Chapter One. The Hammer Drops (Aug. 1918)
The Shot Heard Across Russia
The Assassination of Vladimir Lenin
The Death of Comrade Lenin, painted by Vladimir Pchelin (1927)
The Assassination of Vladimir Lenin
The Death of Comrade Lenin, painted by Vladimir Pchelin (1927)
Chapter One. The Hammer Drops (Aug. 1918)
A revolutionary in ideology, a reactionary to the Bolsheviks
Fanny Kaplan was by no means a reactionary. Born into an impoverished Jewish family during the absolutist era of the Tsar, Kaplan was given a life sentence of hard labor at just 16, due to her plot to kill the governor of Kiev with a homemade bomb being uncovered. For eleven long years, Kaplan was a slave in Siberia, working close to death and barely surviving the horrid conditions. But, her dreams of revolution came true despite her dire circumstances, and with the February Revolution, Fanny Kaplan was a free woman. She returned home in joy, wanting to fulfill her thirst for revolution in Russia. But, that thirst was quenched with a bitter flavor: the Bolsheviks. She had initially been fond of the once-exiled Vladimir Lenin, but Lenin was far more autocratic than she had hoped. The Bolsheviks soon became the dominant force in Revolutionary Russia, and with it, they tightened their grip on the political apparatus. Most opposition parties were outlawed, the Russian Constituent Assembly was abolished, and in March 1918, the Bolsheviks had negotiated a peace treaty with Imperial Germany, effectively giving up much of Russia’s western lands to the German puppet states. To her, this war was a necessity for greater revolution for both Russia and beyond, and Lenin had just handed off her country to the reactionary Kaisers of Berlin and Vienna.
Kaplan had enough of Lenin and what she believed was his betrayal of the revolution, and was not alone in this belief. She joined in the July 1918 uprising in Moscow, where members of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party rose up unsuccessfully against the Soviet government. They managed to assassinate the German ambassador, Wilhelm von Mirbach, but they were unable to overcome the strength of the Bolsheviks, and the Left-SR was banned shortly after. Kaplan managed to avoid arrest, and after witnessing her comrades be brutally subdued by the Bolsheviks she came to hate, she realized she had only one option left: kill the fake revolutionary.
When Vladimir Lenin visited the Hammer and Sickle armaments factory, he knew nothing of Fanny Kaplan. It was just another visit to the working men of Moscow, a means to boost morale and keep the support of the working class, nothing out of the ordinary, and then a female voice called out to him.
“Comrade Lenin!”
He turned around, believing it to be a devoted supporter of his, wanting to express her adoration of him, but soon rang out a gunshot, and Lenin immediately felt something hit his left side, and saw that his clothes had begun to turn dark red.
“Death to the traitor!”
He felt something pierce his chest, and the taste of blood filled his mouth. He realized what had just happened to him, but with rapid blood loss and struggling to breathe, his mind went hazy as the third shot went into his collarbone. Lenin fell to the ground in agonizing pain, and out of his blurring vision, he saw Cheka guards wrestling a peasant woman into the mud, and both locked eye contact as his eyes slowly closed.
This would be the last person he lay eyes on. His guards panicked and rushed his unconscious body into the car, and they struggled to figure out what to do as blood came dribbling out of his mouth. He was not very responsive, he would muster some sounds in response to his name, but he was in critical condition, and he needed to be saved at all costs. When they arrived at the hospital, however, the doctors knew that it was too late. Lenin had already stopped responding once they got to the hospital, and they easily deduced that he had drowned on his blood stemming from his punctured lung, and that Vladimir Lenin was no more.
On August 30, 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was pronounced dead, aged 48.
