The official story is that Kaplan immediately joined an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy under the leadership of the SR activist and military commander Grigory Semyonov, and that the group was engaged in planning a series of assassinations of Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Uritsky, Volodarsky and others. Their plots were portrayed as a highly organised armed conspiracy, funded by reactionary groups and foreign powers, dedicated to overthrowing the legitimate power of the Bolshevik state. August 1918 was not a single episode, the line went, but part of a web of violent actions against the regime.
The aim of such allegations was to blacken the reputation of the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were by then regarded by the Bolsheviks as their sworn enemies. All evidence of SR treachery was grist to the regime's propaganda mill.
It is, nonetheless, completely understandable that Kaplan would have been disenchanted with Lenin and the Bolshevik party. After February 1917 the short-lived Provisional Government had begun to introduce the foundations of parliamentary democracy; and even after he seized control in October, Lenin continued to promise 'All Power to the Soviets', the directly elected local councils ofworkers, peasants and soldiers. To the surprise of his opponents and many of his own supporters, Lenin stood by the Provisional Government's promise of free elections to a national Constituent Assembly, a body that was intended to pave the way for a constitution and a parliament based on universal suffrage.
The millions who turned out to vote on 25 November 1917 probably believed that democracy in Russia was finally dawning. After a largely peaceful election, in which two thirds of the population voted, the Constituent Assembly convened in the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg on the afternoon of 5 January 1918. It was the first freely elected parliament in Russia's history, a historic moment by any standard.
But it was doomed to failure. The Bolsheviks had not done well in the elections and the Socialist Revolutionaries had secured a majority in the Assembly. With more than twice as many seats as the Bolsheviks, the SRs should have been the dominant force in Russia. But Lenin had already installed a government packed with Bolshevik ministers, and he wasn't about to let an election remove them from power.
'To relinquish the Soviet Republic won by the people, for the sake of the bourgeois parliamentary system of the Constituent Assembly, would now be a step backwards and would cause the collapse of the October workers' and peasants' revolution,' Lenin wrote. 'We must not be deceived by the election figures. Elections prove nothing. The Bolsheviks can and must take state power into our own hands
The Constituent Assembly was allowed to exist for just over twelve hours. The Bolsheviks walked out after the first votes went against them. The other parties carried on until four o'clock in the morning of 6 January and were then evicted by pro-Bolshevik guards fuelled with vodka and brandishing rifles. When the deputies came back the next day they found the Tauride Palace locked and surrounded by soldiers. Lenin's Bolsheviks had hijacked the embryonic institutions of freedom and democracy. Now they were about to impose a centralised dictatorship even harsher than the tsarist regime they had overthrown.
Given such treachery on the part of the Bolsheviks, Fanny Kaplan and the other disenfranchised SRs would undoubtedly have felt cheated and angry. But did she really pull the trigger that day in August? Would Semyonov really have selected Fanny Kaplan to carry out the attack? A woman who was nearly blind, had never shot a revolver in her life and had little or no experience of terrorist attacks? Her role up to then had seemingly been confined to intelligence gathering - finding out where Lenin would be at a specific time and reporting back to her colleagues.
It was nearly 10 p.m. by the time Lenin emerged from the Mikhel- son factory; sundown in Moscow at that time of year is around 9 p.m. and Fanny could not see in the dark. When Kaplan was arrested, she was not even wearing glasses. Not one of the eighteen witnesses who were interviewed actually saw her firing. And the bullet removed from Lenin's neck, almost four years later, was found not to have come from the Browning pistol alleged to have been held by Kaplan.
In 1922, Semyonov would testify that the official version of events was true in all respects, despite the inconsistencies it contained. But by then he had renounced his Socialist Revolutionary allegiance and was almost certainly collaborating with the Bolsheviks as they prepared for a show trial of SR leaders designed to discredit the party once and for all.
What is undeniable is that Fanny made no attempt to exculpate herself. She was arrested either on the spot or at a tram stop on nearby Serpukhovka Street - the policeman who collared her changed his testimony - carrying a suitcase and making no effort to run away. Taken for questioning by the Cheka secret police, she allegedly made the following statement (although there is no way of verifying its authenticity, as she would be dead by the time the Cheka released it):
My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will give no details. I resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Siberia for participating in an assassination attempt against a tsarist official in Kiev. I spent eleven years doing hard labour. After the [February] Revolution, I was freed. I supported free elections to the Constituent Assembly and I still support that. In October, the Bolsheviks seized power without the consent of the people. The Bolsheviks are conspirators who carried out a coup.
Another suspect arrested at the same time as Kaplan, a man named Alexander Prototipov, had been shot almost at once, so Fanny knew the fate that awaited her. Yet she refused to argue her innocence or to implicate any accomplices. Her silence has led to suggestions that she was the scapegoat for others, shielding her comrades who had done the deed. She would be presented by Soviet propaganda as a psychotic monster and her reputation has not been completely rehabilitated even now.
Guilty or innocent, Fanny Kaplan would, inevitably, be executed; but she would have one more appearance to make in our story before going to the firing squad.
While Kaplan was being bundled into the police van, Lenin was being rushed back to the Kremlin. Terrified that other assassins might be lying in wait for him, his security men refused to take the Soviet leader out of the safety of his fortified living quarters. They brought in doctors to treat his wounds, but the bullets were lodged in critical areas of his body and they decided not to remove them.
Lenin had come close to death; his injuries were severe, and although fate decreed that he would live, his health was badly undermined. The shooting almost certainly contributed to the series of strokes that would incapacitate and ultimately kill him in January 1924; but his survival - by the narrowest of margins - meant he would have five and a half more years to continue his work. In those five and half years, Lenin would succeed in consolidating a Soviet system that would endure for more than seven decades, bringing to fruition the greatest socialist experiment of all time. His survival would enable epochal changes in political and social thinking, changes that for better or worse would affect the lives of millions across the globe.
Lenin's injuries were grave, and blood from the wound to his neck had spilled into his lungs, making breathing difficult. But the Bolshevik media played down the seriousness of the situation, fearing it might engender public panic or encourage opposition forces plotting a coup against the regime. Official propaganda portrayed Lenin as brushing his injuries heroically aside, refusing to heed the warnings of the medical men. Pravda's headline read: 'Lenin, shot twice, refuses help. Next morning, he reads papers, listens; continues to guide the locomotive of global revolution.'