Assassination attempt on Lenin

30 August 1918 was the blackest day for the Bolsheviks since they had seized power. In the morning in Petrograd a young poet and former officer cadet, Leonid Kannegisser, shot dead the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky. In the evening in Moscow, after a rally at the Michelson works, shots were fired at the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Lenin. Two bullets hit him in the neck and shoulder, and for several days it was uncertain whether he would survive. The Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan was detained on the spot. For the Soviet authorities the two attacks became the signal to unleash mass terror, which from then on was officially called red.

A summer of assassinations

In the summer of 1918 Bolshevik power hung by a thread. In the east the Czechoslovak Legion and the troops of the Samara Komuch were pushing along the Volga, and at the beginning of August they took Kazan with the state gold reserve. In the north the Allies landed at Archangel. In Moscow and Petrograd themselves officers, Socialist Revolutionaries and Entente intelligence agents were conspiring. In June the commissar for the press, V. Volodarsky, was killed in Petrograd by a Socialist Revolutionary assassin, and on 6 July the Left Socialist Revolutionaries killed the German envoy Mirbach. Repression was already under way: the Cheka, created in December 1917, was shooting more and more people, often without trial.

The Socialist Revolutionaries, who had won the elections to the Constituent Assembly, had not forgiven Lenin for dispersing it in January. Part of the Socialist Revolutionary Party returned to the methods it had used against tsarist dignitaries before the revolution.

The shot in Petrograd

Moisei Uritsky, a former Menshevik who had gone over to the Bolsheviks in 1917, headed the Petrograd Cheka and was commissar for internal affairs of the Northern Commune. On the morning of 30 August he arrived by car at the commissariat building on Palace Square. Waiting for him in the vestibule was 22-year-old Leonid Kannegisser, the son of a well-known engineer, a poet from the circle of the Petersburg bohème and a former cadet of the Mikhailovsky Artillery School. As Uritsky walked to the lift, Kannegisser shot him in the head from a few paces. The Cheka chief died on the spot.

The killer fled on a bicycle, pursued by a car. On Millionnaya Street he abandoned the bicycle, ran into a building, grabbed a coat in someone else’s flat and tried to slip out through the courtyard, but was caught there. Under interrogation he claimed that he had acted alone and had avenged a friend, the officer Viktor Pereltsweig, recently shot by the Petrograd Cheka. Some historians, however, link him to the underground group of his cousin Maximilian Filonenko, who maintained contacts with Boris Savinkov. Paradoxically, according to Russian researchers, Uritsky was one of those Chekists who opposed shooting people without trial. Kannegisser was executed in October 1918.

The rally at the Michelson works

Despite the news from Petrograd, nobody in Moscow cancelled the rallies planned for that Friday evening, at which members of the government were to speak. Lenin spoke first at a rally in the former Corn Exchange and then drove to the Michelson works in the working-class district of Zamoskvorechye, in the south of the city. He came without a bodyguard, and there was none on the factory grounds either. He spoke about defending the revolution against counter-revolution and intervention, and ended with the words: “We shall die or we shall win!”

As he crossed the courtyard to his car after the rally, he was stopped by a woman complaining about the confiscation of bread at railway stations. At that moment three shots were fired from a Browning M1900 pistol. One bullet passed through his neck and lodged near the collarbone, damaging a lung; the second lodged in his left shoulder. The third, according to some accounts, wounded the woman who had been talking to Lenin. Lenin’s driver, Stepan Gil, drove the wounded man to the Kremlin. According to some accounts Lenin climbed the stairs to his flat by himself, but the doctors soon judged his condition to be very serious. The bullets were not removed, as an operation was considered too risky.

Fanny Kaplan

At a tram stop on Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street a woman was detained who was taken to be the assassin. She was 28-year-old Fanny (Feiga) Kaplan, also known as Dora. As a teenager she had become involved with the anarchists, and in 1906, after the explosion of a bomb being prepared for the governor-general of Kiev, she was sentenced to life at hard labour in Akatuy beyond Lake Baikal. There she almost lost her sight. She was freed only by the February Revolution, and in exile she had drawn close to the Socialist Revolutionaries.

Under interrogation she admitted shooting at Lenin because she considered him a traitor to the revolution who was setting back the ideas of socialism by decades. She said she supported the Constituent Assembly and had acted alone, and refused to say where she had got the weapon. There was neither a proper investigation nor a trial. On 3 September, on the oral order of the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Yakov Sverdlov, the commandant of the Kremlin, Pavel Malkov, shot her in a Kremlin courtyard to the roar of running lorry engines, and her body was burnt in a barrel.

There have long been doubts whether it really was Kaplan who fired. She was almost blind, and according to some historians none of the witnesses saw her with a weapon in her hand. In 1922, at the show trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the party’s former militants Grigory Semyonov and Lidiya Konopleva testified that the attack had been prepared by their group and that Kaplan had been a member of it. Historians such as Dmitri Volkogonov and Arkady Vaksberg considered this version doubtful and did not rule out that someone else had fired. The case has never been cleared up.

Red Terror

That same evening Sverdlov signed an appeal of the VTsIK announcing that the “Right Socialist Revolutionaries” and the “hirelings of the British and French” would answer for the attack, and that the working class would respond to attempts on its leaders with merciless mass terror. The Petrograd Krasnaya Gazeta wrote that thousands of enemies must pay for the life of one revolutionary. In the following days the Cheka arrested thousands of people, and among the hostages were former tsarist dignitaries, officers and members of the bourgeoisie. On 31 August Chekists burst into the British embassy in Petrograd, and on the night of 31 August to 1 September the British representative to the Soviet government, Robert Bruce Lockhart, was arrested in Moscow. The Soviet press quickly linked the attacks with the “Ambassadors’ Plot” that had just been uncovered.

Uritsky was buried with great honours on 2 September on the Field of Mars, and Palace Square was renamed in his honour. That same day the VTsIK declared Soviet Russia a single military camp, and on 5 September the Council of People’s Commissars adopted the decree on Red Terror, which allowed the shooting of persons connected with White Guard organisations, conspiracies and rebellions and the isolation of “class enemies” in concentration camps. In Petrograd alone the authorities announced the shooting of about five hundred hostages within a few days, and a wave of executions swept the whole country.

Lenin survived. Contrary to his doctors’ fears he quickly recovered his strength, and on 25 September he left for convalescence at Gorki outside Moscow. He returned to work in mid-October. For propaganda purposes the attack made him a martyr of the revolution, but his health never returned to what it had been. One of the bullets was removed only in 1922, and some doctors and historians link the effects of his wounds with the illness that killed him in 1924.