At six in the morning 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 colourless. 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. She was shot before she knew if her attempt to alter history had failed or succeeded.
At 4 p.m. on 3 September Fanny Kaplan was taken to an underground garage and executed with a single bullet to the back of the head. There had been no trial and no verdict. Pavel Malkov, the Kremlin commandant who did the deed, wrote later that he had no hesitation in despatching a 'traitor' such as Kaplan:
I knew at that moment that there must be no mercy shown to the enemies of the revolution. Retribution was complete; the sentence carried out. I, Pavel Dmitrievich Malkov, Bolshevik party member, sailor of the Baltic Fleet and commander of the Kremlin, carried it out personally. If history were to repeat itself and another piece of work such as she, someone who had lifted her hand against Vladimir Ilych, were to appear before the barrel of my pistol, my hand would not tremble as I pulled the trigger, just as it did not tremble back then.
Malkov says he received orders from Yakov Sverdlov that Kaplan should have no grave; no physical trace should be allowed to remain of a woman who might become a counter-revolutionary martyr. So Malkov soaked Kaplan's corpse in petrol and burned it in a steel barrel in the Alexandrov Gardens beneath the Kremlin wall. The whole gruesome process was witnessed by the Bolshevik regime's poet laureate, the proletarian hack Demyan Bedny, in order 'to fuel his socialist imagination'.
Bruce Lockhart was considerably luckier. After a month in the Lub- yanka, London swapped him for a high-ranking Soviet diplomat. On his return, the British media were quick to portray him and Sidney Reilly as heroic Western agents nobly trying to smash the communist menace. A radio play starring Errol Flynn, and a Warner Brothers movie with Leslie Howard, entitled British Agent, took a resolutely anti-Bolshevik stance, portraying our plucky 'diplomats' as the prime movers in a daring operation sanctioned by London.
Bruce Lockhart's claims that Britain had nothing to do with the attack on Lenin are contradicted by the Cheka's records of the affair. They suggest he confessed to being part of a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and that Sidney Reilly was also involved. Bruce Lockhart's own son, Robin, wrote in 1967, 'Once intervention in Russia had been decided on in 1918, he gave his active support to the counterrevolutionary movement, with which Reilly was actively working. My father has himself made it clear to me that he worked much more closely with Reilly than he had publicly indicated.'
Recently released telegrams between Bruce Lockhart and his Foreign Office bosses lend credence to this. In late summer 1918, shortly before Fanny Kaplan's attack on Lenin, he reported on a meeting he had held with the former leader of the SRs' Fighting
Committee, also known as the Terror Brigade, the anti-Bolshevik plotter Boris Savinkov. One telegram states: 'Savinkov's proposals for counter-revolution. Plan is how Bolshevik barons will be murdered and military dictatorship formed.'
In a handwritten note at the bottom of Bruce Lockhart's message, the foreign secretary Lord Curzon comments, 'Savinkov's methods are drastic, though if successful probably effective.'
The evidence remains inconclusive, but if Britain were indeed behind the assassination attempt, Bruce Lockhart was extremely fortunate to be released. Before he left the Lubyanka, he caught a chilling glimpse of the consequences that the plot against Lenin would have for those who fell foul of Bolshevik power:
As we were talking, a motor van - a kind of 'Black Maria' - pulled up in the courtyard below, and a squad of men, armed with rifles and bandoliers, got out and took up their places in the yard. Presently, a door opened just below us, and three men with bowed heads walked slowly forward to the van. I recognised them instantly. They were Sheglovitoff, Khvostoff, and Bieletsky, three ex-Ministers of the Tsarist regime, who had been in prison since the revolution. There was a pause, followed by a scream. Then through the door the fat figure of a priest was half-pushed, half-carried, to the 'Black Maria.' His terror was pitiful. Tears rolled down his face. His knees rocked, and he fell like a great ball of fat on the ground. I felt sick and turned away. 'Where are they going?' I asked. 'They are going to another world,' said Peters drily . the first batch of the several hundred victims of the Terror who were shot at that time as a reprisal for the attempted assassination of Lenin.
The day after Fanny Kaplan's execution, Sverdlov announced the opening of a campaign of reprisals that would be known as the Red Terror. It would be uncompromising and brutal, and it was the direct result of the assassination attempt on 30 August:
• FANNY KAPLAN'S ATTEMPT TO KILL LENIN • Moscow Kremlin, 5 September 1918.
The Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. DECREE: 'On Red Terror'
Having considered the report of the Chairman of the Cheka commission on the struggle against counterrevolution ... the Council of People's Commissars finds that in the current situation the use of political terror to secure the non-militarised areas of the country is an absolute necessity; ... that it is necessary to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by confining them to concentration camps; that all persons participating in White Guard organisations, conspiracies and rebellions must be executed by shooting, and that the names of those executed and the reason for their execution must be made public.
The decree gave free rein to the bloodthirsty fanatics of the Cheka. From now on they would arrest and eliminate anyone they suspected of harbouring the slightest reservations about the Bolshevik regime, and many others who simply got in their way. The rule of law and judicial oversight were suspended; executions could be ordered by a 'troika' of three secret policemen, sitting in private, and with no right of appeal.
As paranoia became the norm, the Bolsheviks relied more and more on their murderous henchmen. The Cheka's methods, cynically acknowledged by its leader, 'Iron' Felix Dzerzhinsky, were simple: confessions extracted by torture, followed by immediate execution. 'We stand for organized terror,' Dzerzhinsky said. 'This should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly ... Do not think that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; we are not in need of justice now - this is war.'
The shooting on 30 August had plunged the Bolsheviks into panic and fear. In the throes of civil war and surrounded by enemies, the fragile regime saw threats everywhere. There was an absolute and immediate assumption that this was an enemy conspiracy. News came in of another attack, this time fatal, on the head of the Petrograd secret police, Moisei Uritsky. Scores of suspects were rounded up, tortured and shot.
Exact figures for the number of deaths are hard to establish. The 'first batch' of victims referred to by Bruce Lockhart seems to have claimed the lives of around 800 Socialist Revolutionaries and other political opponents of the regime, most of whom had been arrested after the October revolution. Since then they had been held as hostages, whose lives would be forfeit in the event of enemy action against Bolshevik interests. Even the officially admitted figures make startling reading. In Petrograd alone, 512 political prisoners - none of them connected in any way with Fanny Kaplan - were murdered. Across the country, an estimated 14,000 executions were carried out.