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This post refers to the summary execution without trial of a 28-year-old female revolutionary in 1918. Shared solely for historical education and remembrance of the victims of political terror in the early Soviet period.
The Execution of Fanny Kaplan – The Woman Who Shot Lenin (1890–1918)
On the evening of 3 September 1918, in the inner courtyard of the Kremlin, 28-year-old Jewish-Ukrainian revolutionary Fanny Efimovna Kaplan (real name Feiga Haimovna Roytblat) was shot in the back of the head with a single bullet and her body immediately cremated. No trial. No witnesses. No official record.
Three days earlier, on 30 August 1918, at the Mikhelson factory in Moscow, Kaplan had approached Vladimir Lenin as he was leaving a meeting and fired three shots from a Browning pistol. Two bullets struck him – one in the neck, the other in the shoulder. Lenin survived, but the attack gave the Bolshevik leadership the pretext it needed.
A lifelong anarchist and later member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SR), Kaplan had already spent eleven brutal years in tsarist hard-labour camps (1906–1917) for her part in a terrorist bombing. Blinded for several years by the conditions in Siberia, she regained partial sight only after the February Revolution. By mid-1918 she had come to view Lenin as the greatest traitor to the revolution: he had dissolved the Constituent Assembly (in which the SRs held the majority), banned all opposition parties, and turned Russia into a one-party dictatorship.
During brief interrogation by the Cheka, she declared openly: “I shot Lenin because he betrayed the revolution… I carried out my duty before the people and the revolution.”
She refused to name any accomplices. On the direct order of Yakov Sverdlov, Cheka commandant Dmitry Malkov and poet-revolutionary Varlam Avanesov carried out the execution themselves. The ashes were reportedly flushed down a drain.
The attempted assassination of Lenin became the official justification for the decree of 5 September 1918 that formally reinstated the death penalty and unleashed the Red Terror – tens of thousands would be executed without trial in the following months.
We remember Fanny Kaplan today not to glorify political violence, but to recognise the tragedy of a revolution that devoured its own children; to honour all those – from every faction – who lost their lives in the fratricidal terror of 1918–1921; and to remind ourselves that the path from revolutionary idealism to summary execution in a Kremlin courtyard can sometimes be measured in only eighteen months.
Official & reputable sources
State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) – Fond 130, Opis 2, Delo 627 (Cheka investigation file on F. Kaplan, partially preserved)
Lyandres, Semion – “The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the Evidence” (Slavic Review, 1989)
Rabinowitch, Alexander – The Bolsheviks in Power (Indiana University Press, 2007)Leggett, George – The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1981)
Testimony of Dmitry Malkov, published 1959 (memoirs)