Much about Fanny Kaplan remains uncertain, even her first name. She may have been born Vera, and was also known as Dora. She may also have had some connection with the British secret service spy ‘Sydney Reilly; – the notorious ‘Ace of Spies’ – but the early 20th-century revolutionary waters she inhabited were full of currents of rumour, allegation and ad hoc alliances. Speculation apart, however, Fanny’s political background shows her to be a classic revolutionary of her time and place. Born in 1883 into a peasant family, she was Jewish at a time when there were severe restrictions on Jews in Russia, and when Jewish activists operated at every level of resistance.
Fanny joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and was wounded in 1906 when transporting explosives in Kiev – the explosives were to be used to blow up a Tsarist official. She was deported to Siberia, where she languished in ill health for 11 years, only being released after the February Revolution of 1917, which established a Constituent Assembly. In October, the Bolsheviks seized power, and to the amazement of Russian progressives, the assembly that Russians had struggled and died for over the course of many decades of great sacrifice, was simply dissolved in January 1918 by Bolshevik diktat.
In August 1918, Fanny – who was undoubtedly aware of precedent (see 1793: Charlotte Corday assassinates Marat) – accosted Lenin in the street. She challenged him briefly about the Bolshevik tyranny, then shot him twice. Under interrogation, Fanny expressed no remorse and said that Lenin had betrayed the Revolution by dissolving the Constituent Assembly.
What Happened Next
In 1918, revolutionary sentiment and sympathy were still factors to be reckoned with among the new Bolshevik rulers, and Krupskaya – Lenin’s widow – denied with tears in her eyes that Fanny had been executed. In fact, she was shot in September and her body was ordered to be destroyed, ‘without trace’. The attempted assassination is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of history. A dead Lenin would almost certainly have meant the end of the Bolshevik’ grip on power, as the grip was Lenin’s iron grip. Lenin died in 1924, with one of Fanny’s bullets still in his neck. By this date, the Revolution’s power structures – most particularly Lenin’s Cheka, the organisation which dealt ruthlessly with perceived subversion, were firmly in place. At the time of Fanny’s execution, the Red Army’s newspaper called for a war without mercy and for the shedding of ‘floods’ of bourgeois blood, and in the immediate aftermath of the execution, thousands more – many of them old socialists – were murdered during the Red Terror. During the Civil War period of 1918-1921, hundreds of thousands of ‘state enemies’ were to be summarily executed. And millions more were to die in the purges and famines of the 1920s and 1930s. See 1920: Lenin disappoints Bertrand Russell.