Lubyanka, 2 September 1918
My dear Mika,
Though you have made it clear that you do not care for me, my heart nevertheless insists that I address you as ‘my dear’. I know this will only irritate you. It irritates me too. My love has brought neither of us any happiness. But don’t think that I resent you for this. On the contrary, I am grateful. At a time of revolution, love is a bourgeois indulgence. In rejecting my affections, you reminded of this. I am ashamed of the woman I was in Kharkov. I wanted romance so desperately that I forgot myself. For those two days, I allowed myself to imagine that I was once again a girl of sixteen. When I saw you, I saw the last man who had treated me with tenderness, spoke loving words to me, and made me feel like more than a rag dragged through the dirt. Seeing you, it was as if the twelve years of prison and loneliness had evaporated.
You will never understand, but I have lived for twelve years in permanent blackness. Even in the rare moments when my vision cleared, I saw before me only my black life in the prison camp. Many times I wished for the strength to bring about my own death. Many times I cursed myself for having survived the explosion in the hotel room. What had my survival brought me? Only misery. A girl of sixteen, half blind, imprisoned with no hope of clemency. But then came the February Revolution, the amnesty, and the doctors who restored my vision. And then, as if by fate, there you were in the street buying a newspaper. How else to explain your presence in Kharkov, standing in the street where I took my afternoon walks?
This is mere sentimentality I know, but amnesty from prison and reprieve from blindness made us foolish and optimistic. I shudder to think of the image I must have cut running towards you. I felt myself a young beauty, but what I must have looked like! Hysterical, a madwoman, coat flapping, hair wild, pale and gaunt. Like a witch from a fairy tale used to frighten children. I saw the truth in your eyes but I refused to admit it. Though now, sitting in my cell, I see quite plainly the disgust on your face. I have seen much more of it these last days. I no longer care. I accept that I am a woman who does not inspire warmth in men, and I will never again beg like a dog for a scrap of kindness.
I have no illusions, Mika. I know what awaits me. I know what to expect from the Bolsheviks. Sverdlov, Lenin’s pet jackal, has come to witness my interrogation. Naturally, I refuse to speak in his presence. They send one after another of their lackeys to pry information from me. They do not believe that I was capable of acting alone. Perhaps you also cannot believe this? But it is true. Before this letter reaches you, you will have read in the newspapers that I shot at Lenin. I do not think I succeeded in killing him. If I regret anything, it is only that. He is a traitor to the Revolution. I lay the responsibility for the treacherous peace with Germany and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly at his feet. I have told my inquisitors as much and so expect that they will not censor it from this letter. That this letter reaches you at all I have entrusted to Yakov Peters. He is the only one among them who has treated me with even a semblance of decency. In his youth, like you and me, he was an anarchist. History has turned him in one direction, me in another, and you in yet another. What will come of it all I can only speculate. But when the doctors fixed my eyes, I had hoped that I would look upon a better world. For the first days, I saw beauty all around me. I saw potential in all things, including myself. Of course this sensation did not last. It did not take long for the world to assert its true nature. The Revolution was betrayed and you confirmed my inadequacy as a woman.
For years I had consoled myself that, in prison, blindness was a sort of blessing. What, after all, is worth seeing in prison? But even liberated from the tzar’s prison I recognised that I was not free. For the workers of the world, liberty remains an unkept promise. We remain prisoners of the bourgeoisie and of the false prophets of the Revolution. And so I am not sad to say goodbye to this world. I have done what I could to further the Revolution. I will die as I have lived, a Marxist and a Socialist revolutionist.
I will end here but for one request. Mika, I know I have no claims on you and no reason to make demands, but as this is the only letter I am permitted to send, I ask that you write to my brother Berl in New York. Tell him he was right, I was not made for a long life. Tell him also that I do not want our father to recite prayers for me.
Yours,
Fanny
This letter was discovered among the papers of Yakov Peters at the time of his arrest and execution by the NKVD in 1938.