Thus perished a young woman ridiculed as the Russian Charlotte Corday: without the semblance of a trial, shot in the back while the truck engines roared to drown out her screams, her corpse disposed of like so much garbage.
The details of the terrorist plot that led to the attempt on the life of Lenin, and, as it turned out, also on the lives of Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, became known to the Cheka only three years later. The main source of this information was a veteran SR terrorist, G. Semenov (Vasilev). Semenov emigrated abroad but changed his mind and in 1921 returned to Russia, where he turned renegade and denounced his past associates. His testimony, no doubt doctored to some extent, was subsequently used by the Bolshevik prosecutor in the trial of the Socialists-Revolutionaries in 1922.58
As best as can be determined, the SR Combat Organization was reactivated in Petrograd at the beginning of 1918, The group, which numbered fourteen people, some of them intellectuals, some workers, for a while shadowed Zinoviev and Volodarskii. In June 1918, one of its members, the worker Sergeev, assassinated Volodarskii. This terrorist underground acted on its own without sanction of the SR Central Committee. In the spring of 1918, after the Bolshevik Government had moved to Moscow, some members of the Combat Organization followed it. They chose Trotsky as their first victim in the belief that his death would have the greatest effect on the Bolshevik cause since he directed the war effort. Lenin was to follow. Adopting methods perfected against tsarist officials, members of the group stalked their victims to determine the pattern of their movements. They learned that Trotsky traveled constantly and unpredictably between Moscow and the front, and hence, “for technical reasons,” as Semenov would later explain, it was decided to dispose of Lenin first.
Before carrying out their mission, the terrorists requested the approval of the SR Central Committee. By this time most SR leaders had moved to Samara, but a branch of the committee remained in Moscow, headed by Abraham Gots. Gots and one other committee member, D. Donskoi, refused to sanction the attempt on Lenin’s life, but said they would not object to it as long as it was done as an “individual” act, without implicating the party. They also promised that the party would not repudiate Lenin’s murder.
While laying his plans, Semenov learned that Fannie Kaplan and two associates were working independently toward the same end. Kaplan impressed him as a resolute “revolutionary terrorist”—in other words, a suicidal type. He invited her to join his group.
To track Lenin’s appearances at worker meetings, Semenov divided Moscow into four districts, to each of which he assigned two members of his organization: one to act as observer (
Lenin addressed a gathering of the Moscow Committee of the Party on Friday, August 16, but due to some mishap Semenov’s observer failed to appear. The following Friday, Lenin spoke again, this time at the Polytechnic Museum. Word got around of his appearance and a large crowd turned up. This time everything went according to plan, but the “executor” lost his nerve, for which Semenov expelled him from the Combat Organization. Semenov had intelligence that the following Friday, August 30, Lenin would make one or more appearances in the southern zone. To make certain that nothing would go wrong this time, he assigned to this area his two most trusted agents: an experienced terrorist, the worker Novikov, to act as observer, and Kaplan as executor. In the tradition of SR terrorists, Kaplan was prepared to give up her own life for the one she took: she told Novikov that after shooting Lenin she would surrender. Just in case she changed her mind, however, he hired a hack to stand by.
In the afternoon of August 30, Kaplan took up her post at Serpukhovskii Square. In her purse she carried a loaded Browning; three bullets had crosslike incisions, into which had been rubbed a deadly Indian poison, curare.*
