Fanny Kaplan
Encyclopedia
Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan , also known as Fanya Kaplan and as Dora Kaplan), was a Russian political revolutionary and an attempted assassin
Assassination
To carry out an assassination is "to murder by a sudden and/or secret attack, often for political reasons." Alternatively, assassination may be defined as "the act of deliberately killing someone, especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons."An assassination may be...

 of Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

.

Biography

There is some confusion as to Kaplan's birth name. Vera Figner
Vera Figner
Vera Nikolayevna Figner was a Russian revolutionary and narodnik born in Kazan, Russia.-Biography:...

, in her memoirs, At Women's Katorga
Katorga
Katorga was a system of penal servitude of the prison farm type in Tsarist Russia...

, gives the name Feiga Khaimovna Roytblat-Kaplan (Фейга Хаимовна Ройтблат-Каплан). Other sources give her original family name as Ройтман (transliterated from Russian as Roytman, which corresponds to the common German/Yiddish name Reutemann). [Actually, given the results of a certain vowel shift in Yiddish, "Roytman" would be the Yiddish word with the English meaning "Redman", whose German equivalent would be "Rothman".]

Kaplan was born into a Jewish family, one of seven children. She became a political revolutionary at an early age and joined a socialist group, the Socialist Revolutionaries
Socialist-Revolutionary Party
thumb|right|200px|Socialist-Revolutionary election poster, 1917. The caption in red reads "партия соц-рев" , short for Party of the Socialist Revolutionaries...

 (Esers). In 1906, when she was 16 years old, Kaplan was arrested in Kiev over her involvement in a terrorist bomb plot, and committed for life to the katorga
Katorga
Katorga was a system of penal servitude of the prison farm type in Tsarist Russia...

 system (a form of forced labour). She served in the Maltsev and Akatuy prison
Akatuy katorga
Akatuy katorga prison was part of the Nerchinsk katorga system of the Russian Empire in the Nerchinsk okrug of Transbaikalia. It was constructed in 1888 at the Akatuyskom mine, what is now the village of New Akatuy...

s of Nerchinsk katorga
Nerchinsk katorga
Nerchinsk katorga was a katorga system of the Russian Empire in the Nerchinsk okrug of Transbaikalia , between rivers Shilka and Argun, near the border to Mongolia, in 18th-20th centuries.Katorga labor was used for mining lead ore and silver on emperor's private lands Nerchinsk katorga (Russian:...

, Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

, where she lost her sight (partially restored later). She was kept in the Maltzevskaya prison, where she was severely caned with birches (розги) on her bare body as disciplinary corporal punishment. Fully undressed corporal punishment was not usual for political prisoners at that time. She was released on March 3, 1917, after the February Revolution
February Revolution
The February Revolution of 1917 was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. Centered around the then capital Petrograd in March . Its immediate result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the end of the Romanov dynasty, and the end of the Russian Empire...

 overthrew the imperial government. As a result of her imprisonment, Kaplan suffered from continuous headaches and periods of blindness.

Kaplan became disillusioned with Lenin as a result of the conflict between the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

 party. The Bolsheviks had strong support in the soviets
Soviet (council)
Soviet was a name used for several Russian political organizations. Examples include the Czar's Council of Ministers, which was called the “Soviet of Ministers”; a workers' local council in late Imperial Russia; and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union....

; however, in elections to a competing body, the Constituent Assembly
Russian Constituent Assembly
The All Russian Constituent Assembly was a constitutional body convened in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917. It is generally reckoned as the first democratically elected legislative body of any kind in Russian history. It met for 13 hours, from 4 p.m...

, the Bolsheviks failed to win a majority in the November 1917 elections and a Socialist Revolutionary was elected President in January 1918. The Bolsheviks, favoring soviets, ordered the Constituent Assembly
Russian Constituent Assembly
The All Russian Constituent Assembly was a constitutional body convened in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917. It is generally reckoned as the first democratically elected legislative body of any kind in Russian history. It met for 13 hours, from 4 p.m...

 to be dissolved. By August 1918 conflicts between the Bolsheviks and their political opponents had led to the banning of most other influential parties - most recently, of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had been the Bolsheviks' principal coalition partner for some time, but had organized a revolt in July because of their opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. Kaplan decided to assassinate Lenin.

Assassination attempt

On August 30, Lenin spoke at a Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

 factory called "Hammer and Sickle". 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. One passed through Lenin's coat, the other two hit him in the left shoulder and jaw.

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 later killed him.

Kaplan was taken into custody and interrogated by the Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...

. She made the following statement:
My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at 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 Kyiv. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.

When it became clear that Kaplan would not implicate any accomplices, she was executed on September 3, 1918.

Legacy

In recent years the actual role of Kaplan in the assassination attempt has been questioned by several historians (amongst them Arkadi Vaksberg and Donald Rayfield). Vaksberg says it was Lidia Konopleva, another SR, who 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. 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. Another argument points to the contradiction between the official Soviet account (Kaplan was immediately seized by angry workers who witnessed the event) and official documents, in particular a radiogram by Yakov Peters
Yakov Peters
Jēkabs Peterss or Yakov Khristoforovich Peters was a Latvian Communist revolutionary, Soviet politician, chekist, and terrorist. Together with Feliks Dzerzhinsky, he was one of the founders and chiefs of the VChK...

 which talks about an arrest of several suspects.

In the official announcement Kaplan was declared a Right Eser. On the same day, Moisei Uritsky
Moisei Uritsky
Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky was a Bolshevik revolutionary leader in Russia.He was born in the city of Cherkasy, Kiev Governorate, to a Jewish family. His father, a merchant, died when Moisei was little and his mother raised her son by herself.Moisei studied law at the University of Kiev...

, People's Commissar for Internal Affairs in the Northern Region and head of the Cheka in Petrograd, was assassinated. While the Cheka did not find any evidence linking the two events, their co-occurrence appeared significant in the overall context of the intensifying civil war. The Bolshevik reaction was an abrupt escalation in the persecution of their opponents.

An official decree for Red Terror
Red Terror
The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as having been officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended about October 1918...

 was issued only hours after the Kaplan shooting, calling for "a merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the revolution." In the next few months, about 800 Right SRs and other political opponents of Bolsheviks were executed without trial. During the first year the scope of Red Terror expanded significantly and the number of executions grew into the thousands. Some historians consider this to be a harbinger of the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

, but others consider that the purges of the 1930s and the Great Purge were not only quantitatively different from the Red Terror under Lenin, but also took place for very different reasons and in a very different context.
Several writers included Kaplan as characters in their plays ('Fanny Kaplan' by Venedikt Erofeev
Venedikt Erofeev
Venedict Vasilyevich Yerofeyev or Erofeev or Erofeyev was a Russian writer.-Biography:Yerofeyev was born in the small settlement Niva-2, a suburb of Kandalaksha, Murmansk Oblast. His father was imprisoned during Stalin's purges but survived 16 years in the gulags. Most of Yerofeyev's childhood...

; 'Kill me, o my beloved!' by Elena Isaeva).

Further reading

Yuri Felshtinsky, Lenin and His Comrades (New York: Enigma Books, 2010), ISBN 978-1-929631-95-7.

External links

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