The Russian Revolution полностью

Novikov learned that Lenin would speak at the Mikhelson factory. To make certain that the information was correct, Kaplan questioned Lenin’s chauffeur, after which she entered the building, placing herself near the exit. (Other sources have her waiting in the courtyard.) It was Novikov who staged the accident on the steps leading to the exit, purposely falling to hold back the crowd so as to give Kaplan undisturbed access to her victim. After firing her revolver, Kaplan seems to have forgotten her promise to surrender and instinctively ran away, but then stopped and gave herself up.

On September 6, Pravda carried a brief statement from the Central Committee of the SR Party, disclaiming, on its behalf and that of its affiliates, any connection with the attempt on Lenin’s life. This violated the agreement which Semenov had made with Gots and Donskoi, and considerably dampened the terrorists’ spirits. They made an attempt on the life of Trotsky, as he was departing for the front, but Trotsky eluded them by switching trains at the last moment. To keep the organization going, they carried out several “expropriations” of Soviet institutions, but their morale kept on sinking, especially after the Bolsheviks had regained the initiative against the Whites. Sometime toward the end of 1918, the Combat Organization dissolved.

Lenin recovered remarkably quickly. This attested to his strong constitution and will to live, but to his associates it implied supernatural qualities; it was as if God Himself intended Lenin to live and his cause to triumph. As soon as he regained some strength, he resumed work, but he overexerted himself and suffered a relapse. On September 25, on his physicians’ insistence, he and Krupskaia left for Gorki. Lenin spent three weeks there convalescing; although he kept in touch with events and did some writing, he left the day-today conduct of affairs of state to others. One of the few visitors allowed to see him was Angelica Balabanoff, an old comrade and a Zimmerwald participant. As she recalls it, when she raised the matter of Fannie Kaplan’s execution, Krupskaia became “very upset”; later, when the two women were alone, she shed bitter tears over it. Lenin, Balabanoff felt, preferred not to discuss it.⁵⁹ At this time, the Bolsheviks still felt embarrassment about executing fellow socialists.

Lenin returned to Moscow on October 14. On October 16, he attended a meeting of the Central Committee and the following day a session of the Sovnarkom. To assure the populace that he had fully recovered, motion-picture cameras were brought to the Kremlin courtyard and filmed him in conversation with Bonch-Bruevich. On October 22, Lenin made his first public appearance, after which he returned to full-time work.

The most immediate effect of Kaplan’s attempt was the unleashing of a wave of terror which in its lack of discrimination and number of victims had no historic precedent. The Bolsheviks were thoroughly frightened, and acted exactly as Engels had said frightened people did: to reassure themselves they perpetrated useless cruelties.

The assassination attempt and Lenin’s recovery had another consequence as well, in the long run perhaps no less important: it inaugurated a deliberate policy of deifying Lenin which after his death would turn into a veritable state-sponsored Oriental cult. Lenin’s rapid recovery from a near-fatal injury seems to have stirred among his lieutenants, prone to venerating him even before, a superstitious faith. Bonch-Bruevich cites with approval the remark of one of Lenin’s physicians that “only those marked by destiny can escape death from such a wound.”⁶⁰ Although Lenin’s “immortality” was later exploited for very mundane political ends, to play on the superstitions of the masses, there is no reason to doubt that many Bolsheviks genuinely came to regard their leader as a supernatural being, a latter-day Christ sent to save humanity.*

Until Fannie Kaplan’s attempt on his life, the Bolsheviks had been rather reticent about Lenin. In personal contact, they treated him with a deference in excess of that normally shown political leaders. Sukhanov was struck that in 1917, even before Lenin had taken power, his followers displayed “quite exceptional piety” toward him, like the “knights of the Holy Grail.”⁶¹ Lenin’s stature rose with each of his successes. As early as January 1918, Lunacharskii, one of the better-educated and more levelheaded of the Bolshevik luminaries, reminded Lenin that he no longer belonged to himself but to “mankind.”⁶² There were other early inklings of an incipient cult, and if the process of deification did not unfold as yet, it was because Lenin discouraged it. Thus, he stopped Soviet officials who wanted to enforce on his behalf tsarist laws savagely punishing the defacement of the ruler’s portrait.⁶³ His peculiar vanity dissolved tracelessly in the “movement”: it received complete gratification from its successes without requiring a “personality cult.”