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 through 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.