Lenin’s failed assassin, Fanny Kaplan, was a young Jewish woman and former Anarchist turned SR, who told the Cheka that the plot to kill him had been all her own. She said that Lenin had betrayed the revolution, and that ‘by living longer, he merely postpones the ideal of socialism for decades to come’. Kaplan was detained in the same Lubianka cell as the British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, whom the Bolsheviks had also arrested on suspicion of involvement in the plot. He described her entering 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. Her features, strongly Jewish, were unattractive. She might have been any age between twenty and thirty-five. We guessed it was Kaplan. Doubtless the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign of recognition.
But she did not. Soon she was removed to the Kremlin, where she was almost certainly tortured before being shot (and her remains destroyed without trace) on 3 September. According to Angelica Balabanoff, soon to become the Secretary of the Comintern, Krupskaya wept at the thought that, in Kaplan, the first revolutionary had been killed by the revolutionary government.70 One wonders how much she wept for the thousands of other revolutionaries shortly to be killed in revenge for the wounding of her husband.
Although Kaplan had always denied it, she was at once accused of working for the SRs and the Western Powers.fn9 It was yet another ‘proof’ in the paranoiac theory that the regime was surrounded by a ring of enemies; and that, if it was to survive, a constant civil war had to be waged against them. The Bolshevik press called for mass reprisals. Having drummed up a rage of adulation for the Bolshevik leader, it did not take much to turn this passion into violent hatred for his enemies. The mass circulation Krasnaia gazeta set the tone on 1 September:
Without mercy, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky let there be floods of bourgeois blood — more blood, as much as possible.
Peters, the deputy head of the Cheka, denounced Kaplan’s shot at Lenin as an attack on the working class and called on the workers to ‘crush the hydra of counter-revolution’ by applying mass terror. The Commissar for Internal Affairs ordered the Soviets to ‘arrest all SRs at once’ and take ‘hostages’ en masse from the ‘bourgeoisie and officers’: these were to be executed on ‘the least opposition’.71 It was the signal for the start of the Red Terror.
*
The Red Terror did not come out of the blue. It was implicit in the regime from the start. As Kamenev and his supporters had warned the party in October, the resort to rule by terror was bound to follow from Lenin’s violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy. The Bolsheviks were forced to turn increasingly to terror to silence their political critics and subjugate a society they could not control by other means.
Lenin had always accepted the need to use terror in order to ‘defend the revolution’. It was a weapon in the ‘civil war’. Of course he was careful to distance himself in public from the institutions of the Terror — others put their signatures to its death warrants — and this helped to fuel the myth that Lenin was a good and gentle ‘Tsar’ who had nothing to do with the evil actions of his oprichniki. But behind the scenes Lenin was a stalwart champion of the Red Terror. On 26 October 1917 the Second Soviet Congress had passed a resolution proposed by Kamenev to abolish the death penalty. Lenin was absent from the session and, when told of it, flew into a rage:
Nonsense, how can you make a revolution without firing squads? Do you expect to dispose of your enemies by disarming yourself? What other means of repression are there? Prisons? Who attaches significance to that during a civil war?
Lenin looked upon the use of terror as a means of class war against the ‘bourgeoisie’. From the start, he had encouraged the mass terror of the lower classes against the rich and the privileged through the slogan ‘Loot the Looters!’ ‘We must encourage the energy and the popular nature of the terror,’ he wrote the following June.72 As we saw in Chapter 11, this mass terror had given the Bolsheviks a strong base of emotional support among those elements of the poor who derived a certain satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty fall regardless of whether it brought any improvement in their own lot. The early Cheka system was directly shaped by the local initiatives of this mass terror.
