It was the custom of Bolshevik leaders, Lenin included, every Friday afternoon or evening to address workers and party members in various parts of Moscow. Lenin’s appearances were usually not announced beforehand. On Friday, August 30, he was scheduled to attend two rallies: one in the Basmannyi District, in the building of the Grain Commodity Exchange, another at the Mikhelson factory in the southern part of the city. Earlier that day news had arrived that the chief of the Petrograd Cheka, M. S. Uritskii, had been shot. The assassin was a Jewish youth, L. A. Kannegisser, a member of the moderate Popular Socialist Party. It later transpired that he had acted on his own, to avenge the execution of a friend. But this was not known at the time and fears arose that perhaps a terrorist campaign was underway. Worried family members urged Lenin to cancel his appearances, but he quite uncharacteristically chose to face danger and went to town in a car, driven by his trusted chauffeur, S. K. Gil. He first appeared at the Grain Commodity Exchange, from where he proceeded to Mikhelson’s. Although the audience half expected Lenin, there was no certainty he would appear until his car pulled into the courtyard. Lenin delivered his customary canned speech attacking Western “imperialists.” He concluded with the words: “We shall die or triumph!” As Gil later told the Cheka, while Lenin was speaking, a woman dressed in work clothes came up and asked whether Lenin was inside. He gave an evasive reply.
As Lenin was making his way to the exit through a dense crowd, someone close behind him slipped and fell, barring the crowd. Lenin went into the courtyard followed by a few people. As he was about to enter his car, a woman approached to complain that bread was being confiscated at railroad stations. Lenin said that instructions had been issued to stop this practice. He had a foot on the running board when three shots rang out. Gil swung around. He recognized the person firing from several paces away as the woman who had inquired about Lenin. Lenin fell to the ground. Panic-stricken onlookers fled in all directions. Drawing his revolver, Gil raced in pursuit of the assassin, but she had vanished. Children who remained in the courtyard indicated the direction in which she had fled. A few people followed her. She kept on running, but then abruptly stopped and faced her pursuers. She was arrested and taken to Cheka headquarters in the Lubianka.
Lenin was carried unconscious into his car and driven at top speed to the Kremlin. A physician was called for. By then he was barely able to move. His pulse grew faint and he bled profusely. It seemed he was breathing his last. A medical examination revealed two wounds: one, relatively harmless, lodged in the arm; the other, potentially fatal, at the juncture of the jaw and neck. (The third bullet, it was learned later, struck the woman who had been conversing with Lenin when he was shot.)
In the next several hours, the terrorist underwent five interrogations by Cheka personnel.* She was very uncommunicative. Her name was Fannie Efimovna Kaplan, born Feiga Roidman or Roitblat. Her father was a teacher in the Ukraine. It was later learned that as a young girl she had joined the anarchists. She was sixteen when a bomb which anarchists were assembling in her room to kill the governor-general of Kiev exploded. A field court-martial condemned her to death, then commuted the sentence to lifelong hard labor, which she served in Siberia. There she met Spiridonova and other convicted terrorists, under whose influence she became a Socialist-Revolutionary. Early in 1917, benefiting from the political amnesty, she returned to central Russia, settling first in the Ukraine and then in the Crimea. By then, her family had emigrated to the United States.
According to her deposition, she had decided in February 1918 to assassinate Lenin to avenge the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the imminent signing of the Brest Treaty. But her objections to Lenin ran deeper: “I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor,” she told the Cheka. “By living long, he postpones the idea of socialism for decades to come.” She further said that although she belonged to no political party, she sympathized with the Committee of the Constituent Assembly in Samara, liked Chernov, and favored an alliance with England and France against Germany. She steadfastly denied having any accomplices and refused to say who had given her the gun.†
After her interrogation, Kaplan was briefly detained in the same cell at the Lubianka where the Cheka confined Bruce Lockhart, whom it had arrested in the middle of the night on suspicion of complicity: “At six in the morning [of August 31],” he writes,
