The SR activist who shot Lenin, believing him a 'traitor to the revolution'
At her Cheka interrogation: 'Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.'
Born into a Jewish teacher's family in Volhynia, Fanny Kaplan took up anarchism at 15 and was arrested at 16 for a bomb plot against the governor of Kiev, earning a life sentence to Siberian hard labour. During eleven years in prison she went blind and partially recovered, and under Maria Spiridonova's influence joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Freed by the February Revolution of 1917, she came to see Lenin as a traitor to the revolution after the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly, and on 30 August 1918 fired three shots at him outside Moscow's Michelson factory. The attempt, along with the same-day assassination of Moisei Uritsky, triggered the Red Terror; Kaplan was shot in the Kremlin four days later.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1906Arrested in Kiev for a bomb plot targeting Governor Sukhomlinov
- 1907–1917Served life sentence at Maltsev and Akatuy prisons, Nerchinsk katorga; went blind and partially recovered
- 1917Released under Provisional Government amnesty after February Revolution; resumed SR activity
- 1918.08.30Fired three shots from a Browning pistol at Lenin outside Moscow's Michelson factory, wounding him seriously
- 1918.09.03Shot in the Kremlin by Pavel Malkov after Cheka interrogation
Related historical events
Identification, interrogation, and contested responsibility
Even the capture does not yield a single narrative. According to the testimony of Deputy Commissar S. N. Batulin, he was within twenty steps of Lenin when he heard three shots and saw Lenin face down; he then detained a woman who looked suspicious, and she turned out to be Kaplan. The factory commissar N. I. Ivanov, by contrast, claimed to have arrested her only after several children who had followed her down the street identified her. One arrest thus survives in two conflicting eyewitness accounts.
Under Cheka interrogation Kaplan stated: "Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver," declaring that she had resolved long before to kill the man she called a traitor to the Revolution, and that she had favoured the Constituent Assembly and still did. The Russian record adds that she fixed her decision in Simferopol in February 1918, after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and believed Lenin's actions set socialism back by decades. She confined the act to herself and denied acting on any party's orders. When it became clear she would not implicate accomplices, she was executed. Although the Cheka found no evidence linking her attempt to the same-day assassination of Moisei Uritsky in Petrograd, their occurrence in quick succession appeared significant amid the intensifying civil war: the Bolsheviks' reaction was an abrupt escalation in the persecution of opponents, and an official decree announcing the Red Terror was issued only hours after the shooting. In the following months about 800 Right SRs and other political opponents were executed.
The Russian record also notes that no real investigation took place, only formal proceedings. Historians dispute who fired. Dmitri Volkogonov and others have questioned Kaplan's actual role, calling the official account another mystification of Bolshevik history, while Arkady Vaksberg named the SR Lidia Konopleva as the culprit. The arguments include Kaplan's near-blindness, the fact that no witness actually saw her fire, and Jēkabs Peterss's radiogram mentioning the arrest of several suspects rather than one. The Russian article counters that a 1922 X-ray examination confirmed at least two of the three bullets struck Lenin, and that the claim that the bullets taken from Lenin's body did not match the pistol found with Kaplan first appeared in émigré publications in the 1970s. The pistol was inventoried as Browning M1900 No. 150489. Amid the confused information of August 1918, Kaplan defined herself as the sole perpetrator, and that self-definition has remained the most contested point in later accounts.