Vladimir Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov
“Yakov was mischievous and restless as a boy; he organized games for all the children on his street.”
Klavdia Sverdlov (wife of Yakov Sverdlov),
Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov
Moscow, 1976, p. 60
For the sake of caution, we will call this chapter an assumption, one that has as much right to exist as, for example, the hypothesis that Yakov Sverdlov and Vladimir Lenin were friends; or that Lenin was friends with Stalin. Or, finally, that Lenin was shot by Fanny Kaplan and that Sverdlov died of the Spanish flu. All of Soviet history is riddled with theories and hypotheses. What remains to be determined are those that are correct and those that are not.
The subject herer is another conspiracy: the one by Dzerzhinsky against Lenin. In August 1918, Dzerzhinsky, having failed to undermine the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk through the assassination of Mirbach, attempted to destroy the Brest-Litovsk agreement by getting rid of the promoter of this policy, the chairman of the Sovnarkom, Lenin. This conspiracy is usually known to historians as the Kaplan assassination attempt of August 30, 1918. Like the murder of the ambassador in July, the attempt to assassinate Lenin was carried out through other people, not by the main conspirators themselves. And as will be shown in this chapter, it was the result of a broad anti-Lenin conspiracy within the upper echelons of the party—so broad, in fact, that the plan to eliminate Lenin was evidently known to Sverdlov, who was subsequently eliminated either by Lenin or by the other conspirators—who in March 1919, during the intraparty war between Lenin and Sverdlov, after the abrogation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the end of the First World War, chose to side with Lenin rather than Sverdlov.
Those who do not understand how Sverdlov could have planned to eliminate Lenin at the height of the mortal struggle with “international imperialism,” and how Lenin could have allowed himself to settle scores with Sverdlov at a time when the whole party depended upon him, are referred to Lenin’s pronouncement, cited above and quoted by Lunachasky in his speech “Radiant Precious Genius”: “Imagine that a commander is fighting a war against an enemy and that he has an enemy in his own camp. Before he goes to the front to fight the enemy, he must first clean out his own camp and make it free of enemies.”1
This notion captures the essence of the relations among the Bolshevik leaders. In 1918–1919, the Soviet commander Lenin did nothing but go to the front, but also cleaned out enemies in his own camp. And Sverdlov did his own cleaning, too, just not as successfully. His mistrust of those around him was so serious that after his death, the keys to his personal safe could not be found. The safe was sent to the inventory warehouse of Pavel Malkov, the commandant of the Kremlin, where it remained until July 26, 1935, when it was finally opened. On July 27, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Genrikh Yagoda submitted a list of the safe’s contents to Stalin. It contained czarist-era gold coins in the amount of 108,525 rubles; gold articles, many with precious stones—705 items altogether; seven blank czarist-era passports; czarist bank notes in the amount of 750,000 rubles.2
Also discovered were nine traveling passports, including a passport made out in Sverdlov’s name, prepared in the event that he would have to flee Soviet Russia. From the dispatches of the German diplomatic mission (one of the few that was working in those days in Soviet Russia), it is known that in August 1918, even before the assassination attempt against Lenin, “something resembling a state of panic” settled over Moscow. On August 1, 1918, the German embassy notified Berlin that the leadership of Soviet Russia was transferring “substantial monetary resources” to Swiss banks; on August 15, the embassy wrote that people were procuring traveling passports and that “the air of Moscow... is pregnant with assassination as never before.”3
1919 was a very difficult year. The fact that fourteen countries had launched an offensive against the Soviet republic created such a dangerous situation that it was possible that the party would once again have to go into hiding, if the forces of the domestic counter-revolution and the foreign interventionists should temporarily gain the upper hand. And so passports had to be made for all the members of the Central Committee and above all for V. I. Lenin. Material resources had to be secured for the party as well. To this end, a large sum of czarist-era money was printed (so-called “yekaterinki,” i.e., 100-ruble bills with a portrait of Catherine). In order to keep this money safe, the bills were packed in identical boxes and given to Nikolai Yevgenyevich Burenin for safekeeping in Petrograd. He buried them, as far as I know, outside of the city, somewhere in Lesny, and later even photographed how they were dug up, when the position of the Soviet government finally became secure. At the same time, a document was made out in Burenin’s name (he was a merchant by birth), stating that he was the owner of the Hotel Metropole. This was done in order to provide for the party financially.4
In 1957, Stasova’s revelations were greeted with surprise, since the Bolsheviks did not like to talk about their period of panic. As soon as he received her memoirs, the prominent Menshevik Rafail Abramovich reported about what he had read to another Menshevik and the author of several books, Nikolai Valentinov-Volsky. “The episode with the passports and the money at the beginning of 1919, at the most dangerous moment for Bolshevism in the civil war,” Valentinov-Volsky replied, “is known not only to me, as one of the main members of what was then the Mensheviks’ central committee, but also, independently from me, to four other people [Mensheviks] in New York: L. O. [Dan], B. I. Nicolaevsky, [Yu. P.] Denike, and B. Dvinov. At the time, we ourselves were offered passports by Enukidze and Kamenev, which were prepared for us and for the Bund, and the Bund, which was then operating in Belorussia, even received a rather substantial sum in those very 100-ruble bills that you write about.... I know, as you probably know also, as does [B. K.] Suvarin, that at the same time or some time earlier, they sent a large amount of gold abroad through Mark Natanson; this gold was supposed to be deposited in Swiss banks, in accounts named by the Bolshevik Party. Some part of this gold they gave to Left SRs of Natanson’s stripe, who then used this money to establish Skify Press in Berlin.”5
Lenin was no stranger to panic either. Bukharin recalled how, at moments of crisis, Lenin would “just in case give orders to take such-and such measures in order to recommence underground operations. He [does not] doubt for a second that he would die if defeated.”6
Thus, Sverdlov was not the only government leader who was making arrangements to flee abroad. But it was the Secretariat of the Central Committee, and Sverdlov first and foremost, that was responsible for preparing the party’s transition to an extralegal footing should the Bolsheviks be defeated due to Lenin’s defeatist Brest-Litovsk policy, which had brought the Bolsheviks to a dead end and to the brink of their downfall.
It is remarkable that in his speech about Lenin, which we have already cited, Lunacharsky constantly brought up another genius: Sverdlov. Initially, he explained, it was Sverdlov who was in charge of selecting party workers, i.e., it was he who carried out the duties of the general secretary of the party:
Thus, Comrades, our Bolshevik underground lived under this terrible weight, under this pressure of several thousand atmospheres, and one could watch a person and see whether he was active, whether he was energetic, whether he was an organizer, how well groups crystallized around him. Ya. M. Sverdlov knew all of these types very well. For example, Ivanov or Petrov—who is he? Sverdlov knew when he had joined the party, when he had fled, when he had been released, and so on. This trait was so phenomenally developed in Ya. M. Sverdlov—all of us in party knew about it; therefore, when we were electing people for our Central Committee and the editorial board of our main newspaper, we elected them not because we liked their noses, but following an enormous vetting process. And the people in these positions of leadership had to be tested by life in the most severe, the most merciless fashion. This is how the best men among the intelligentsia and the proletariat gradually filtered through to the best organization in the country: great leaders were being created for the Revolution, which would come later. It is perfectly clear that such an organization and such leaders were unique in the world.
Sverdlov was pointedly placed by Lunacharsky on the same level as the “shining precious genius,” Lenin:
[Lenin] valued Sverdlov very highly. As you know, Sverdlov played a big role in the history of the party—he was the secretary of the Central Committee, worked on selecting and sorting out new personnel, and thus stood at the head of the Soviet government, doing an enormous amount of the most vital work together with Vladimir Ilyich. When Sverdlov died, Vladimir Ilyich said...: A man has died whom no one can replace. We have no other such man in the party.... He must be replaced by a collective.7
In other words, already in 1919 Lenin was making the same accusation against Sverdlov that he would go on to make against Stalin in his “Last Testament”: that he was concentrating unlimited power in his own hands. The unfolding of Lenin’s struggle against Dzerzhinsky and Stalin in 1922–1924—and its final outcome—is described below. How, then, did the struggle between Lenin and Sverdlov—the party’s first general secretary—play out and what was its final outcome?
Historians have usually viewed August 30, 1918, as the date that marked the beginning of the campaign of Red Terror, which came in response to the assassination attempt against Lenin. The accepted view has been that he had been shot by Kaplan, an SR who was arrested, confessed to everything, and either shot or, according to another account, secretly pardoned, and that the terrorist attack had been organized by the leaders of the SRs’ combat group. However, August 30 became a watershed in the history of the Bolshevik Party for quite a different reason. For the first time since seizing power, the Bolsheviks were disposing of one of their own leaders: Lenin was shot by his own party.8
The Russian Federation’s General Prosecutor’s Office has twice started new investigations into the circumstances surrounding the assassination attempt against Lenin on August 30, 1918. On June 19, 1992, Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office, which began looking into the justifiability of the arraignment, sentencing, and execution of Fanny Kaplan on September 3, 1918, by an extrajudicial resolution of the presidium of the Cheka, passed a resolution to reopen this old criminal case:
Yu. I. Sedov, senior judicial advisor at the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation and prosecutor at the department for the rehabilitation of the victims of political repressions, after examining the materials of criminal case No. N-200 against F. Ye. Kaplan, has resolved that:
F. Ye. Kaplan (Roydman) was criminally prosecuted and subsequently executed for attempting to carrying out a terrorist attack against Sovnarkom Chairman V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin).
The materials of the case reveal that the investigation was conducted in a superficial fashion. No forensic or ballistics tests were conducted; witnesses and victims were not questioned; other investigative procedures necessary for a full, comprehensive, and objective investigation of the circumstances of the crime were not conducted.
Therefore, the prosecutor has resolved, under articles 384 and 386 of the penal code of the RSFSR, to commence proceedings in the light of newly discovered evidence.9
The aim of the investigation was to establish “whether Kaplan shot Lenin, and what were her motives and subsequent fate.”10 The investigators were expected to examine her files and those of the Right SRs, who had been convicted in 1922 on charges which included the assassination attempt against Lenin. And since the relevant files were stored in the archives of the former KGB and remained classified until 1992, the investigation of the matter was assigned to the investigations directorate of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Security (the former KGB and the current FSB). After the Ministry of Security was abolished in late February and early March of 1994, the Kaplan case passed to Vladimir Solovyev, a criminal prosecutor at the General Prosecutor’s Office.11
By the summer of 1996, the Kaplan case had been examined by six investigators, who had replaced one another (which could only have had a detrimental effect on the work). The idea of reexamining the terrorist attack did not please the FSB. Although the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation instructed the FSB to get to the bottom of all the circumstances surrounding Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt against Lenin on August 30, 1918, outside the Mikhelson Factory, during which the head of the Sovnarkom received two gunshot wounds, the FSB’s staff did not display any zeal in carrying out their instructions.12
So what did happen on August 30, 1918? Lenin’s secretary, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, recalled: “Comrade Kozlovsky arrived late at night. As a member of the collegium of the Commissariat of Justice, he had been ordered to question Kaplan first.... Kozlovsky told me that Kaplan made an extremely undistinguished, stunted, high-strung, almost hysterical impression. She acted confused, rambled when she talked, and was in a state of depression. Kozlovsky said that the SR organization was undoubtedly behind this, although Kaplan denied it, and that it had a clear connection to the events in St. Petersburg (the murders of Volodarsky, Uritsky), and that, of course, other acts of violence are to be expected. Kozlovsky did not yet know any details about the assassination itself.”13
Immediately following the shooting, even before Kaplan’s first interrogation, which began at 11:30 p.m., the Soviet government accused the SR Party of organizing the terrorist attack. Sverdlov, as head of the VTsIK, signed the resolution: “To everyone, to everyone, to everyone.... Several hours ago a villainous assassination attempt was carried out against Comrade Lenin.... We have no doubt that here, too, we will find traces of the Right SRs, traces of the hirelings of the British and the French.”14
It should be noted that Sverdlov knew about the involvement of the SRs and the “British-French hirelings” in the assassination attempt before he received the first reports about the shooting. For him it was important to make use of the attempt against Lenin in order to dispose of the SRs and to initiate a large-scale terror campaign against all “enemies of the revolution,”15 just as Mirbach’s murder had been used to destroy the Left SR Party.
After Sverdlov’s announcement, the VTsIK issued a decree declaring the transformation of the Soviet republic into an armed camp and the Sovnarkom issued a decree announcing the beginning of the Red Terror. On September 1, Yakov Peters, the deputy head of the Cheka and the head of the Revolutionary Tribunal, reported in Izvestiya that “the arrested woman who fired at Comrade Lenin is a member of the Right SR Party,” but that the terrorist (who had not yet been named) “stubbornly refuses to provide information about her collaborators or to reveal the source of the money that was found on her.... Eyewitness testimony has revealed that a whole group of people participated in the assassination attempt, since as Comrade Lenin was approaching his car, several people stopped him under the pretence of wanting to talk to him. A congestion of people was deliberately created at the exit.”
Thus, a whole group participated in the assassination attempt, but Kaplan, who was first named only on September 3 in the morning edition of Izvestiya, had for some reason been transferred on September 1 from her solitary cell in the Cheka jail to the Kremlin jail; and on September 3 at 4 p.m. she was shot by Pavel Malkov, the commandant of the Kremlin. On September 4, Izvestiya reported that “Fanny Roydman (Kaplan), who shot at Comrade Lenin, has been executed in accordance with a Cheka resolution.”16
Descriptions of the assassination attempt and of Kaplan’s arrest are numerous and contradictory. She was arrested by S. N. Batulin, an assistant to the military commissar of the Fifth Moscow Soviet Infantry Division, who testified that she had been picked up far from the scene of the shooting and following a chase:
Approaching the car in which Comrade Lenin was to depart, I heard three sharp, dry sounds, which I interpreted not as gunshots but as ordinary motor noises. Following these sounds, I saw the crowd of people who had previously been standing peacefully by the car now starting to run in different directions, and I saw Comrade Lenin behind the car, lying immobile with his face to the ground. I understood that an assassination attempt against Comrade Lenin had taken place. I did not see the person who had shot Comrade Lenin. I did not lose my head and I shouted: “Hold the murderer of Comrade Lenin!”—and shouting this, I ran out to Serpukhovskaya Street, where people who had been scared by the shots and by the general disorder were running in different directions, alone and in groups.... On Serpukhovskaya Street...behind me, beside a tree, I saw a woman holding a briefcase and an umbrella, whose strange appearance caught my attention. She had the appearance of a person who was being chased; she looked harassed and frightened. I asked this woman why she was here. She replied: “Why do you need to know?” Then, searching her pockets and taking her briefcase and umbrella, I told her to follow me.... On Serpukhovskaya Street, someone from the crowd recognized this woman as the person who had shot Comrade Lenin. After this I asked her again: “Did you shoot Comrade Lenin?” She replied in the affirmative, refusing to name the party on whose orders she did the shooting.... In the military commissariat of the Zamoskvoretsky district, this woman, whom I had arrested, named herself as Kaplan and confessed to attempting to assassinate Comrade Lenin.17
Lenin’s driver, Gil, did not see the assassin.18 Moreover, as it later turned out, none of the questioned witnesses who had been present at the scene of the shooting had seen the person who shot Lenin face-to-face and none of them were able to identify Fanny Kaplan as the guilty party.19 There was only indirect evidence against her, and the witnesses’ testimony was full of contradictions. Some had seen a strange woman in some kind of hat; others had seen a woman with no hat, but a kerchief on her shoulders; some had seen a woman in a short jacket, others in an autumn coat; the majority could remember nothing more than a hand with a gun. There were even greater discrepancies in witnesses’ accounts of the perpetrator’s arrival at the factory. Some claimed that she had entered the building several minutes after Lenin’s arrival. Others asserted that a strange woman had turned up at the factory workshop even before the meeting, and that workers had seen her smoking constantly. The circumstances of her arrest were altogether vague: she had either been arrested immediately in the factory yard, or else she had had time to run away and was arrested at a considerable distance from the scene of the shooting. According to some witnesses, she had been chased down the street; according to others, she had walked down the street calmly, then stopped, tossed papers of some kind out of her briefcase, and then for some reason collected them again. Someone had even noticed that she tore something up in front of her pursuers.20
The first interrogation took place at the Zamoskvoretsky military commissariat. According to the transcript, which Kaplan refused to sign, she admitted that she was guilty of attempting to assassinate Lenin: “Today I shot Lenin. I shot of my own volition.”21 However, this response must be considered extremely peculiar. It could have been given only by a person who did not know when exactly the assassination attempt had taken place. The interrogation was conducted by A. M. Dyakonov, head of the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal and member of the collegium of the Cheka, and Abram Belenky, the future head of Lenin’s guard. Kaplan was requested to provide some kind of proof that she had really done the shooting. But she could not give any details about the assassination: “How many shots I fired—I don’t remember.” “I won’t tell you what gun I used; I don’t want to talk about details.”22 Kaplan further informed her questioners that she had been arrested “at the entrance to the meeting.” Not “at the exit,” as might have been said by someone who had just fired at Lenin as he was leaving the meeting, but “at the entrance.” Naturally, her testimony that she had been arrested there also contradicted the recollections of witnesses who claimed that she had been apprehended at some distance from the scene of the crime.
From the Zamoskvoretsky commissariat, on Peters’ request, Kaplan and M. G. Popova—a woman who was wounded along with Lenin—were taken in separate cars to the Cheka. Chekist Grigory Alexandrov rode in Kaplan’s car; Zinaida Legonkaya, the “Chekist-scout,” accompanied Popova on a Red Cross truck. At the Lubyanka, those arrested were met by People’s Commissar of Justice Dmitry Kursky; Mechislav Kozlovsky, a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Justice; Varlam Avanesov, VTsIK secretary; Peters; and Nikolai Skrypnik, the head of the Cheka’s counter-revolution department. Sverdlov arrived later. Over a period of four days—from August 30 until September 2—more than 40 witnesses were questioned. The last interrogation of Kaplan that is known to us is dated August 31.
The Kaplan interrogations at the Cheka were dry and formal. All six were conducted during the twenty-four hours following her arrest and were very short. She was interrogated by different people who asked the same questions. Apparently, there was no doubt that she had carried out the shooting. But she had to provide all of the evidence against herself. The investigators had nothing incriminating: no one could identify her, no weapon had been found on her. Kaplan agreed to sign the transcripts of only two of the interrogations. She possessed no information that was of interest to the Cheka. One of the interrogations was described as follows: “The interrogation went smoothly, without complications; everything that was said was carefully recorded. Although reluctantly, Kaplan told about her childhood and her family.... And she said nothing illuminating about her participation in the assassination attempt against Lenin. How did she get into the meeting at the Mikhelson Factory? Who gave her orders and helped her by watching the scene? Who provided her with money and a weapon? Not a word about any of this.”23 And, naturally, this was not because the Chekists were incapable of beating the information out of her.
Popova, a common citizen who had asked Lenin questions while standing beside his car and was hit by one of the bullets, was treated in a completely different fashion. Her wound was dressed in a hospital; then she was taken to the Zamoskvoretsky military commissariat (where Kaplan was also brought); and from there to the Cheka jail in Lubyanka Square. She was arrested because of the testimony of police officer A. A. Sukhotin:
About four paces from Lenin, a woman was lying on the ground. She looked about 40 years old. She was crying, “I’m wounded, I’m wounded,” while people in the crowd were shouting, “She’s the killer.” I rushed to this woman.24
On the morning of August 31, Popova’s husband and two daughters were also arrested and put in the Cheka jail. Izvestiya reported: “On the day of the fateful assassination attempt against Comrade Lenin, Popova was wounded by a bullet that went through her left breast, shattering a bone on her left side. Her two daughters and husband were arrested, but soon released.”25 Nikolai Skrypnik, Cheka collegium member and head of its counter-revolution department, felt that parents could be arrested on account of their children, but “to keep the children under arrest because their mother was a victim is somewhat indecent.”26 And indeed, the husband and daughters who had been taken hostage were released by the beginning of September, and at the beginning of October Popova herself was let go, her case having been dismissed for lack of evidence. She was given a lump-sum compensatory payment,27 and after Lenin’s death in 1924 she began receiving a personal pension due to the work disability caused by her wound.28
Thus, the suspect Popova was held in jail and questioned for over a month, while Kaplan—who was involved in the assassination attempt and who confessed to carrying out the terrorist attack—was interrogated for one day! So what did Kaplan’s role consist of? Many authors who have studied this issue have come to the conclusion that her job was to establish the time and place of Lenin’s appearances at meetings for the actual terrorists who had designs on his life. After all, according to her testimony, she had come “to the meeting at about 8 p.m.”29 (and it was at this time that she was noticed by numerous witnesses). After learning that Lenin would be speaking at the factory, Kaplan “herself left before the meeting began and conveyed the information about Lenin’s arrival at the factory to the local operative, who was waiting at a prearranged location on Serpukhovskaya Street. She remained behind to wait for the outcome of the assassination attempt on the spot where Commissar Batulin later found her.”30 So why did the conclusions which were easily reached by historians and journalists many years later fail to tempt the Cheka’s investigators in 1918? For some reason unknown to us they preferred to consider her the lone gunwoman—Kaplan, who was arrested with an umbrella in one hand and a briefcase in the other, and, as was revealed later, with nails in her shoes that made it painful for her to walk and to run.31 Furthermore, the Chekists discovered another unexpected complication in dealing with Kaplan: she turned out to be half-blind and half-deaf, half-insane and not an SR.32
Could a half-blind and, apparently, not entirely normal woman have fired several well-aimed gunshots, late at night? Indeed, where did Kaplan learn how to shoot a gun? The experts’ opinion is that “only the firm, well-trained hand of a professional marksman” could have “hit a target from a pistol (or a revolver) under such crowded conditions.”33 On September 2, 1918, Cheka investigator Kingisepp conducted a reenactment of the crime, staging the assassination. Gil played himself. N. Ya. Ivanov was “Lenin,” Kingisepp was “Fanny Kaplan,” and Sidorov, a trade union committee employee, was “Popova.”34 As a result, it was determined that “the shooter was positioned near the front left fender of the car, while Lenin was within a yard of the rear fender. The shots were fired from a distance of 4–4.5 meters, at an angle of 45–50 degrees, and most likely from the car’s fender.”35 It seems unlikely that such shooting could have been done by someone who had no experience firing a gun.
File no. 2162, which contains materials pertaining to the assassination attempt against Lenin on August 30, 1918, has several pages missing: 11, 84, 87, 90, and 94. They were removed from the file and hidden from the eyes of future investigators because they contained the testimony of witnesses who claimed that Lenin had been shot by a man.36 Lenin himself, who was never questioned about the incident, had also seen that the person who fired the gun was a man.37
The question of Lenin’s personal security deserves to be examined separately. “The day of August 30, 1918, got off to a lousy start,” Malkov recalled. “Grim news was received from Petrograd”—M. S. Uritsky (the head of the Petrograd Cheka) had been killed. Dzerzhinsky “immediately took off for Petrograd, in order to oversee the investigation in person.” Lenin “was supposed to speak on that day at the Mikhelson Factory. People close to him, learning about Uritsky’s death, tried to stop Lenin, and talk him out of going to the meeting. In order to calm them, Vladimir Ilyich said at lunch that maybe he would not go, but then he called for a car and drove off.”38 We should add: drove off without bodyguards. Moreover, at the factory where he was to speak, there were no bodyguards either.
This behavior—so atypical for the ordinarily cautious Lenin—was apparently dictated by the fact that on August 29, Sverdlov had sent Lenin the following directive, which was not cancelled despite Uritsky’s murder:
Vladimir Ilyich! Please schedule a meeting of the Sovnarkom for tomorrow, not earlier than 9 p.m. Major meetings will be held in all districts tomorrow according to the plan that you and I have agreed on; advise all Sovnarkom members that, if anyone receives [an invitation] or an appointment to a meeting, no one has [the right] to refuse. The meetings will begin at 6 p.m.39
On orders from Sverdlov, Sovnarkom member Lenin went off—without bodyguards—to deliver a speech that had been announced in the district in advance.40 “Somehow it happened that no one met us: neither the members of the factory committee nor anyone else,” testified Lenin’s driver, Gil.41
Like Gil, we are also surprised: how was it that, on the day when Uritsky was killed, Lenin arrived at the meeting without bodyguards?
All this stands in stark contrast to the security that he had been provided with when he delivered a speech at the same factory on June 28. The event took place in the same hall, in front of the same several thousand people. Responsibility for supervising the security was assigned to A. D. Blokhin, military commissar and head of the Zamoskvoretsky garrison. He was armed with a mauser gun and a revolver. Lenin was met in military fashion, with an official report. Blokhin was accompanied by Red Army soldiers. Together with Lenin, they came out onto the stage. Lenin was embarrassed by such obvious security presence at the factory. He requested that the soldiers be taken away. Blokhin did not rush to carry out the Sovnarkom chairman’s orders, but called his supervisor on security issues, Dzerzhinsky, since it was precisely Dzerzhinsky who had instructed district military committees and garrison commanders to provide security at meetings. Dzerzhinsky gave orders to inform Lenin that he, Dzerzhinsky, would allow the security personnel to be removed from the stage. And this was his only concession.
To identify the organizers of the attack on Lenin, it was extremely important to determine the time at which the shooting took place. This seemingly banal topic turned out to be incredibly convoluted. His driver, S. K. Gil, testified on the night of August 30, i.e., immediately following the shooting, that he had “arrived with Lenin around 10 p.m. at the Mikhelson Factory.... After the end of V. I. Lenin’s speech, which lasted about an hour, a crowd of about 50 people rushed from the building in which the meeting was held toward the car and surrounded him.”42 It is hard to believe that Gil was mistaken and did not remember the time at which he had let Lenin off at the factory gates. If what he says is accurate, then Lenin’s speech ended around 11 p.m. The testimony of police officer A. Sukhotin—which was given at 1 a.m. on August 31, i.e., immediately after the shooting—agrees with this account: “Comrade Lenin arrived around 9 p.m. In about one or two hours, Comrade Lenin finished his speech and headed for the exit.”43
On that day, decree time was shifted back one hour. Due to this, witnesses’ testimony could differ by an hour because of the time change. It is also known that Lenin was the last to speak at the meeting. Therefore, the assassination attempt could have taken place not earlier than 10 p.m., and more likely around 11 p.m., when it was completely dark. It would seem that Gil’s testimony is the most reliable, since the transcript of Fanny Kaplan’s first interrogation clearly indicates the time when it took place: 11:30 p.m. Assuming that her arrest and delivery to the nearest military commissariat, where the interrogation began, took 30–40 minutes, then the time indicated by Gil should be considered the most accurate. And there is another piece of evidence to suggest that the shooting did indeed take place at such a late hour: the meeting at the Mikhelson Factory was not the first at which Lenin had spoken. Before that, he had attended a meeting at the opposite end of Moscow, in the Basmanny district, inside the Grain Exchange building. Several people had given speeches, and his own lasted from thirty minutes to an hour. Travel time from one end of Moscow to the other must have been at least an hour.44
Therefore, Lenin arrived at the factory at approximately 10 p.m. according to the old decree time or at 9 p.m. according to the new decree time, and spoke for about an hour, concluding his speech between 10 and 11 p.m. according to the new decree time. To the great regret of historians, it is impossible to establish the time of the attack on him any more precisely. But it is the exact time of the attack that contains the answer to another puzzle about the organizers of the shooting. It is obvious that some time must have passed between the shots fired at Lenin and the report about these shots that was delivered to Sverdlov.45 But Sverdlov’s announcement about the assassination attempt was signed by the chairman of the VTsIK at 10:40 p.m. This could have happened only if the announcement had been written beforehand, if Sverdlov had been informed about the assassination attempt that was being planned, if he had deliberately allowed the terrorist attack to happen or perhaps was—through the Cheka and Dzerzhinsky—its direct organizer.
Another peculiar item in Sverdlov’s announcement—in addition to the time of its writing—is its first sentence. After clearly defining the enemy of the Revolution—the Right SRs and the British-French hirelings; and after specifying to the minute the time at which the announcement was written—10:40 p.m.; Sverdlov was all too imprecise about the point that called for the greatest precision: the time of the attack itself. “Several hours ago a villainous assassination attempt was carried out against Comrade Lenin...” Meanwhile, no more than half-an-hour could have elapsed since the shooting.
Let us compare this text with the telephone message sent out by Lenin after the murder of German ambassador Count Mirbach on July 6, 1918, which was written at 4:20 p.m.: “At around 3 p.m. two bombs were detonated inside the Germany embassy...”46 Lenin had reacted to the assassination of Mirbach after about an hour and a half. When exactly did Sverdlov write his announcement? When did he find out about the attack that was being planned or had taken place?
Yet Sverdlov’s instructions to Lenin to attend the August 30 meeting without fail and the time at which Sverdlov wrote his “announcement” are not the only and not even the most significant pieces of evidence against him. The interrogations of Kaplan at the Cheka ended on August 31. On September 1, on Sverdlov’s orders, she was transferred from the Cheka jail to a cell in the Kremlin, located under Sverdlov’s office. We know about the details of her transfer there from the memoirs of Malkov, commandant of the Kremlin:
One or two days [after the assassination attempt] I was summoned by [the secretary of the TsIK, who was accountable to Sverdlov, the head of the VTsIK], Varlam Alexandrovich Avanesov.
“Go to the Cheka at once and get Kaplan. You will put her here, in the Kremlin, under reliable guard.”
I called for a car and drove to the Lubyanka. Taking Kaplan, I brought her to the Kremlin, to a semi-basement room underneath the children’s half of the Bolshoi Palace. The room was spacious, with high ceilings.... Another day or two passed and Avanesov again summoned me and showed me a Cheka resolution: Kaplan was to be executed, the sentence was to be carried out by the commandant of the Kremlin, Malkov.... “When?” I asked Avanesov quickly.... “Today. At once.”47
A page later Malkov indicates that he shot Kaplan on September 3 at 4 p.m.48 And although Malkov really did not want to admit it, it is easy to figure out that, on the night of August 31 at the latest, Sverdlov interrupted the interrogations and took Kaplan away to the Kremlin in order to have her shot “at once.” The perplexity of researchers concerning this matter has been expressed by one author as follows:
Probably the reader has become convinced that many details about the assassination attempt against Lenin remain unclear, casting serious doubts on the generally accepted account of the event. What is remarkable is the feverish haste with which Fanny Kaplan was convicted and eliminated in circumstances that are so dark and unnatural that it is difficult to find a reasonable explanation for them. Why was she transferred from the completely secure cellars of the Cheka at the Lubyanka to the Kremlin? Even if we make allowances for the harsh conditions that existed at the time, it is impossible to understand why it was necessary to eliminate Kaplan specifically inside the Kremlin, where the Soviet government was located. Why was the Cheka’s death sentence not carried out by the Chekists themselves? For what reason did the chairman of the VTsIK assume personal responsibility for organizing the execution, appointing the commandant of the Kremlin as its executor? One forms the impression that the organizers of this execution were afraid of something. Kaplan’s last recorded interrogation took place on August 31, and she was shot on September 3. Could she have, perhaps, begun giving testimony that did not suit the investigators and was for this reason so hastily transferred from the Cheka to the Kremlin? Could it have become increasingly likely that she would have to be returned to the Lubyanka? Could this increasing likelihood have been linked to Dzerzhinsky’s return from Petrograd? Could this not have been the reason why the execution was carried out in such haste, inside the Kremlin, where no one could interfere?49
We shall try to unravel the reasons for such strange behavior on Sverdlov’s part. The basic facts of the case are as follows. A certain woman, who was referred to as “Kaplan,” was arrested, subjected to several brief and quite general interrogations by various people, and, not earlier than August 31 and not later September 3, was taken to the Kremlin on orders from Avanesov, who was acting on orders from Sverdlov. In the Kremlin, she either was or was not subjected to further questioning, and on September 3 she either was or was not shot by Malkov. And since Sverdlov, for reasons that are quite mysterious, gave orders to “destroy the remains without a trace,”50 we have no material proof of Kaplan’s execution apart from one author’s assertion that Kaplan’s corpse was doused with gasoline and burned in an iron barrel in Aleksandrovsky Garden.51 Malkov did state, however, that the execution had been witnessed by the Bolshevik poet Demyan Bedny, who was living in the Kremlin and who had come out to the courtyard of the Kremlin after hearing a strange noise. During executions, to keep the public from hearing the shots, the Bolsheviks would usually run the motors of trucks that were standing nearby (usually, the same trucks on which the victims had been brought). Commandant Malkov recalled:
To my displeasure, I ran into Demyan Bedny here, who had come running at the sound of the motors. Demyan Bedny’s apartment was located right above the car squadron, and he had taken the back stairs, which I had forgotten about, and come out right into the courtyard. Seeing me with Kaplan, Demyan immediately understood what was going on, nervously bit his lip, and silently took a step back. However, he had no intention of leaving. So what, then? Let him be a witness.52
But all that Bedny could have witnessed was the execution of some woman, who—he was told—was the Kaplan who had attempted to assassinate Lenin.
Recalling that the assassination of German ambassador Mirbach on July 6 was also directed against Lenin and carried out by the agents of the Cheka, the Soviet government could have again had reasons to suspect the Chekists, above all the Left Communist and opponent of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Felix Dzerzhinsky, of organizing a conspiracy against Lenin. It is possible that it was precisely for this reason that Lenin, Sverdlov, and Trotsky had considered it necessary, in July 1918, to keep the arrested leadership of the Left SR Party not in the Cheka jail, under the control of Dzerzhinsky, but behind the walls of the Kremlin, the key to which was in the possession of Commandant Malkov, who answered to only two people: Lenin and Sverdlov. He took no orders from anyone else.53
Let us note once more who was subordinate to whom. Lenin’s assistant and secretary was Bonch-Bruevich. Sverdlov’s assistant and secretary was Avanesov. Malkov answered to Lenin and Sverdlov, but he did not answer to Bonch-Bruevich and Avanesov. With Bonch-Bruevich and Avanesov, he was on an equal footing.
Had Malkov carried out similar orders in the past? The answer is yes. On the evening of July 7, 1918, he had taken Spiridonova and Sablin—members of the central committee of the Left SR Party and of the VTsIK—to the Kremlin and placed them under arrest. Ordering Malkov to remove Kaplan from the Cheka before Dzerzhinsky’s return from Petrograd would have been a natural move if Sverdlov was not a participant in the conspiracy against Lenin and suspected Dzerzhinsky of organizing the terrorist attack. By removing Kaplan from the Cheka, Sverdlov would have been, first, preventing the murder of Kaplan by Chekists—above all, by Dzerzhinsky—who wished to keep her from testifying; second, preventing Dzerzhinsky from seeing and questioning Kaplan; and third, have an opportunity to question Kaplan inside the Kremlin and to find out what really happened. As it turned out, however, she was taken to the Kremlin only so that she could be shot. And here, of course, there is some missing link that makes it difficult to understand what really happened. After all, if she was executed in the Kremlin with Demyan Bedny as a witness, then someone must have really been in a big hurry.
We have only Malkov’s word to prove that he carried out the execution in accordance with a Cheka resolution. No one ever saw such a resolution. Kaplan’s execution was most likely never officially formalized. It was not even mentioned in the records of the Cheka’s judicial committee. Nor is it very clear how the Cheka could have resolved not only to execute her, but also to order the commandant of the Kremlin to carry out the sentence. The assignment is too routine for such a distinguished revolutionary. But let us suppose that a Cheka resolution did indeed exist. Why would Sverdlov have had to execute Kaplan immediately—and destroy her remains? There is only one conceivable reason: it was important not only to stop her from talking, but also to forestall the identification of her body by the witnesses of the terrorist attack—Lenin, Gil, Batulin, and others.
If the description of the arrest of the woman with a briefcase and an umbrella makes it clear that she was not the one who did the shooting, then Malkov’s account of the events suggests that someone (evidently, Sverdlov) considered it very important to cover up the traces of the crime: a destroyed corpse cannot be identified. After September 3, it was impossible to determine anything: whether the woman with the umbrella and the briefcase who was arrested by Batulin was indeed Kaplan; whether the woman arrested by Batulin was the same one who had spoken to Gil before the start of the meeting, prior to the attack; whether Kaplan was the one who had carried out the attack, i.e., whether she was the woman who had shot Lenin; whether the woman who was shot in the Kremlin was indeed Kaplan; whether the woman who was shot in the Kremlin was the same one who was arrested by Batulin; whether the woman who was shot in the Kremlin was the same one who was seen by Gil and other witnesses near the Mikhelson Factory; whether Kaplan was half-blind and half-deaf; and who exactly was shot in the Kremlin on September 3, 1918? The list of these questions is endless. With Kaplan no longer a living witness, and with her dead body eliminated, it was impossible to answer them. It was Sverdlov who closed the Kaplan case by destroying the most important piece of evidence—the arrested party herself. He could have done so only if he personally wished to avoid an investigation and if he directly was involved in the conspiracy. No other explanations for Sverdlov’s behavior exist.
Nor was it possible, without Kaplan, to answer any questions about her accomplices. Yet Lenin had been shot four times with two guns of different caliber,54 apparently a revolver and a Browning. Kingisepp had discovered four shells while inspecting the scene of the attack and reenacting the crime. On Monday, September 2, he was given the gun by which Lenin had been shot on August 30. According to some accounts, this was a revolver from which three bullets had been fired; according to others, it was a “Browning No. 150489,” with four unused cartridges. It was this Browning that ended up in Moscow’s Historical Museum as the weapon used in the attempt. On April 23, 1922, a bullet “from a medium-size Browning”55 was removed from Lenin’s body. All of this meant that two or three shots could have been fired at Lenin with the Browning, because the seventh bullet—a 6.35 mm type from Browning’s 1906 model—could have remained in the barrel of the gun.
Immediately after the attack on Lenin, on the night of August 30, Alexander Protopopov, a former Left SR, was arrested and shot. In March 1918, he had been the head of the Cheka’s counterintelligence unit; in April, he became the deputy commander of Dmitry Popov’s Cheka military unit. On July 6, when Dzerzhinsky showed up at the headquarters of the Left SRs—who were being protected by Popov—and demanded that Blumkin be given up to the authorities, Protopopov personally arrested Dzerzhinsky, using force while doing so, and dealing Dzerzhinsky several blows. After the Left SRs were destroyed, Protopopov was arrested; but by August 30, he had been released.
This is the first direct piece of evidence that a highly placed Cheka operative—whom someone had released from jail well enough ahead of time—could have also had some connection to the attack on Lenin. Obviously, a person who had beaten up and arrested Dzerzhinsky on July 6 could have been released from jail only by Dzerzhinsky himself.
On September 2, 1919, the Cheka received a “top secret” report from Goryachev, a Chekist who claimed that he had “heard citizen Neyman say that a certain Zinaida Legonkaya had taken part in the assassination attempt, and that in fact this Legonkaya had allegedly done the shooting.” This was the very same “Chekist-scout” who had accompanied Popova to the Lubyanka in the Red Cross truck. Consequently, on September 11 the Cheka issued an order—order No. 653—to arrest and search Maria Fedorovna Neyman and Zinaida Ivanovna Legonkaya.
On September 24, 1919, Legonkaya was interrogated (Neyman’s interrogation is not in the Kaplan file) by the head of the Cheka’s Special Department. She indicated that she had been a party member since 1917, that during the October Revolution she had served as an intelligence officer for the Zamoskvoretsky military commissariat, and that in October-November 1918 she had worked “behind enemy lines.” In the concluding paragraph of her testimony, Legonkaya indicated that she had searched Kaplan and found “in her briefcase a Browning gun, a notebook with pages missing, cigarettes, a train ticket, needles, pins, and various trifles.”
This testimony must be characterized as sensationalistic, since it contains the first mention of a Browning found on Kaplan’s person. It is equally obvious that Legonkaya was not telling the truth. The results of the search, which was conducted at the Zamoskvoretsky commissariat by three women—Legonkaya, D. Bem, and Zinaida Udotova—are well known to us from the recorded testimony of Bem and Udotova, given on August 30, 1918. Zinaida Udotova testified:
During the search, we undressed Kaplan completely and examined all of her things in minutest detail. We held up hems and seams to the light; every fold was smoothed out. Her shoes were meticulously examined; the insoles were removed; the lining was turned inside out. Each item was inspected two or three times. Her hair was combed and smoothed out. But despite the thoroughness of the search, nothing was discovered. She dressed partly by herself, partly with our assistance.
More or less the same thing was reported in her testimony on August 31, 1918, by Legonkaya herself:
During the search, on Comrade Dyakonov’s orders I stood by the door with a revolver at the ready. I did not touch her things at all and only watched Kaplan’s hand movements. The search was thorough, even the hems and seams were examined; the footgear was examined on the inside and the lining was turned inside out. Her hair was combed; her naked body was also examined, between her legs, under her arms. But despite all of this thoroughness, nothing was discovered. She dressed partly by herself, partly with help from us.
The items discovered on Kaplan included: a train ticket to Tomlino, needles, eight hairpins, cigarettes, a brooch—all kinds of trifles. “Nothing else was discovered on Kaplan,” Bem testified. In every other particular, Legonkaya’s list was identical to Bem’s: a notebook with pages missing, cigarettes, a train ticket, needles, pins...56
Legonkaya herself was not even arrested. She was made to sign a summons to appear before the Special Department of the Cheka upon request and released. About her subsequent fate, nothing is known, but it is curious that her file was reviewed by the NKVD in November 1934, and it is difficult to suppose that, having taken up her case once more, the NKVD left her at liberty.
Rumors that Kaplan was, in fact, never executed began to spread in the 1930s–1940s among convicts in prisons and concentration camps who had allegedly seen her working in the prison administrative office or the library in the Solovki Prison, in Vorkuta, in the Urals, and in Siberia. Persistent rumors circulated throughout the 1930s that she had been seen in the Verkhne-Uralsk and Solikamsk prisons, and that later the warden and the director of the prison had even pointed out her cell.
Fuel was added to the fire by the memoirs of Comintern activist Angelica Balabanova. Upon her return from Stockholm shortly after the assassination attempt, she visited Lenin and inquired about Kaplan’s subsequent fate. He told her that the answer to this question would depend “on the Central Committee.” He said this in such a tone of voice that she did not ask about Kaplan again. “It became clear to me,” she wrote, “that the decision would be made by other people and that Lenin himself was not in favor of executing her.... Neither Lenin’s words nor those of other people warrant the conclusion that an execution took place.”
Balabanova wrote that her meeting with Lenin took place “at a secret location” where he had been taken “on the advice of physicians and out of precaution.” “Physically, he had not yet recovered from the attack,” and “he spoke about his health very reluctantly.” The “secret location” was Gorki, where he and Krupskaya went on September 24–25. Therefore, Balabanova’s meeting with him took place at the end of September or the beginning of October 1918. It is inconceivable that by this time Lenin did not know about Kaplan’s execution, if only because reports about it had appeared in Izvestia and in the Cheka’s newsletter.57 The way in which Balabanova describes taking leave of Krupskaya seems even more implausible. According to her account, Krupskaya embraced her and “with tears, said.... ‘How frightening this is—to execute a revolutionary in a revolutionary country.’”58 Today we know for certain that Lenin was not afraid of executing people, including revolutionaries. It is very difficult to believe that one month after the assassination attempt Krupskaya—who had spent all this time beside the recovering Lenin—should have shed tears on account of the executed and half-insane Kaplan. It is even more difficult to suppose that she did not know about the execution. Unless she was talking not about Kaplan, but about some other woman? But then everything described by Balabanova would have been tantamount to Lenin divulging a state secret by, and neither he nor Krupskaya would have ever agreed to that. However, rumors that Kaplan had not been executed had to be explained somehow. Perhaps people in the camps had seen another woman who had been convicted for shooting Lenin on August 30, 1918? Perhaps this was the woman who really had shot Lenin? Perhaps the NKVD had reviewed the case of Chekist Zinaida Legonkaya in 1934 and finally arrested her, and perhaps it was she who became known in the camps as the previously “pardoned” Kaplan?
Taken to the Kremlin after the shooting, surrounded by doctors, Lenin was convinced that he was about to die. Bonch-Bruevich, a man who was loyal to Lenin personally—his personal secretary and the executive secretary of the Sovnarkom—was the first to come to Lenin’s side, along with his wife, Vera Velichkina, who had medical training. Only in her presence were doctors permitted to give Lenin morphine, an overdose of which could kill a sick person. The first injection was administered by Velichkina herself.59 According to Bonch-Bruevich’s memoirs, Lenin tried to understand whether he was badly hurt: “‘What about the heart?... It is far from the heart... The heart cannot be hurt...’ Lenin asked. And then he said something very strange, as if he thought that he was being killed by his own people: ‘Why torture me? Why not just kill me at once...,’ he said quietly and fell silent, as if falling asleep.”60
Lenin’s attitude toward the official account of Kaplan’s shooting was skeptical. According to Sverdlov, by September 1, Lenin was “jokingly” cross-examining the doctors. Of course, not “jokingly” at all—he had no time for jokes. He was cross-examining the doctors quite seriously, trying to understand what had happened and what was happening.61
On September 14, Lenin talked to Malkov. One can imagine two alternative scenarios. Either Malkov told Lenin that he had shot Kaplan on Sverdlov’s orders and destroyed the corpse without a trace. Or, on Sverdlov’s orders, Malkov told Lenin nothing. In the former case, it would have become clear to Lenin that Sverdlov was covering his tracks and that the conspiracy had been organized by Sverdlov. In the latter case, we must suppose that Kaplan’s execution was concealed from Lenin in order not to compromise Sverdlov. But it would have hardly been possible to keep this information secret for long.
It turned out, however, that even wounded, Lenin could make things difficult for Sverdlov as long as he remained in the Kremlin. Lenin was therefore sent away from Moscow—to Gorki. The analogy to Lenin, Stalin, and Gorki in 1922–1923 naturally comes to mind. Officially, in 1922–1923 Lenin was sent to Gorki to recover. The last chapter of this book will show how he was in fact squeezed out of his position by Stalin, exiled, and died in mysterious circumstances. But it was Sverdlov, not Stalin, who first thought of Gorki, in 1918. And reading about Sverdlov’s “concern” for the health of the wounded “Ilyich,” one is reminded of Stalin’s “concern” for the ailing Lenin in 1922–1923. Let us refer to Malkov’s memoirs:
Ilyich started getting up from his bed. On September 16, for the first time after his illness, he took part in a meeting of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, and on the same evening he chaired a meeting of the Sovnarkom. Ilyich had returned to work!
What good news! Could the overworked Sverdlov finally relax? Not quite. As Malkov goes on:
In those days, I was summoned by Yakov Mikhailovich. I found the head of the Moscow provincial executive committee in his office; Yakov Mikhailovich instructed the two of us to find a decent house outside the city where Ilyich could be temporarily moved, so that he might rest and recover all his strength.
“Keep in mind,” Yakov Mikhailovich instructed us, “that no one must know about this assignment. Don’t tell anyone anything. Do everything by yourselves and keep me informed.”
This was how the famous Gorki came about. It was an estate that had once belonged to Reynbot, the former city governor of Moscow (who had married the widow of Savva Timofeyevich Morozov, the protagonist of this book’s first chapter). Sverdlov “gave orders to prepare Gorki for Ilyich’s move,” Malkov recalls. “He again emphasized that everything must be kept strictly secret.... Dzerzhinsky assigned ten Chekists to provide security at Gorki, subordinating them to me. I drove them to the location....and on the following day I drove Vladimir Ilyich and Nadezhda Konstantinovna to Gorki. This was around September 24–25, 1918.”
Visitors to Gorki were few: Sverdlov, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Bonch-Bruevich. As would happen repeatedly in 1922–1923, Lenin was impatient to return to the Kremlin, but he was not permitted to do so. In order to keep Lenin in Gorki, major repairs were started in his apartment in the Kremlin:
By the middle of October, Vladimir Ilyich felt considerably better and began asking more and more often how the repairs were going and how soon he would be able to return to Moscow. I told Yakov Mikhailovich about this, and he replied:
“Drag them out, drag out the repairs.... Let him stay a while longer where the air is fresh, let him rest.”62
Sverdlov’s main purpose was to demonstrate to party workers that the Soviet government could function perfectly well without Lenin. All of September and the first half of October, Sverdlov and Alexei Rykov took turns presiding over Sovnarkom meetings. All other top leadership posts—chairman of the VTsIK and secretary of the Central Committee, chairman of the Politburo and chairman of the Central Committee—already belonged to Sverdlov. “Look, Vladimir Dmitriyevich, we’re surviving without Vladimir Ilyich,”63 Sverdlov once said to Bonch-Bruevich. Can there be any doubt that Bonch-Bruevich reported this conversation to Lenin?
It should be noted that Sverdlov was not the only one who was surviving without Lenin: the same was true of Trotsky. Speaking on October 1, 1918 at a joint meeting of the Moscow Soviet and workers’ organizations, he remarked:
Over the relatively short period of time from the moment when the traitorous shot was fired at Comrade Lenin until today, the position of the Soviet army has stabilized. Every day, the Soviet army is taking gigantic steps forward.
Trotsky told his audience that he had visited Lenin “yesterday,” and that he was “certain that the two bullets inside his body were not preventing him from keeping track of everything and from gently prodding everyone—which, of course, does not hurt.”64
In other words, the wounded Lenin was not too much in the way, while the development of the army in his absence was “taking giant steps forward.”
In October, the repairs to Lenin’s apartment were finished. Apparently, Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin’s personal friend and secretary, was the only person who did not want Lenin to rest and breathe fresh air: he immediately told Lenin that the repairs were completed and that he could return to the Kremlin.65 Malkov recalls:
About three weeks after moving to Gorki, Vladimir Ilyich met me during one of my visits with a kind of exaggerated courtesy.
“So, Comrade Malkov, will the repairs in my apartment be over soon?”
“Well, you know, Vladimir Ilyich, things are not so easy...”
He suddenly became stern.
“...The repairs in the Kremlin ended two days ago. I have found this out... Tomorrow, I’m going back to Moscow and returning to work. Yes, yes. Tomorrow. You can, by the way, let Yakov Mikhailovich know about this. Because I know who’s giving you orders. So, remember—tomorrow!”
And, sharply turning his back to me, Vladimir Ilyich went to his room. On the following day, he came back to Moscow.66
Thus, with the assistance of the evil Bonch-Bruevich, who wished to do him harm, Lenin returned from exile, where he had been sent by the good Sverdlov in order to relax under the gentle eyes of ten of Dzerzhinsky’s Chekists.
By this time, Bonch-Bruevich—and Lenin, who was getting his information from him—had another reason to enter into conflict with Sverdlov. If Sverdlov, the conspirator, had had plans to dispose of the wounded Lenin, then he had been hampered in his designs inside the Kremlin by Bonch-Bruevich and his wife, Velichkina, who were always by Lenin’s side. And it seems too suspicious a coincidence that, on September 30, i.e., five or six days after Lenin’s departure for Gorki, Velichkina died in the Kremlin, officially of the Spanish flu.67
The coded language of the memoirs left by members of the Bolshevik old guard who had managed to survive Stalin’s purges is not always easy to understand. Bonch-Bruevich’s recollections contain the following lines:
Fall of 1918.... In the Kremlin, over the course of two days, three women died of the Spanish flu. Vladimir Ilyich was in the country, recovering from his serious wounds. After receiving news of the deaths of the women, he expressed the most heartfelt condolences to their families and gave instructions for providing them with assistance. Not a month went by before Ya. M. Sverdlov came down with the same Spanish flu.... One had to see how concerned Vladimir Ilyich was.... By this time, he was already living in the Kremlin.... Despite doctors’ warnings about the fact that the Spanish flu was highly contagious, Vladimir Ilyich came to the bedside of the dying [Sverdlov]... and looked right into Yakov Mikhailovich’s eyes. Yakov Mikhailovich grew silent, became thoughtful, and whispered: “I am dying.... Farewell.”68
On March 16, at 4:55 a.m. Sverdlov died.
This outwardly innocent passage from Bonch-Bruevich’s memoirs tells us a great deal. First of all, Lenin would have never gone to see Sverdlov if he had been ill with the contagious Spanish flu.69 No less important is the fact that one of the three women who died in the Kremlin over the course of two days in the fall of 1918 was Bonch-Bruevich’s wife—a fact that Bonch-Bruevich “forgot” to mention. And it is clear why he forgot: three people over two days in the Kremlin—that sounds more like the elimination of undesirables than death from the Spanish flu, even during an epidemic.70 Finally, Bonch-Bruevich deliberately shifted the dates: much more than one month had passed between the death of his wife and the death of Sverdlov. We are forced to read between the lines and conclude that the quote from Bonch-Bruevich is not all that innocent, that we are being given to know, first, that Sverdlov eliminated Velichkina and two other women, possibly medical workers;71 and second, that Sverdlov himself was killed—“the same Spanish flu”—but now on orders from Lenin, who had recovered from the assassination attempt of August 1918.
Sverdlov returned to Moscow from another trip to the provinces on March 8, 1919. On March 9, i.e., immediately after his arrival, it was reported that he was “gravely ill.” It was believed that he had caught a cold. However, already at that time persistent rumors were circulating that Sverdlov had been killed, that he had been attacked during a meeting. In November 1987, a documentary was broadcast on Soviet television with footage of Sverdlov’s funeral. He was shown lying in his coffin with his head in bandages. Who had struck him is open to speculation.
Several years later, in 1922, at an open trial against the SR Party, the Soviet government formally acknowledged the fact that the assassination attempt against Lenin on August 1918 had been prepared by Cheka operatives G. I. Semenov and L. V. Konopleva (who had infiltrated the SR Party on assignment from the Cheka).
In order to sort out this part of the puzzle, let us state once more what we know about the attack on Lenin on August 30, 1918: he was shot and wounded; the shots were fired from two guns; one of the participants in the shooting may have been a woman; there is no evidence that the woman who fired the gun was Kaplan; there is no evidence that the woman who was shot by Malkov was Kaplan; there is no evidence that the woman who was shot was the same woman who had shot Lenin; the real participants in the assassination attempt were not arrested; the organizers of the assassination attempt remain unknown.
We have seen the example of Blumkin, Cheka agent and participant in the assassination of Mirbach. Blumkin was soon pardoned, formally accepted into the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, and spent the remainder of his life working for Soviet counterintelligence, principally abroad. In 1929, he was arrested and shot for illegal contacts with Trotsky, who had been exiled from the USSR.
Semenov and Konopleva had similar careers. On orders from above—and obviously these orders could have come only from Dzerzhinsky—Semenov and Konopleva were preparing to assassinate Lenin. If the Left SR Blumkin, who killed Mirbach, had put the heads of the Left SRs on the executioner’s block, then Semenov and Konopleva, who were “SRs,” were putting the heads of the SR Party’s leadership on the executioner’s block.
The central committee of the SR Party always categorically denied any involvement in the attempt to assassinate Lenin. In the spring of 1918, the provocateur Konopleva proposed to Abram Gots, a member of the central committee of the SR Party, to assassinate Lenin, Gots replied: “Give up not only the work you are doing, but give up all work, go to your family, and take a rest.”72
Even if we assume that the scenario presented by the Cheka at the SRs’ trial was accurate—that Kaplan had shot Lenin, that she had made preparations to assassinate him because of a resolution passed by the central committee of the SR Party, and that she had worked under the supervision of Semenov and Konopleva—then we are still led to the conclusion that the attempt to assassinate Lenin was organized by the Cheka, under Dzerzhinsky’s supervision, while Sverdlov’s suspicious behavior, along with his sudden death in March 1919, brings us back full circle to where this account begins.
In January 1921, Semenov formally joined the Bolshevik Party with the recommendation of Avel Enukidze, Leonid Serebryakov, and Nikolai Krestinsky—prominent Bolsheviks, secretaries of the Central Committee, and members of the Central Committee. Konopleva joined in February 1921. After the decision was made at the end of 1921 to stage an open trial of the SR Party, Konopleva and Semenov were asked to prepare the necessary compromising documentation. On December 3, 1921, Semenov finished writing a pamphlet about the SRs’ subversive activities. The manuscript of this pamphlet, which is stored in the archives of the SR trial, bears a handwritten note by Stalin: “I’ve read this. J. Stalin. (I think that the question of printing this document, the ways in which it might be used, and also the [future] fate of the diary’s author should be discussed by the Politburo.) J. Stalin.”73
On December 5, 1921—i.e., two days after completing the pamphlet that was reviewed by Stalin personally—Semenov submitted a “report” to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party about the anti-Soviet and subversive activities of the SRs.74
On January 21, 1922, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party issued instructions to intelligence agencies to ensure that Semenov’s pamphlet would appear in print abroad within two weeks. On March 2, 1922, the Berlin newspaper Rul’ for the first time mentioned Semenov’s book, which had been published in Berlin.75 Immediately after this, it was reissued in the RSFSR. Back then, the Chekists had a simple way of doing things, so the book that was published in Soviet Russia explicitly stated that 20,000 copies had been printed by the GPU printing office at the Lubyanka.76
Like Semenov, Konopleva wrote a number of documents that backed up her own false profile as an SR-turncoat, and traitor, who had gone over to the Soviet government. For the Chekists, it was important to have materials in the archives that showed that Konopleva (like Semenov) was a former SR and not just a Cheka operative. On January 15–16, she produced those documents. On January 15, 1922, she wrote a letter to the central committee of the SR Party where she let it be known that she was “informing the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party about the military, combat, and terrorist activities of the SRs from the end of 1917 until the end of 1918 in St. Petersburg and Moscow.”77 On the same day, Konopleva gave elaborate testimony that the central committee of the SR Party had prepared terrorist attacks against Volodarsky, Uritsky, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Lenin. In other words, she signed a death sentence for the members of the central committee of the SR Party. The letter’s final words—“former member of the SR Party, member of the Russian Communist Party [Bolsheviks]”—manifestly spelled bad news for the central committee of the SR Party: Konopleva had been a Soviet agent provocateur within the SR Party.78
At the same time, on January 15–16, she wrote a personal letter to the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Leonid Serebryakov. In this letter, she explained how and why she had gone over from the SRs to the Bolsheviks.79 To accord with its contents, the letter would have to be backdated, to make it appear that it had been written before Konopleva joined the Communist Party. Apparently, this was the reason why it was decided not to use it, and the actual date of its writing remained. The letter to “dear Leonid Petrovich” was about whether Konopleva was ready—at this point—to join the party. In reality, it was written by a party member with over a year’s standing:
Dear Leonid Petrovich! I would like to have a talk with you, to share my thoughts. 1919 was the year when my old ideological worldview collapsed. And the outcome was that both in my views and in my work, I effectively became a communist, but considered it impossible to join the Russian Communist Party formally on account of my past. While still a member of the SR Party... I believed that it was our duty—mine and Semenov’s—in the name of justice to open up to the International those pages of the history of the SR Party which are hidden from the masses.... The International must know all the dark, all the hidden aspects of the party’s tactics during the Revolution. But how to do this, I don’t know. This question, bound up with a difficult personal moral dilemma, stood in the way of my joining the Russian Communist Party. On the one hand, I felt that I had no moral right to join a party against which I had committed so many grave sins without telling it about them; on the other hand, I believed that that I could not reveal this information about my prior work in the SR Party without indicating the actual state of things, its connections to a number of specific individuals—everything was too tied up. I also considered this unacceptable from a moral point of view—plainly speaking, a betrayal of my old comrades. As much as I wanted to reveal my past to the International—an impartial judge—revealing it to the Central Committee or some other organ of the Russian Communist Party would have been unacceptable. One political party is no judge of another: both are interested parties, not impartial judges. Such was my belief. Before joining the Russian Communist Party, I told you more than once that my past prevented me from joining. But I decided to step over my past and I have joined the party, intending in my future work to compensate at least in part for my past, my mistakes and crimes against the Revolution.
Going abroad, and reading the SR newspaper Volya Rossii, my old feelings returned with new force. This persecution of the Russian Revolution, of the Communist Party, that the SRs are fueling, by exaggerating and screaming about the Russian Communist Party’s mistakes, by trying to turn the Western European proletariat against us, by screaming about the horrors of the Central Committee and the Red Terror, has convinced me that the genuine face of the SR Party, its tactics, its crimes against the Revolution, must be revealed to the international and Russian proletariat in the name of the Revolution and the party.
I know that everything that is in the interest of the Revolution is permissible and just. The interest of the Revolution is our truth, our morality, and when Semenov and I discussed this question prior to his departure for Russia, we both decided that if the interest of the Revolution demands it, then we must, we are obligated to do this, even if it is unacceptable from the point of view of human morality... Just as a terrorist attack must be followed by the physical death of its perpetrator, so this action must be followed by a moral death. Or perhaps the death of the old morality? That is something I still do not know. Anything is possible. I know only one thing—everything must be done in the name of the Revolution!
I have asked myself, trying to test myself, whether maybe it is so difficult, so torturous for me to submit a request to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party because I still have something in common with the SRs, some kind of connection. In response to that, I told myself, and I am telling you: there is no connection left. As they are the enemies of the Revolution, the enemies of the Russian Communist Party, so they are also my enemies...
Dear Leonid Petrovich, I do not know whether you will be able to make sense of what I have written... I am completely alone here. I have tried to get to the bottom of this question, and frankly speaking, I have become completely confused about moral issues...
All my very best to you.
Lida
January 15, 1922
Added to the letter:
...I am writing all of this to you as a comrade whom I value and respect, and as one human being to another. I repeat once more that I have not the least doubt or hesitation about what I must, what I personally must do for the Revolution; but to combine this with morality and ethics is something that I don’t know how to do, can’t do, and am afraid to do.
Please forgive such a confused letter and write to me. January 16, 1922.
Lida
P. S. In any event, let me know...that you have received the report and the letter. Please do this without fail.80
What is remarkable is both the fact that Konopleva, a former terrorist, who was supposed to have killed Bolsheviks, addresses the secretary of the Central Committee “Dear Leonid Petrovich,” and the fact that she is examining the question of her joining the party not in terms of whether or not the Bolsheviks will accept her, but in terms of whether she herself is morally prepared to join the party. Obviously, this letter is an unused rough draft, a part of the overall scenario of the SRs’ trial. But it is addressed to an old close acquaintance, if not a friend. This is corroborated by the memoirs of Serebryakov’s wife:
It was quite typical that Lydia Konopleva, the Right SR who revealed her party’s plans, who prepared terrorist attacks (the trial of Gots and others was heard around the world), came specifically to Serebryakov for a confessional conversation and made him the first to know everything that she knew about the bloody designs of her former party comrades. Subsequently, she constantly visited us: a quiet, blonde woman with an unremarkable appearance, who looked like a country teacher, and had a heavy look in her lightly tinted, womanly eyes. As it turned out, underneath this commonplace unattractiveness she concealed a tempestuous temperament and the slippery and detail-oriented mind of a cunning conspirator. She and her friend (I have forgotten his name) [Semenov] genuinely revered Serebryakov. After the SRs’ trials, both of them went abroad on secret assignments.81
It is obvious that Serebryakov, the secretary of the Central Committee, could have been friends with Konopleva only if she was and remained a Communist. He could not have been friendly with a former militant SR. As for frequent visitors to Serebryakov’s home with whom he was friendly:
A great brotherly love over many years connected Sverdlov with Leonid. They had spent a long time together in exile, and had worked together from the first days of the October Revolution. Sverdlov’s large family—his sisters, brothers, wife—continued to maintain close, friendly relations with Leonid after Yakov Mikhailovich’s death.82
Thus, his best friend was Sverdlov. We read further: “Valery Mezhlauk once told me after quarrelling with Leonid over some trifle, both were serving as deputies for People’s Commissar of Transport Dzerzhinsky that Leonid was wily and deceitful.”83
What interests us here is not the personal characterization—which came from someone whose opinion may not have been entirely objective—but the fact that Serebryakov had been taken on as a deputy by Dzerzhinsky. The clear inference is that he was his right-hand man. Their work together was reinforced by friendly personal relations. Serebryakov’s wife writes:
Among Leonid’s closest friends were very many Georgians, Abkhazians, and Armenians.... Gifts would constantly arrive from Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Yerevan—wines, grapes, churchkhela, cheeses, and honey—which we, in turn, would give out to such intimate friends of Leonid’s as Dzerzhinsky, Grigory Belenky, Bukharin, Voronsky, Sergei Zorin, Rudzutak, A. S. Enukidze, and Kalinin. It was a rare evening when one of these people did not visit us, and in the days of plenary meetings and congresses, a good dozen people would sleep over at our house.84
Thus, during the years 1918–1923, Serebryakov was friends with Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky. And his home, which was visited daily by the likes of Dzerzhinsky, Bukharin, and Kalinin, was also visited by former SRs Konopleva and Semenov, who, on orders from the central committee of the Right SR Party, were preparing an attack on Lenin, which on August 30, 1918, almost ended his life. Can there be any doubt that Konopleva and Semenov were ordinary Soviet intelligence officers, operatives out of Dzerzhinsky’s agency?
During the years 1922–1924, Konopleva served in the fourth directorate of Red Army headquarters; gave lectures on planting explosives to GPU operatives;85 and then worked for the Moscow department of public education, in the publishing houses Rabotnik prosvesscheniya and Transpechat’. She was arrested in Moscow on April 30, 1937, “for possession of the Right SR Party archives” (i.e., materials from the 1922 trials, which she herself had helped to prepare), accused of having ties to Bukharin and Semenov, she was shot on July 13, 1913, and rehabilitated “for lack of a chargeable offense”86 on August 20, 1960.
Semenov worked in the intelligence directorate of the Red Army. His major assignments in 1922 included organizing terrorist attacks against Kolchak and Denikin. In 1927, he was sent to China as a resident agent for Soviet intelligence. On February 11, 1937, he was arrested and charged with participating in an anti-Soviet right-wing organization since 1928, of having ties to Bukharin, being the leader of a “right-wing combat and terrorist organization,” “organizing former militant SRs into a number of terrorist groups” on Bukharin’s orders, “using these groups to prepare terrorist attacks against the All-Union Communist Party [Bolsheviks] and the Soviet government.” On October 8, 1937, the Supreme Court’s military tribunal sentenced him to death and executed him on the same day. On August 22, 1961, he was rehabilitated. The military tribunal ended his case because the charges against him could not be proved:
An examination of the case has established that after 1918 Semenov did not create any terrorist groups and was not connected with the SRs. After his arrest on February 11, 1937, Semenov denied his guilt until June 15, 1937, and on June 4, 1937, during a confrontation with the convicted K. A. Usov, who was providing evidence against him, said: “You have worn Usov down with threats. Look at his appearance! That’s why he’s giving such evidence.” For this comment, Semenov was put in solitary confinement, after which on June 15, 1937, he wrote a declaration, addressed to People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs N. I. Yezhov, in which he admitted his guilt and promised to provide detailed testimony. The examination then established that in 1939, former NKVD agent M. L. Gatov, who had supervised the investigation and interrogated Semenov, was convicted for falsifying evidence and engaging in anti-Soviet activity in the organs of the NKVD.
Thus, the organizers of the attack on Lenin in August 1918 were rehabilitated in the USSR, not as part of the general wave of rehabilitations in 1956, when victims of Stalinist terror were being rehabilitated en masse, but through individual resolutions of the military tribunal in 1960 and 1961.
Claims that top Soviet leaders had some relation to the attack on Lenin in 1918 were first heard in 1938, during Bukharin’s trial. In the spring of 1918, after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Left SRs started talking about forming a party together with the Left Communists in opposition to Lenin. To this end, they intended to “arrest the Sovnarkom,” with Lenin at its head, declare war on Germany, and immediately release the arrested members of the Sovnarkom to form a new government with those who supported a revolutionary war. Pyatakov was to be appointed the head of the new Sovnarkom. The Left Communists themselves described those days as follows:
On the issue of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, as is well known, at one time the situation in the Central Committee of the party was such that the opponents of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk formed a majority in the Central Committee.... During a meeting of the VTsIK at the Tauride Palace, while Lenin was delivering a report on Brest-Litovsk, Pyatakov and Bukharin were approached by the Left SR Kamkov, [who]...half-jokingly said: “So what are you going to do if you get a majority in the party? Because in that case, Lenin will leave, and we and you will have to form a new Sovnarkom. In that case, I think that we will elect Comrade Pyatakov to be the head of the Sovnarkom.”... After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty...Comrade Radek came by...Proshyan’s office in order to have some Left Communist resolution sent by radio. Laughing, Proshyan said to Comrade Radek: “All of you write resolutions. Wouldn’t it be easier to arrest Lenin for a day, declare war on the Germans, and then again to unanimously elect Comrade Lenin as head of the Sovnarkom?” Proshyan was saying that, naturally, Lenin, as a revolutionary, if he were forced to put up a defense against the advancing Germans, while constantly berating both us and you (“you”—the Left Communists), would nonetheless be better than anyone else at conducting a defensive war.87
I cannot pass by the monstrous charge against me that I allegedly gave Semenov terrorist directives.... No mention is made here of the fact that Semenov was a Communist, a party member.... I defended Semenov in accordance with a resolution by the Central Committee of the party. Our party believed that Semenov had done it a great service and accepted him into its ranks.... Semenov effectively gave away all of the SRs’ combat groups to the Soviet government and the party. All of the SRs who remained SRs considered him a “Bolshevik provocateur.” He appeared in the role of an informer at the trial against the SRs also. The SRs hated him and avoided him like the plague.88
During the preparations for the Bukharin trial Stalin was least of all interested in the truth, Bukharin’s denial therefore changed nothing, and at the trial of the “anti-Soviet bloc of rightists and Trotskyites” in 1938, government prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky continued to claim that Semenov had received terrorist directives from Bukharin personally. Later, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published under Stalin, added the finishing touches:
By now it has been incontrovertibly proven that heinous Trotskyite-Bukharinite traitors were also involved in preparing the killing of the great Lenin. Moreover, the loathsome scoundrel Bukharin was an active organizer of the villainous assassination attempt against Lenin, which had been prepared by the Right SRs and took place on August 30, 1918. On that day, Lenin spoke at a workers’ meeting in the Mikhelson Factory. While leaving the factory, he was gravely wounded by Kaplan, a White-SR terrorist. Two poisoned bullets had struck Lenin. His life was in danger.89
In 1938, many were surprised by the fact that Bukharin did not deny this most frightening of all accusations against him.90 And here is why. The NKVD prepared for the Bukharin trial with the utmost seriousness. And during the trial, the NKVD stood ready to introduce two important new witnesses: V. A. Novikov and...Fanny Kaplan.
On December 15, 1937, NKVD investigators had questioned former SR Vasily Novikov, who had been arrested long before. According to Semenov’s allegations, Novikov had been one of the main participants in the attack on Lenin on August 30, 1918. Dressed as a sailor, he had made two appearances on the scene: he had caused congestion near the exit as Lenin was leaving the building; and after Lenin had been shot and was lying on the ground, he ran toward him with a revolver in order to finish him off but did not reach him and failed to do so. After the shooting, Novikov had allegedly escaped in a cab that was waiting for him, and after being arrested he had somehow managed not to get shot—although he should have shared “Kaplan’s” fate for taking part in the terrorist attack—but was released instead. In short, Vasily Novikov was not involved in the attack on Lenin.
As a former SR, Novikov ultimately ended up in prison. In 1937, before the Bukharin trial, the NKVD remembered him:
Excerpt from the transcript of the interrogation of the convict Vasily Alexeyevich Novikov, born 1883, from December 15, 1937.
Question: Have you named all of the former members of the SR terrorist brigade with whom you met in subsequent years?
Answer: I omitted to mention the participant of the assassination attempt against V. I. Lenin, F. Kaplan, whom I met in the Sverdlovsk prison in 1932.
Question: Describe in detail the circumstances in which this meeting occurred.
Answer: In July 1932, in a transit prison in Sverdlovsk, during a walk in the prison yard, I met Fanny Kaplan accompanied by a guard. Despite the fact that she had greatly changed since our last meeting in Moscow in 1918, I nonetheless instantly recognized her. I did not have a chance to talk to her during this meeting. I don’t know whether she recognized me—when we met, she gave no indication. Still doubting that this was Fanny Kaplan, I decided to check this and found proof that, indeed, it was really she.
Question: How?
Answer: One of the cells in the Sverdlovsk prison was occupied by Kozharinov, who was being transferred from solitary confinement in Chelyabinsk to internal exile. Kozharin had been recruited as a typist at the Sverdlovsk prison. I asked him to look through the lists of convicts to see whether Fanny Kaplan was among them. Kozharinov informed me that Fanny Kaplan—also known as Fanny Royd, transferred from political solitary confinement—was indeed listed among the inmates of the Sverdlovsk prison...
Question: From whom and what exactly did you hear about Kaplan in 1937?
Answer: On November 15, 1937, I was transferred from the Murmansk prison to the Leningrad prison, on Nizhegorodskaya Street. There I shared a cell with Matveyev. He and I started talking about my former work as an SR, and about Fanny Kaplan among other things. Matveyev, who was serving his sentence in Siberian concentration camps, told me that he knew that Fanny Kaplan—who participated in the assassination attempt against V. I. Lenin—was working in the directorate of the Siblag [Siberian labor camp] in Novosibirsk as a volunteer worker...
I have read this transcript and confirm its accuracy.
With such testimony from Novikov, it was safe to accuse Bukharin of organizing the attack on Lenin on August 30, 1918. Should the Bukharin trial have gone badly, the prosecution could have always introduced Kaplan and Novikov as witnesses—the former would have confirmed that she had received directives from Bukharin himself, and the latter would have confirmed that the witness on the stand was indeed Kaplan. For reasons that will never be known, Stalin decided not to use these “witnesses.”