Fanny Kaplan

Vladimir Pchelin's depiction of the assassination attempt

On August 30, 1918, Lenin spoke at the Hammer and Sickle, an arms factory in south Moscow.[7] As Lenin left the building and before he entered his car, Kaplan called out to him. When Lenin turned towards her, she fired three shots with a Browning pistol.[2] One bullet passed through Lenin's coat, the other two struck him: one passing through his neck, puncturing part of his left lung, and stopping near his right collarbone; the other lodging in his left shoulder.[2][8]

Lenin was taken back to his living quarters at the Kremlin. He feared there might be other plotters planning to kill him and refused to leave the security of the Kremlin to seek medical attention. Doctors were brought in to treat him but were unable to remove the bullets outside of a hospital. Despite the severity of his injuries, Lenin survived. However, Lenin's health never fully recovered from the attack and it is believed the shooting contributed to the strokes that incapacitated and eventually killed him in 1924.[9]

There are contradictory stories of her capture. According to the testimony of Deputy Commissar S. N. Batulin, he was within 20 steps of Lenin when he heard three shots and saw Lenin face down on the ground. Afterwards, he identified a woman whom he felt looked suspicious and detained her. This turned out to be Kaplan.[10] However, factory commissar N. I. Ivanov claimed to have arrested her after she was identified by several children who had followed her down the street.[1]^:439 During interrogation by the Cheka, she made the following statement:

My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.[11]

When it became clear that Kaplan would not implicate any accomplices, she was executed in Alexander Garden, the order was carried out by the commander of the Kremlin, the former Baltic sailor P. D. Malkov and a group of Latvian Bolsheviks[12] on September 3, 1918 with a bullet to the back of the head.[2] Her corpse was bundled into a barrel, and set alight. The order came from Yakov Sverdlov who, just six weeks before, had ordered the execution of the tsar and his family.[13] Because there were no remains, rumors of her survival in Siberian labor camps persisted for years.[1]^:442

Grigory Semyonov, a military commander in the SR who later turned state's evidence against the group, testified in 1922 that Kaplan had been a member of his organization and that he regarded her as the "best person to carry out the attack on Lenin".[3][14]

Some historians such as Dmitri Volkogonov, Arkady Vaksberg, and Donald Rayfield have questioned the actual role of Kaplan in the assassination attempt. Volkogonov suggests "it is more likely" that Kaplan was actually not the culprit, and describes her assassination attempt as "another of the many mystifications of Bolshevik history".[15] Vaksberg states that Lidia Konopleva, another SR, was the culprit, believing it would be all too comforting that Lenin narrowly avoided being assassinated by a woman whose personality is so far from the stereotype of a national hero.[16] In particular, it is suggested that she was working on behalf of others and after her arrest assumed sole responsibility. The main argument put forth in this and other versions is her near-blindness, as well as the fact that none of the witnesses actually saw her fire the gun.[15][17] Another argument points to the contradiction between the official Soviet account and official documents, in particular a radiogram by Yakov Peters, which mentions the arrest of several suspects instead of just one. Furthermore, the bullet removed from Lenin's neck after his death was found to have been fired from a weapon other than the one Kaplan had.[3][18] Semion Lyandres goes so far as to argue that Kaplan was not even a SR.[1]^:433

Moisei Uritsky

Despite her refusal to name any accomplices, in the official announcement of the assassination attempt, Sverdlov blamed the Right SRs, although they themselves denied any involvement.[1]^:432 Moisei Uritsky, People's Commissar for Internal Affairs in the Northern Region and head of the Cheka in Petrograd, had been assassinated nearly two weeks prior to the attack on Lenin.[19] While the Cheka did not find any evidence linking the two events, their occurring so close together appeared significant in the context of the intensifying civil war. The Bolshevik reaction was an abrupt escalation in the persecution of their opponents.[11]

An official decree announcing the Red Terror was issued only hours after the Kaplan shooting, calling for all-out struggle against enemies of the revolution.[20] In the next few months, about 800 Right SRs and other political opponents of Bolsheviks were executed. During the first year, the scope of the Red Terror expanded significantly.