Red Terror Begins

September 1918

On August 30, 1918, Vladimir Lenin spoke at a rally at the Mikhelson Factory in Moscow. As he was leaving the rally, he was shot and wounded by a woman waiting for him in the factory’s courtyard. Her name was Fanny Kaplan, and she was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party – an SR.

That same day word reached Moscow that the chief of the Petrograd secret police, Moisei Uritsky, had been gunned down. A young poet by the name of Leonid Kannegiser had ridden his bicycle to the home of the Cheka boss and fired a fatal series of shots. Before the revolution, Kannegiser, a friend of the poet Sergei Yesenin, had been active in the Popular Socialist Party, which, in an ironic twist, had renounced the use of terror.

Both Kaplan and Kannegiser were arrested, and after several days of brutal interrogation, both were shot.

Uritsky, one of the young Soviet regime’s most ruthless executioners, became a hero of the revolution, and to the present day there is hardly a Russian town without a street bearing his name.

Lenin remained in critical condition for some time, and there were rumors that Kaplan had used poisoned bullets. The sharp decline in Lenin’s health several years later and his relatively early death are often attributed to Kaplan’s assassination attempt, although there are other theories that are much less flattering to the revolutionary leader, including that his debilitation was explained by syphilis.

The events of August 30 and their aftermath are veiled in obscurity. Conjecture and legends have abounded for nearly a century, including persistent rumors that Kaplan was not, in truth, executed on September 3, as the authorities claimed, but that she was often encountered in places of exile and Stalinist labor camps. There has also been abundant speculation as to whether or not Kaplan, whose eyesight had been severely impaired while imprisoned by the tsarist regime, was even capable of aiming a gun and that she must have had an accomplice.

Were Kaplan and Kannegiser “lone wolf” terrorists? What were their ties to the Bolsheviks’ rivals, the Socialist Revolutionary Party? The SRs were also socialists, but they had a somewhat different understanding of what the ideology called for. There was a time when they saw Lenin and his followers as comrades in arms, and before the revolution the two groups often found themselves side-by-side in emigration, exile, and tsarist prison cells.

With the fall of the old regime in 1917, a power struggle broke out in earnest between the two groups. The Bolsheviks secured their own hold on power largely by temporarily usurping the SR slogan “Land to the Peasants,” but that did not stop them from persecuting SRs. The “Left SRs,” an offshoot of the Socialist Revolutionary Party that concluded a pact with the Bolsheviks, managed to share power with Lenin’s party for just a few months. By the summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks had branded them “counterrevolutionaries.” In July 1918, SRs, who were strongly opposed to the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, assassinated the German ambassador, Wilhelm von Mirbach, in an attempt to undermine the accord between the Bolsheviks and Germany. They also worked to overthrow the Bolsheviks, who had started to confiscate grain from the peasants. Against this backdrop, the assassinations at the end of August looked like another attempt by the SRs to topple the Bolsheviks by striking against Lenin and the head of the Petrograd Cheka.

Could it be true, as some have alleged, that foreign diplomats, primarily Britain’s Robert Bruce Lockhart, were behind the attempt on Lenin’s life? Were the SRs really planning to overthrow the Bolsheviks after the assassination, and if so, why was no action taken?

Little is known about Fanny Kaplan beyond the most basic facts of her biography. The pensive youth Kannegiser, who belonged to renowned literary circles, is a less obscure figure, but his motives also remain a mystery. Was he seeking to avenge a friend who was killed at the hands of the Cheka? Was he hoping to save Russia and stop the bloodletting? There have even been theories that claim the shootings were arranged by the Bolsheviks themselves as an excuse to launch the Red Terror (such theories emphasize the fact that both assassins were Jews who, of course, were partners with the Bolsheviks in a grand conspiracy). This theory was bolstered by the fact that there were many murky connections between SRs and the secret police, the ranks of which included many former members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Whatever the case may have been, the decision to launch a Red Terror was taken the very next day after the shootings. All Bolshevik newspapers were filled with calls for vengeance. The leaders of the party also urged revenge. In every Russian city, the authorities rounded up hostages from among their own people, or rather from among people whom they considered neither their own nor people: business owners, priests, and members of the intelligentsia. The idea was that they would be shot if the enemies of the revolution took action against the government. In reality, on top of the torture and abuse to which the hostages were subjected, many were shot without the slightest regard for what the SRs did.

Once Lenin recovered consciousness after the assassination attempt, he repeatedly exhorted local authorities to show no mercy. As the revolution’s вождь (vozhd or leader) he, of course, instructed that verdicts should be substantiated, but he never bothered to clarify exactly what constituted grounds for the death penalty. In fact, they were simple: if you were a member of the “exploiting classes,” then you were guilty. Vladimir Ilyich recommended a variety of punishments, but the death penalty was, of course, a favorite among them, and it soon stopped seeming like anything exceptional or horrible.

Lenin called for variety and experimentation in rooting out “harmful insects”: “In one place, they’ll imprison tens of the wealthy, dozens of pilferers, and a half dozen workers shirking their jobs... In another they’ll set them to cleaning the toilets. In a third they’ll give them yellow identity cards when they’re let out of jail, so the entire people will keep an eye on them as harmful until they’ve reformed. In a fourth, they’ll shoot them on the spot, one out of ten of those guilty of parasitism.” One can only marvel at the powers of creativity exhibited by the leader of the revolution!

How laughable it is (if such a word can be used here) that some poor excuses for historians seriously believe that the Bolsheviks used Kaplan and Kannegiser as an excuse to unleash terror. In fact, they had long since demonstrated that they needed no excuse. By the summer of 1918, so much blood had already been spilled that some scholars date the start of the Red Terror to late 1917, immediately following the revolution, rather than tying its inception to the shots fired by Fanny Kaplan. By August 30, 1918, all non-Bolshevik political parties had already been dispersed, several members of the Constitutional Democratic Party who belonged to the Provisional Government had been killed by drunken sailors, peasant uprisings had been quashed all across Russia, and Bolshevik artillery had brazenly sent a large part of the rebellious town of Yaroslavl to kingdom come…

The Red Terror did not need to be launched. It was already well underway.