The immediate effect of the August shootings was a terrible hardening in the Bolshevik mentality. In response to the attack on Lenin, so-called class enemies were rounded up and executed for no other crime than their social origin. In operations that foreshadowed the Gestapo, hostages were selected from former tsarist officials, landowners, priests, lawyers, bankers and merchants to be used as reprisals. The British journalist Morgan Philips Price recorded his horror at the Bolsheviks' methods:
I shall never forget one of the Izvestia articles for Saturday, September 7th. There was no mistaking its meaning. It was proposed to take hostages from the former officers of the Tsar's army, from the Kadets and from the families of the Moscow and Petrograd middle-classes and to shoot ten for every Communist who fell to the White terror. Shortly after, a decree was issued by the central Soviet Executive ordering all officers of the old army within territories of the Republic to report on a certain day at certain places ... The reason given by the Bolshevik leaders for the Red terror was that conspirators could only be convinced that the Soviet Republic was powerful enough to be respected if it was able to punish its enemies, but nothing would convince these enemies except the fear of death. All civilized restraints had gone...
Lenin himself signed the execution lists. It was he who initiated the Terror and he who pushed it ever further into bloody excess. He acknowledged the ruthlessness that drove him onwards when he confessed that he took the fanatical Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky's novel What Is To Be Done? as a model and inspiration: 'I can't listen to music,' Lenin said, 'because it makes me want to say sweet, silly things, and pat people on the head . but you have to beat people's heads, beat them mercilessly!'
That fanaticism, which would result in a lot of 'merciless beating' over the next five years, was undoubtedly intensified by the impact of the bullets he received in August 1918. Lenin's aim now seemed to be the physical annihilation of a whole social class. Being modestly well off made you guilty; soft hands unused to manual labour could get you shot. Martin Latsis, the head of the Cheka in Ukraine, revealed the real purpose of the Terror:
Don't go looking in the evidence to see whether or not the accused fought against the Soviets with arms or words. Just ask him which class he belongs to, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and the very essence of the Red Terror.
In the name of Lenin's Utopia, an estimated half a million people were killed in the three years to 1921. The long-term legacy of Kaplan's three bullets in August 1918 would be to make terror a permanent feature of Soviet society. It would reach its apogee in Stalin's murderous purges of the late 1930s, but for the whole seven decades of its existence the USSR consistently relegated the rule of law to a secondary role. Even in the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev was lamenting that the Soviet Union had never been 'a law governed society'. The killings had stopped, but the lawlessness continued, and it continues in Russia today.
Would it all have been different if Fanny Kaplan had succeeded in killing Lenin? Or if she had never embarked on her mission in the first place? Counterfactual history is a thankless task; it leaves too much to the individual imagination, but there is evidence that Lenin's brush with death changed the whole tenor of Soviet politics.
The terror against 'class enemies' prompted an unprecedented flight of the brightest and best in Russian society. Members of the former middle class were denounced as bourzhoui, 'bourgeois parasites', and 'non-persons'. Their homes were confiscated, their furniture seized and their clothes requisitioned for the state. They were placed in the lowest category for food rations, on the border of starvation, and forced to do cruel, often deadly labour.
Of those intellectuals, scientists and artists who had not been mown down by the Cheka, between one and two million fled abroad. It was a brain drain that left the nation bereft. Shortly before he himself starved to death, the philosopher Vasily Rozanov wrote presciently:
With a clank, a squeal and a groan, an iron curtain has descended over Russian history: the show is over, the audience has risen. It's time for people to put on their coats and go home. But when they look around they see there are no coats anymore, and no more homes.
The men and women who had made the country function - doctors, engineers, chemists, architects, inventors - were gone, dead or fled. Their absence hastened the economic collapse, industry stalled and factories closed. With wages losing 90 per cent of their value, even the proletariat began to desert the Bolsheviks. 'Down with Lenin and horsemeat,' scrawled the Petrograd graffiti, 'Give us the Tsar and pork!' When strikes broke out, the government turned its Red Terror on the workers, with mass firings, arrests and executions.
As his hold on power became ever more fragile, Lenin abandoned his promises of freedom, justice and self-determination. The rhetoric of liberation gave way to what came to be known as War Communism
harsh, enslaving and repressive. Lenin had come to power promising 'Peace, Bread, Land and Workers Control'. But after 1918 the Bolsheviks would rescind every one of these promises.
Between 1918 and 1921, forced labour was imposed on the population, with breaches of discipline punishable by death. The labour camps began to fill up with 'anti-revolutionary elements'. A siege mentality informed the government's every act. Workers were no longer seen as agents of the revolution but as raw material, an expendable resource to be exploited in the great experiment of building socialism. Instead of peace, Lenin had brought devastation. Instead of bread
starvation. Instead of land - requisitions. Instead of workers representation - terror. Winston Churchill commented tartly that 'Lenin's aim was to save the world, his method to blow it up'. The British consul in Petrograd, Colonel R. E. Kimens reported:
The only work done by the Soviet authorities is the inciting of class hatred, requisitioning and confiscation of property, and destruction of absolutely everything. All freedom of word and action has been suppressed; the country is being ruled by an autocracy that is infinitely worse than that of the old regime. Justice does not exist and every act on the part of persons not belonging to the 'proletariat' is interpreted as counter revolutionary and punished by imprisonment and in many cases execution . The Soviet authorities' one object is to overthrow the existing order of things and capitalism, first in Russia and afterwards in all other countries, and to this end all methods are admissible.
Lenin seemed unmoved. In the years after he was shot by Fanny Kaplan, it is hard to find a word of human sympathy or concern anywhere in his collected works. Directives that he signed personally called for ever-greater repressions in the name of Bolshevism.
'If it is necessary for the realization of a specific political goal to perform a series of brutal actions, then it is necessary to perform them in the most energetic manner,' Lenin wrote to Molotov. 'We must ...
put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for decades,' he wrote of those priests who were resisting his campaign to close the churches and confiscate church property. 'The greater the numbers of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing . the better. Because these people must be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to even think of further resistance for decades to come.'
Russia was slipping into anarchy. Strikes were crippling the towns, the countryside riven by revolt. And Lenin's response was still more terror.