary elements. The working class will respond to attempts against its leaders with even greater consolidation of its forces, with merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the Revolution.

  In the days and weeks that followed, the Bolshevik press (the non-Bolshevik press having been eliminated by then) was filled with similar exhortations and threats, but it provided surprisingly little information either about the murder attempt or about the actual condition of Lenin’s health, apart from regular medical bulletins of which laymen could not make much sense. The impression one gains from reading this material is that the Bolsheviks deliberately underplayed the event to convince the public that whatever happened to Lenin, they were firmly in control.

  On September 3, the commandant of the Kremlin, an ex-sailor named P. Malkov, was called to the Cheka and told that it had condemned Fannie Kaplan to death. He was to carry out the sentence at once. As Malkov describes it, he recoiled: “Shooting a person, especially a woman, is no easy task.” He asked about the disposal of the body. He was told to consult Sverdlov. Sverdlov said that Kaplan was not to be interred: “Her remains are to be destroyed without trace.” As the place of execution Malkov chose a narrow courtyard adjoining the Kremlin’s Large Palace and used as a parking lot for military vehicles.

  I ordered the commander of the Automobile Combat Detachment to move some trucks from the enclosures and to start the engines. I also gave orders to send a passenger car to the blind alley, turning it to face the gate. Having posted at the gate two Latvians with orders to allow no one in, I went to fetch Kaplan. A few minutes later I was leading her to the courtyard.… “Into the car!” I snapped a sharp command. I pointed to the automobile that stood at the end of the cul-de-sac. Convulsively twisting her shoulders, Fannie Kaplan took one step, then another … I raised the pistol …

  *

  Thus perished a young woman ridiculed as the Russian Charlotte Corday: without the semblance of a trial, shot in the back while the truck engines roared to drown out her screams, her corpse disposed of like so much garbage.

  The details of the terrorist plot that led to the attempt on the life of Lenin, and, as it turned out, also on the lives of Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, became known to the Cheka only three years later. The main source of this information was a veteran SR terrorist, G. Semenov (Vasilev). Semenov emigrated abroad but changed his mind and in 1921 returned to Russia, where he turned renegade and denounced his past associates. His testimony, no doubt doctored to some extent, was subsequently used by the Bolshevik prosecutor in the trial of the Socialists-Revolutionaries in 1922.58

  As best as can be determined, the SR Combat Organization was reactivated in Petrograd at the beginning of 1918, The group, which numbered fourteen people, some of them intellectuals, some workers, for a while shadowed Zinoviev and Volodarskii. In June 1918, one of its members, the worker Sergeev, assassinated Volodarskii. This terrorist underground acted on its own without sanction of the SR Central Committee. In the spring of 1918, after the Bolshevik Government had moved to Moscow, some members of the Combat Organization followed it. They chose Trotsky as their first victim in the belief that his death would have the greatest effect on the Bolshevik cause since he directed the war effort. Lenin was to follow. Adopting methods perfected against tsarist officials, members of the group stalked their victims to determine the pattern of their movements. They learned that Trotsky traveled constantly and unpredictably between Moscow and the front, and hence, “for technical reasons,” as Semenov would later explain, it was decided to dispose of Lenin first.

  Before carrying out their mission, the terrorists requested the approval of the SR Central Committee. By this time most SR leaders had moved to Samara, but a branch of the committee remained in Moscow, headed by Abraham Gots. Gots and one other committee member, D. Donskoi, refused to sanction the attempt on Lenin’s life, but said they would not object to it as long as it was done as an “individual” act, without implicating the party. They also promised that the party would not repudiate Lenin’s murder.

  While laying his plans, Semenov learned that Fannie Kaplan and two associates were working independently toward the same end. Kaplan impressed him as a resolute “revolutionary terrorist”—in other words, a suicidal type. He invited her to join his group.

  To track Lenin’s appearances at worker meetings, Semenov divided Moscow into four districts, to each of which he assigned two members of his organization: one to act as observer (dezhurnyi), the other as “executor” (ispolnitel’). The former was to mix with the crowds to learn when and where Lenin would speak. As soon as he had the information, he was to contact the “executor,” who would wait at a central location within the zone. These preparations took place in August 1918, at the time when the SRs in Samara, taking advantage of the military victories of the Czechs, were laying claim to authority over Russia.

  Lenin addressed a gathering of the Moscow Committee of the Party on Friday, August 16, but due to some mishap Semenov’s observer failed to appear. The following Friday, Lenin spoke again, this time at the Polytechnic Museum. Word got around of his appearance and a large crowd turned up. This time everything went according to plan, but the “executor” lost his nerve, for which Semenov expelled him from the Combat Organization. Semenov had intelligence that the following Friday, August 30, Lenin would make one or more appearances in the southern zone. To make certain that nothing would go wrong this time, he assigned to this area his two most trusted agents: an experienced terrorist, the worker Novikov, to act as observer, and Kaplan as executor. In the tradition of SR terrorists, Kaplan was prepared to give up her own life for the one she took: she told Novikov that after shooting Lenin she would surrender. Just in case she changed her mind, however, he hired a hack to stand by.

  In the afternoon of August 30, Kaplan took up her post at Serpukhovskii Square. In her purse she carried a loaded Browning; three bullets had crosslike incisions, into which had been rubbed a deadly Indian poison, curare.*

  Novikov learned that Lenin would speak at the Mikhelson factory. To make certain that the information was correct, Kaplan questioned Lenin’s chauffeur, after which she entered the building, placing herself near the exit. (Other sources have her waiting in the courtyard.) It was Novikov who staged the accident on the steps leading to the exit, purposely falling to hold back the crowd so as to give Kaplan undisturbed access to her victim. After firing her revolver, Kaplan seems to have forgotten her promise to surrender and instinctively ran away, but then stopped and gave herself up.

  On September 6, Pravda carried a brief statement from the Central Committee of the SR Party, disclaiming, on its behalf and that of its affiliates, any connection with the attempt on Lenin’s life. This violated the agreement which Semenov had made with Gots and Donskoi, and considerably dampened the terrorists’ spirits. They made an attempt on the life of Trotsky, as he was departing for the front, but Trotsky eluded them by switching trains at the last moment. To keep the organization going, they carried out several “expropriations” of Soviet institutions, but their mora
le kept on sinking, especially after the Bolsheviks had regained the initiative against the Whites. Sometime toward the end of 1918, the Combat Organization dissolved.

  Lenin recovered remarkably quickly. This attested to his strong constitution and will to live, but to his associates it implied supernatural qualities; it was as if God Himself intended Lenin to live and his cause to triumph. As soon as he regained some strength, he resumed work, but he overexerted himself and suffered a relapse. On September 25, on his physicians’ insistence, he and Krupskaia left for Gorki. Lenin spent three weeks there convalescing; although he kept in touch with events and did some writing, he left the day-today conduct of affairs of state to others. One of the few visitors allowed to see him was Angelica Balabanoff, an old comrade and a Zimmerwald participant. As she recalls it, when she raised the matter of Fannie Kaplan’s execution, Krupskaia became “very upset”; later, when the two women were alone, she shed bitter tears over it. Lenin, Balabanoff felt, preferred not to discuss it.59 At this time, the Bolsheviks still felt embarrassment about executing fellow socialists.