All that changed on 30 August. Lenin had gone to the Mikhelson Factory in the southern Moscow suburbs to deliver a standard harangue to the workers on the need to defend the revolution, as was the custom of the Bolshevik leaders on Friday afternoons. Earlier that day news had reached him that Uritsky, the Bolshevik chief of the Petrograd Cheka, had been killed by an SR assassin, Leonid Kanegiser. Lenin’s family had pleaded with him to call off his visit; but Lenin this time chose to go ahead. As he left the factory, a woman named Fanny Kaplan approached him through the crowd and shot three times at him. Lenin fell to the ground, while his bodyguards pursued the assassin. By the time he was brought back to the Kremlin, he seemed on the point of death. One of the bullets had lodged in his neck and he was bleeding profusely. Blood had entered one of his lungs. (It did not stop him from making sure his doctors were Bolsheviks.) For the next few days his life hung in the balance. But then he began to recover and by 25 September was declared well enough to go with Krupskaya to convalesce at Gorki, a village outside Moscow, where an estate had been requisitioned for his private use.
Lenin’s quick recovery was declared a miracle in the Bolshevik press. He was hailed as a Christ-like figure, blessed with supernatural powers, who was not afraid to sacrifice his own life for the good of the people. Bukharin, the editor of Pravda, claimed fantastically that Lenin had refused help after the shooting and, ‘with his pierced lungs still spilling blood’, had gone back to work immediately so as to make sure that the ‘locomotive’ of the revolution did not stop. Zinoviev, in a special pamphlet for mass distribution, extolled Lenin as the son of a peasant who had ‘made the revolution’: ‘He is the chosen one of millions. He is the leader by the grace of God. Such a leader is born once in 500 years in the life of mankind.’ Dozens of other eulogies appeared in the press during the weeks after the shooting. The workers were said to be concerned only for one thing: that ‘their leader’ should recover. Lenin’s poster-portrait began to appear in the streets. He himself appeared for the first time in a documentary film, Vladimir Ilich’s Kremlin Stroll, shown throughout Moscow that autumn to dispel the growing rumour that he had been killed. It was the start of the Lenin cult — a cult designed by the Bolsheviks, apparently against Lenin’s will,fn8 to promote their leader as the ‘people’s Tsar’.68
The cult was reminiscent in some ways of the ancient cult of the divine Tsar. It went back to the medieval practice of canonizing princes who were prematurely killed whilst serving Russia. But the Lenin cult was new in the sense that it also fed into folklore myths of the popular leaders against the Tsar, such as Stenka Razin or Emelian Pugachev, blessed with magical and Christ-like powers. Here was the mixture of peasant Christianity and pagan myth that had long associated revolution with the hunt for truth and justice (pravda) in the popular consciousness. The orchestrators of the Lenin cult consciously played upon this theme. ‘Lenin cannot be killed’, declared one of his hagiographers on 1 September, ‘because Lenin is the rising up of the oppressed. So long as the proletariat lives — Lenin lives.’ Thus Lenin as the Workers’ Christ. Another propagandist claimed that it had been the ‘will of the proletariat’ that had miraculously intervened, like some crucifix or a button on his chest, to deflect Kaplan’s bullets from causing a fatal wound. Poems were published depicting Lenin as a martyr sent by God to suffer for the poor:
You came to us, to ease
Our excruciating torment,
You came to us a leader, to destroy
The enemies of the workers’ movement.
We will not forget your suffering,
That you, our leader, endured for us.
You stood a martyr …
A biography of Lenin for the workers was rushed out after the shooting. With the sort of title that one more readily associates with the cults of Stalin or Mao, The Great Leader of the Workers’ Revolution, it depicted Lenin as supremely wise, a superhuman God-like figure, beloved by all the workers. A similar pamphlet for the peasants, The Leader of the Rural Poor, V. I. Ul’ianov-Lenin, was printed in 100,000 copies. It read a bit like the Lives of the Saints, the favourite reading of the peasants. All sorts of myths about Lenin, the fighter for truth and justice, began to circulate among the peasantry. Photographs of him appeared for the first time in remote villages. These were often placed in the ‘red corner’, the ‘holy spot’ inside the peasant hut where icons and portraits of the Tsar had been traditionally placed.69
