Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  —

  Lenin was a great admirer of the People’s Will leader and author of the Revolutionary Catechism Sergei Nechayev. Before the Revolution he occasionally reminded his clique of Nechayev’s views on regicide. He once told Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich: ‘People have completely forgotten that Nechayev possessed a special talent as an organiser, an ability to establish particular skills in illegal work…It’s enough to recall his precise reply to the question, who should be killed in the royal family? He said “the whole ektenia” [the entire list of Romanovs read out in a traditional Orthodox service]. So who should be killed? The entire house of Romanov…That was pure genius.’

  Yet when Lenin had ordered ‘the whole ektenia’ killed he lied about it – worried, principally, about international reaction. The Soviets tried for years to maintain the fiction that the murders at Ekaterinburg were ordered by the local Soviet; they stuck to the story that the rest of the family died in haphazard circumstances during the Civil War, that their deaths were collateral damage.*5

  Even if the truth had come out it may not have made much difference in Russia, so inured were the people becoming to violent death, and so unpopular were the Romanovs. The British spy Robert Bruce Lockhart wrote in his diary: ‘the population of Moscow received the news…[of the ex-Tsar’s death] with amazing indifference. Their apathy towards everything except their own fate was complete, yet symptomatic of the extraordinary times in which we are living.’

  The former Tsarist Prime Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov was riding in a tram in Petrograd on the day the news was announced. ‘There was no sign of grief or sympathy among the people,’ he said. ‘The report of the Tsar’s death was met with smirks, mockery and base comments. Some passengers said “high time”.’4

  *1 They took Ekaterinburg a week after the Tsar’s murder.

  *2 Sverdlov survived Nicholas II by only a few months. He died in the great Influenza epidemic in March 1919. All kinds of rumours spread later that he was in fact killed on order of Lenin, but no real motive has ever emerged. Sverdlov had not challenged Lenin in any way and had he lived he would very likely have been Lenin’s natural successor. Another fascinating ‘what if’ in history, is what might have happened in Soviet Russia if Sverdlov and not his great enemy Stalin had emerged as leader after Lenin’s death.

  *3 There are four names other than Yurovsky who were officially recorded. His deputy commandant, Grigory Nikutin, whom the former Empress thought ‘handsome and decent’, Cheka official Pyotr Ermakov, well known as an alcoholic, Pavel Medvedev, a welder from a local factory, and a mechanic, Mikhail Kudrin. But recently more files have been opened and we know the identities of four others who took part: Alexei Kabanov, a soldier at one of the machine-gun posts outside the Ipatiev House, Viktor Netrebin, a nervous seventeen-year-old Cheka novice, Stepan Vaganov, a frequent drinking partner of Ermakov, and the Latvian soldier Jan Tsel’ms. For many years the legend among the Whites had it that the murder squad were mostly ‘Jews, Letts and Hungarians’. In fact a Lettish group had originally agreed to take part when they thought the Tsar would be killed, but when they were told the whole family would be slaughtered they refused to kill the young girls and women. Apart from one, the killers were all Russian, and all gentiles – Yurovsky’s parents were converted Jews.

  *4 The following night, 120 kilometres away at Alapaevsk, the former Tsarina’s sister, Grand Duchess Ella, who had become a nun, her companion Sister Barbara, Grand Duke Sergei and five other Romanovs were murdered – again at the hands of the Urals Cheka – in even ghastlier fashion. They were taken at the dead of night by cart to a forest and forced to walk to the mouth of a disused mine. They were beaten with rifle butts and, one by one, thrown down the shaft into a waterlogged pit. Sergei died quickly – he had somehow managed to struggle to the surface and was shot in the head. The others were left to starve to death.

  *5 Adolph Joffe, Russian Ambassador to Germany in the summer of 1918, was certain that Lenin knew all along what the fate of the Romanovs would be. He wrote in his uncompleted memoirs: ‘I was in Berlin when…[they] were executed. I was officially informed only of Nicholas II’s execution. I knew nothing about…[the family] and thought they were still alive. When representatives of Wilhelm II and the brother of the former Empress, the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, and other princes came to see me and asked about the fate of Alexandra Feodorovna and her children, I always told them what I believed. But I began to have doubts; I had been hearing various rumours. Despite all the queries I sent to Moscow, I could get no sense out of them. Finally when Dzerzhinsky was in Berlin incognito, en route to Switzerland, I made him tell me the truth…He told me that Vladimir Ilyich had said I must be told nothing. According to Dzerzhinsky, Lenin had said, “Better if Joffe knows nothing. It’ll be easier for him to lie to them there in Berlin.”’

  44

  The Assassins’ Bullets

  ‘Is the end near? If it is, tell me straight so that I don’t leave matters pending.’

  Lenin to Dr Vladimir Rozanov, 30 August 1918

  ‘Revolution devours its children mercilessly.’

  Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)

  Just after 10 a.m. on 30 August 1918 Moisei Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka, was leaving his office at the Internal Affairs Commissariat at Palace Square. As he reached the pavement outside the building and was about to step into his car, a shot rang out. Uritsky slumped to the ground in a pool of blood – ‘a bullet hole where his left eye had been’, according to one witness.

  There was an exchange of gunfire between Uritsky’s bodyguards and a young man wearing a military cadet uniform, but he got away on a bicycle. Meanwhile Uritsky was rushed to the nearest hospital, where he died within a few minutes of arrival.*1

  Lenin heard about the assassination an hour after it happened. He liked Uritsky, a long-standing Bolshevik who had been at the crucial meeting in October the previous year which decided to mount the Bolshevik coup. He said the loss would be a severe blow to the Revolution. Lenin was told that the immediate response would be tightened security by the Cheka and Red Guards at government and Communist Party buildings. He had a brief meeting at noon with his sister Maria, who pleaded with him not to leave the Kremlin that day. He replied that he had a speaking engagement planned for later that day at the Michelson factory, an engineering plant in a working-class district of Moscow, and he wanted to honour it. He had a brief lunch with Bukharin, who also said it would be foolish to go anywhere in Moscow that day and advised him to stay put in the Kremlin.

  Lenin had a pile of correspondence to work through – including a cable he sent to Trotsky in Sviyazhsk, Tatarstan, one of the fronts in the Civil War that was raging across swathes of Russia. Lenin told him he must use ‘extreme measures’ against soldiers who showed lack of vigour and ‘strength’ on the battlefield. ‘They should be told that from now on we are applying the model of the French Revolution…and they will be put on trial and even shot.’1

  —

  At 5 p.m. he was driven to the factory and spoke for about thirty-five minutes. It was a typical performance. ‘The Revolution was not brought into being so that landlords can return to their properties,’ he said. ‘Those parasites who sucked the blood of the people for so long must know that neither liberty nor equality will give them back their lost wealth, which will go safely into the hands of the workers. Wherever the bourgeoisie rule they give nothing to the toiling masses…Take America…the freest country, they say. There they have a democratic republic. And what is the result? A handful of millionaires and billionaires insolently dominate and the entire nation is in bondage. Wherever so-called “democrats” rule you find plain, straightforward theft. Our way is superior. We have only one choice: victory or death.’

  The applause was enthusiastic and he smiled as he waved goodbye. He marched towards the exit where his car was waiting and paused briefly to speak to a group of women who were politely asking about the problems of food supply.

  Suddenly thr
ee crisp, loud shots were heard. The crowd around the factory gate scattered. Lenin was lying on the ground, blood seeping through his white shirt and dark jacket. His driver and bodyguard, Stepan Gil, bent down over him to see if he was still breathing. Lenin’s eyes were open and he was conscious.

  One man from the factory committee ran up to Gil and realised the wounded man was Lenin. He told Gil, ‘You must take him to the nearest hospital. It’s not far.’ But Gil said, ‘No, I will take him home.’ Lenin must have heard and he whispered, ‘Home, home’. The two men lifted him into the car and Gil drove at breakneck speed through the Moscow streets to the Kremlin.

  —

  When they arrived, Lenin refused help. He put his jacket on by himself and climbed the three floors of stairs to his apartment. His sister Maria opened the door in a state of alarm. Lenin was bleeding profusely, looked in great pain but said, ‘I’ve been shot and slightly wounded, just in the arm.’

  There were no surgeons on hand but two medically qualified people were quickly found in the Kremlin just metres away from Lenin’s apartment: Vera Velichkina, Bonch-Bruevich’s wife, and Vera Krestinskaya, who was married to the senior Party apparatchik Nikolai Krestinsky, examined him, and made him comfortable until surgeons arrived. Velichkina injected him with morphine. Nadya was still at her office in the Enlightenment Commissariat and a car had been sent to bring her back to the Kremlin.

  Within half an hour Professors Vladimir Rozanov and Vladimir Mints, distinguished hospital specialists, had cleaned his wounds. They found that one bullet had gone through his neck from left to right, missing his aorta by a fraction of a centimetre and, having pierced his lung, lodged in his neck above the clavicle. Another bullet was in his left shoulder. The third shot had gone harmlessly through the jacket Lenin was wearing. The first was the most serious because it affected his breathing. The surgeons demanded oxygen tanks, gauze, more bandages, dressing and other equipment which was nowhere to be found in the Kremlin. Officials had to rush out and find supplies from a pharmacy on the main Moscow shopping street, Tverskaya, close by. The surgeons decided to leave the bullets inside Lenin’s body.

  When Nadya returned home she first encountered Sverdlov, who looked worried and grave. All he said was, ‘We are making the arrangements for Ilyich.’ She took that to mean he thought Lenin was dying and when she reached the bedroom, which by now resembled an operating theatre, she was grief-stricken.

  Lenin’s arms were raised on a hoist, he was still conscious and he could see the extent of his injuries. ‘Is the end near?’ he asked Rozanov. ‘If it is, tell me straight so that I don’t leave matters pending.’ The surgeons reassured him the injuries would not be fatal. But he did not seem convinced.

  When he saw Nadya he looked at her for a few seconds in silence and then said, ‘You’ve come. You must be tired. Go and lie down.’ She said later ‘that the words he said were irrelevant…his eyes said something different: “this is the end”. I went out of the room so as not to upset him.’

  The first person he sent for after Nadya was Inessa, who rushed to his side at once. She brought her youngest daughter Varvara, then sixteen, with her. Nadya took the girl off to look around the Kremlin and then some family photographs, ‘leaving her mother alone with Lenin for a long time’, according to one of the other Kremlin wives.

  Immediately after the visit, Inessa wrote to her eldest daughter, Inna, dating the note ‘from my bed in the middle of the night’. She said she was writing in haste and a state of excitement and that the murder attempt and near-death experience ‘has reunited us and brought us even closer together’.*2, 2

  —

  The suspect was apprehended immediately. Workers from the Michelson factory held her at gunpoint until Cheka officers came and arrested her. She was Fanny Kaplan (born Fanya Yefimovna Roitman), twenty-eight, the daughter of a schoolteacher in Volhynia Province. She had been involved in radical politics from her teenage years, first in an anarchist group when she was arrested in 1906 for trying to assassinate a Tsarist official. She bungled the attempt and was wounded from the blast of her own home-made bomb. She was sentenced to ‘eternal hard labour’. She was sent first to a tough prison at Maltsev, where she was frequently caned in public – a routine punishment at the time – then to Orel in central Russia and finally to the notorious Akatua silver-mining camp in eastern Siberia, where conditions were so harsh that hundreds of inmates died. She developed serious problems with her sight and was partially blind in one eye. She was released after the February Revolution and went to live in Crimea. In prison she had ditched anarchism and become a Socialist Revolutionary. After eleven years as a convict she was as dedicated and fanatical as the day she had been arrested as an eighteen-year-old.

  Kaplan must have known what would be in store for her when she was arrested. She was taken to the Lubyanka, where she was briefly held in the same cell as the British intelligence agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, whom the Cheka arrested on suspicion (wrongly) of involvement in the plot, and two other British spies. He watched the guards push her into the cell. ‘She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them. Her face was colourless. She might have been any age between 20 and 35. Doubtless the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us a sign of recognition. Her composure was unnatural. She went to the window and, leaning her chin upon her hand, looked out into the daylight. And there she remained, motionless, speechless, apparently resigned to her fate, until…the sentries came and took her away.’

  She was moved to another cell after a few hours; two days later she was taken to the Kremlin and placed in solitary confinement in a room directly below Sverdlov’s.

  She was interrogated repeatedly by two deputy heads of the Cheka, Yakov Peters and Nikolai Skrypnik, the Commissar for Justice, Dmitry Kursky, and the head of Moscow’s Revolutionary Tribunal, Stanislav Dyakanov.

  Her interrogators were convinced she was part of a broader conspiracy by the Socialist Revolutionaries, whose coup attempt had been foiled just a few weeks earlier. But Kaplan never broke and maintained throughout that she had acted on her own, which the best evidence suggests seems to have been the case.

  With total calm she told them repeatedly: ‘I don’t belong to any party.’

  ‘Why did you shoot at Comrade Lenin?’

  ‘I regard him as a traitor. The longer he lives the further he’ll push back the idea of socialism. For dozens of years.’

  ‘Who sent you to commit the crime?’

  ‘I committed the attempt on my own behalf.’

  They asked her about her connection with the SRs and to name names of other Party members that she knew. She said she had encountered many while she was in prison but none had anything to do with her attempt to murder Lenin.

  ‘How did you feel about the October Revolution?’

  ‘I was in Kharkov, in hospital, when it took place. I didn’t like it. I viewed it negatively. I was for the Constituent Assembly and I still am.’

  ‘So why did you shoot at Lenin? Who sent you to do it?’

  ‘I made up my own mind to shoot Lenin a long time ago. I was the one who shot him. I decided to…[do it] back in February. The idea matured in my mind in Simferopol [in the Crimea] and since that time I have been preparing it.’

  Many people over the decades have doubted whether the murder attempt was the work of a lone gunwoman, especially someone with such extremely poor eyesight as Kaplan. According to some theories there was another woman shooter from an SR assassination team in the vicinity – not on a ‘grassy knoll’, but lurking near the Michelson factory gates, who approached Lenin unseen. Kaplan willingly accepted the blame while the real killer escaped. Others say the Cheka knew someone else had fired the shots but were happy to scapegoat Kaplan, as a prelude to a major crackdown of terror against any opposition.*3 Yet no hard evidence has surfaced that anyone else was involved and Kaplan’s Browning pistol was found at the scene of the crime; three shots had been
fired. One rogue SR said the real culprit was another ‘terrorist’ named Lidia Konopleva but she was never traced and there’s no proof that she was near the scene of the crime. Kaplan did have close links with Socialist Revolutionary activists, but she was not connected to any terrorist ‘combat cell’.3

  By this stage Lenin had become used to being shot at. There had been the incident on New Year’s Day in Petrograd, and in Moscow random violence on the streets was rampant. Law and order had almost broken down. Just three weeks earlier Lenin’s car had been fired at three times in one day. In the morning a group of youths – who turned out to be Bolsheviks – shot at his car from a side street; Lenin got out and rounded on them: ‘You mustn’t just casually fire at people from a street corner without seeing who you are shooting at.’ In the afternoon his car was halted by an unofficial roadblock of armed workers, who fired shots in the air, demanded to see his documents and wouldn’t believe he was the Lenin. They let him go, but the workers were later arrested. In the evening he was shot at again from a street corner not far from the Kremlin by an unidentified man, who missed.*4

  None of those were attempts on his life, just a normal day in downtown Moscow in the summer of 1918. The Kaplan incident was different – a direct attack on Lenin and the regime.

  —

  Late in the evening of 3 September the commandant of the Kremlin guard, Pavel Malkov, was summoned to the Lubyanka and told by one of Dzerzhinsky’s aides, Varlam Avanesov, that it had been decided to sentence Kaplan to death and that he, Malkov, was to carry out the order. ‘The execution of any human being, especially a woman, was no easy thing. It was a heavy responsibility. But I had never been ordered to carry out a more just sentence than this,’ he said later. ‘I asked Avanesov, “When?” and he replied, “Today, immediately.” No one commuted the death sentence on Kaplan. It was duly carried out and it was I who carried it out.’