Fanya Kaplan

Anarchist and accused assailant of Vladimir Ilich Lenin

• Born: 1887
• Birthplace: Volhynia Province, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine)
• Died: September 3, 1918
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Major offenses: Armed assault and attempted assassination of Lenin

Active: August 30, 1918

Locale: Moscow, Russia

Sentence: Eternal hard labor in the Maltsev prison in Siberia for armed assault conviction; execution for assassination attempt

Early Life

Fanya Kaplan (FAHN-ya KAP-lahn) was born as Faiga Khaimovna Roitman in 1887 in the Ukrainian rural province Volhynia in czarist Russia’s Settlement of the Pale. One of seven children born to a schoolteacher, Faiga was educated at home. While still in her teens, she left home and found work in Odessa in a women’s hat factory. In the early years of the twentieth century, Russia was wracked by labor strikes, pogroms in the Pale, and violent revolutionary activity that increased in intensity with the start of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. By 1906, Feiga had joined the anarchist movement. Her marriage to a man named Kaplan enabled her to obtain an internal passport that in turn allowed her to move out of the Pale and into the restricted town of Kiev.

Criminal Career

Faiga, now using Fanya Yefimovna Kaplan as her revolutionary name, and two other anarchists rented a hotel room in Podol, the Jewish quarter of Kiev, where they plotted to assassinate the governor general of Kiev. On December 22, 1906, their explosives detonated unexpectedly. The three anarchists fled the hotel, but Kaplan, slightly injured and somewhat disoriented, alone was arrested. Because the blast had killed a hotel maid, Kaplan was tried and convicted of armed assault. On December 31, 1906, because she was only nineteen, her death sentence was commuted to eternal hard labor in the Maltsev prison in Siberia. Women prisoners were not required to work, and the prolonged isolation and confinement caused many to suffer from chronic diseases and mental illnesses. Kaplan developed severe, prolonged headaches and went completely blind. In 1912 and 1913, she was treated in other prison hospitals and recovered some of her sight.

Released from prison after the overthrow of the czar in 1917, Kaplan moved to Moscow in April, 1917, with former terrorist Anna Pigit. One year later, on August 30, 1918, as Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin was leaving the Mikhelson Armaments Factory, someone shot a pistol at him three times. One bullet wounded a woman talking to Lenin, and two bullets hit Lenin in the left shoulder, severely wounding him. The crowd dispersed rapidly except for Kaplan. When approached, she denied having done anything but was taken into custody. In a short time, she declared that she indeed had shot Lenin. She refused to name any accomplices and insisted that she had no affiliation with any political or revolutionary parties.

Legal Action and Outcome

Kaplan did not request an open trial or clemency. On September 3, 1918, after three days of relatively light questioning, the commandant of the Kremlin executed Kaplan on the orders of Iakov M. Sverdlov, the acting head of the Council of People’s Commissars while Lenin was incapacitated.

Impact

The assassination attempt against Lenin was used as a pretext to begin the infamous Red Terror, which was decreed within hours of Kaplan’s shooting by calling for “a merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the revolution.” Although no one could connect Kaplan directly to any organization, the first target of persecution of the terror was the Socialist Revolutionary Party; many believe that Fanya Kaplan was used as a pawn to discredit this party. When Lenin recovered from what were thought to have been mortal wounds, there emerged a Lenin cult, whose glorifications culminated in his mummification and public display following his death on January 24, 1924.

Bibliography

Fel’shtinskii, Iurii G. “The Mystery of Lenin’s Death.” Translated by Liv Bliss. Russian Social Science Review 45, no. 3 (July/August, 2004): 37-87. Argues that Kaplan’s light interrogation and quick execution indicate that she was a pawn in a campaign to discredit and destroy the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Lyandres, Semion. “The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the Evidence.” Slavic Review 48, no. 3 (Autumn, 1989): 432-448. This seminal article, based on careful examination of all interrogations of Kaplan and the changing depositions of witnesses who testified in the 1922 show trials against members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, argues that Kaplan could not have been the assailant.

Service, Robert. A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Valdimir Putin. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Service agrees with Lyandres that it was unlikely that Kaplan was the assailant of Lenin.