hen the slim margins of history's what-ifs are measured,
So, what are the facts? While much else might be in dispute, the medical bulletin is not.
On the evening of 30 August, Lenin was driven from the Kremlin to the Zamoskvorechie district of Moscow to address the assembled workers of the Mikhelson (Hammer and Sickle) engineering factory. It was a hotbed of revolutionary fervour and Lenin had already spoken there at least four times. Originally built in the mid nineteenth century by an Englishman called Hopper, the factory is nowadays known as the Vladimir Ilyich Electromechanical Plant. It has commemorative plaques recording the occasions on which Lenin visited the building. The plaques make no reference to the dramatic events of 1918, but when I turned up at the site in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the guards at the gate were happy to regale me with stories of 'the day Lenin nearly died'.
The Soviet leader, they said, had finished his speech and was leaving the building; they showed me the door from which he would have emerged into the factory's inner courtyard. His car was waiting nearby with the engine running, but Lenin paused to talk to some Bolshevik activists about the bread shortages that were plaguing the country. When a woman called out to him from the crowd he turned to face her, unaware she was clutching a Browning revolver under the folds of her cloak. Lenin had only a moment to glimpse his assailant's face before she fired three rapid shots. The first missed him, passing through the collar of his overcoat and wounding a bystander; the second lodged in his shoulder; the third punctured his left lung. Lenin's bodyguards rushed forward as he slumped to the ground, bundling him into the car and rushing him back to the Kremlin. He was unconscious and seemingly close to death. The woman was seized by angry members of the public, roughed up and handed over to the police.
The guards' stories were dramatic. They were told with genuine passion. But they were very much the product of official history, the version that decades of Soviet propaganda had inculcated in public opinion. Victors' history has held sway for nearly a century, but it hasn't removed the uncertainty that continues to cloud the events of autumn 1918.
I knew the guards' account was the official version because I had seen it in the cinema. Lenin in 1918, a black and white biopic from 1939, was one of the most widely viewed Soviet films, directed by Mikhail Romm, an artist feted by the Kremlin and a five-time winner of the Stalin Prize. It was the sequel to Romm's earlier Lenin in October, which told the story of the Bolshevik leader's role in the 1917 revolution, and it is undoubtedly the version the Kremlin wanted people to believe. It shows Lenin delivering a rousing speech to the factory workers, then stepping outside. Gunshots ring out and with a heroic look on his face Vladimir Ilyich clutches his chest. At this point the camera cuts to a menacing-looking woman skulking amid a crowd of people. Romm's movie shows the would-be assassin to be a disenchanted Socialist Revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan, who is arrested, tried and deservedly executed by an impartial Soviet judiciary.
But was this really how it all happened? Secrecy and doubt surrounded the aftermath of the assassination attempt; the regime was not slow to shape the story to its own political ends; and some historians now question whether Kaplan pulled - or was even capable of pulling - the trigger.
Fanny Kaplan was born Feyga Chaimovna Roitblat on 10 February 1890 in a Jewish settlement in what is now western Ukraine. Her childhood coincided with the upsurge in state sponsored anti-Semitism that sparked waves of deadly pogroms across the tsarist empire and prompted a mass exodus ofjews from Russia. Young Feyga didn't emigrate, but instead poured her resentment of the status quo into revolutionary activity, joining the Socialist Revolutionaries in her early teens.
Inspired by the socialist thinker Alexander Herzen, the SRs were the leading opposition force in the years before 1917. They were committed to toppling tsarism and were prepared to use violence to do so; but their aim was a democratic socialism that would enfranchise the peasantry and rely on the ballot box as well as the revolver and the bomb. In the maelstrom of competing factions that emerged among the revolutionaries as 1917 transformed the political landscape, the SRs were to be eclipsed and destroyed by the messianic zealots of
Bolshevism, who had no time for either the peasants or democracy. In 1906, when Feyga Roitblat adopted the revolutionary pseudonym of Fanya - or Fanny - Kaplan, that split was yet to happen; but it would ultimately seal her fate.
Fanny Kaplan's first revolutionary act had been to take part in a plot to blow up the tsarist governor of Kiev, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, who had used the military to put down strikes and demonstrations in the city. Still aged only sixteen, Kaplan was romantically involved with the anarchist Viktor Garsky, the driving force behind the plot. As they were preparing the bomb in their room at the Commercial Hotel on Volosh- skaya Street, they dropped it and it exploded. Garsky was unscathed, but Kaplan received severe injuries to her hands and face, and for a time it seemed she would be permanently blind. In the ensuing chaos, Garsky ran away. Unable to see and barely able to walk, Kaplan was quickly arrested. At her trial on 5 January 1907 she was sentenced to death, but was spared execution because of her youth. Condemned instead to life in jail, she was transported later that year to the tsarist labour camps of Nerchinsk in Siberia. In the Maltsev prison she was stripped naked and flogged. With bomb fragments still lodged in her body, partially deaf and almost completely blind, she spent months in the prison hospital suffering constant pain. She recovered some of her sight, but she would experience excruciating headaches and extended periods of blindness for the rest of her days.
By early 1917, Kaplan had spent over a decade in captivity and the tsarist regime was falling apart at the seams. The February Revolution brought the socialists and liberals of the Provisional Government to power in Russia, committed to political reform and a democratically elected national parliament. The leader of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, had been a Socialist Revolutionary, just like Kaplan, and one of his first acts was to order the release of all political prisoners.
In early March Fanny Kaplan returned to Moscow. She benefited from the new government's generosity towards veterans of the revolutionary struggle with an official pass to stay at a health clinic in
Yevpatoria on the Crimean coast. While she was there she met Dmitry Ulyanov, the younger brother of Vladimir Lenin and a key Bolshevik official in the region. It was the summer of 1917 and the split between Kaplan's SRs and Lenin's Bolsheviks had not yet reached its bloody apotheosis. The two young people - Ulyanov was only six years older than Kaplan - evidently hit it off, and he gave orders for her to be admitted to a specialist eye clinic in Kharkov. Two complex operations succeeded in restoring some of her sight; she would never be able to distinguish fine detail, but she was now able to make out the silhouettes of people who were directly beside her and she no longer tripped over large objects.
There is some dispute over Kaplan's activities between the summer of 1917 and her re-emergence into the spotlight of history in August the following year. She was certainly back in Moscow by the spring of 1918 and she was again active in Socialist Revolutionary circles. But it is here that the official Soviet version takes over. Much of the information about Kaplan in the months leading up to the attempt on Lenin's life in August 1918 comes from later writings, Soviet accounts of her political affiliations, references to her interrogation, and - not surprisingly with such a high-profile case - they inevitably embody the party line.