a woman was brought into the room. 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 colorless. 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. 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 presently the sentries came and took her away.57
She was moved from the Lubianka to one of the basement cells in the Kremlin where the most prominent political prisoners were held and from which few emerged alive.
In the meantime, a team of physicians attended Lenin, who was hovering between life and death, but retained enough presence of mind to make certain his doctors were Bolsheviks. The patient’s prospects were not hopeless, even though blood had entered one of his lungs. Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin’s devoted secretary, watching him, had a religious vision: the sight “suddenly reminded me of a famous European painting of the deposition of Christ from the cross, crucified by priests, pontiffs, and the rich.…”* Such religious associations soon became an inseparable element of the Lenin cult which had its beginning with tales of his miraculous survival. It was evident in the reverential description in
Lenin, shot through twice, with pierced lungs, spilling blood, refuses help and goes on his own. The next morning, still threatened by death, he reads papers, listens, learns, observes to see that the engine of the locomotive that carries us toward global revolution has not stopped working.
Such images were calculated to appeal to the Russian masses’ belief in the holiness of those who escape certain death.
The official announcement, published on the front page of
to maintain complete calm and to intensify their work in combating counterrevolutionary elements. The working class will respond to attempts against its leaders with even greater consolidation of its forces, with merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the Revolution.
In the days and weeks that followed, the Bolshevik press (the non-Bolshevik press having been eliminated by then) was filled with similar exhortations and threats, but it provided surprisingly little information either about the murder attempt or about the actual condition of Lenin’s health, apart from regular medical bulletins of which laymen could not make much sense. The impression one gains from reading this material is that the Bolsheviks deliberately underplayed the event to convince the public that whatever happened to Lenin, they were firmly in control.
On September 3, the commandant of the Kremlin, an ex-sailor named P. Malkov, was called to the Cheka and told that it had condemned Fannie Kaplan to death. He was to carry out the sentence at once. As Malkov describes it, he recoiled: “Shooting a person, especially a woman, is no easy task.” He asked about the disposal of the body. He was told to consult Sverdlov. Sverdlov said that Kaplan was not to be interred: “Her remains are to be destroyed without trace.” As the place of execution Malkov chose a narrow courtyard adjoining the Kremlin’s Large Palace and used as a parking lot for military vehicles.
I ordered the commander of the Automobile Combat Detachment to move some trucks from the enclosures and to start the engines. I also gave orders to send a passenger car to the blind alley, turning it to face the gate. Having posted at the gate two Latvians with orders to allow no one in, I went to fetch Kaplan. A few minutes later I was leading her to the courtyard.… “Into the car!” I snapped a sharp command. I pointed to the automobile that stood at the end of the cul-de-sac. Convulsively twisting her shoulders, Fannie Kaplan took one step, then another … I raised the pistol …*
