A. Kuznetsov: The traditional question: "Was there Fanny?"

S. Buntman: Was.

A. Kuznetsov: Undoubtedly. But did she shoot Ilyich?

There are two main versions. The official one is that the leadership of the Right SR party has taken the path of betraying the revolution, of fighting the Soviet regime, that the SRs have returned to their old tactics of individual terror. Three names are usually called - the three victims of this terror. On June 20, 1918, a prominent Bolshevik, Volodarsky, was killed, and a little over two months later, the well-known double assassination attempt took place. On the morning of August 30 in Petrograd, a terrorist, a poet, a close friend of Sergei Yesenin, an acquaintance of Marina Tsvetaeva, a reviewer of one of the first collections of Anna Akhmatova, and indeed a rather interesting person, Leonid Kannegiser, shot Moisei Uritsky, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, with a shot from a revolver.

After this tragic incident, in the afternoon, a note came to Lenin's secretariat stating that in the evening the echo of shots in Petrograd would be repeated in Moscow. Despite the message received, additional security measures were not taken in the capital; Lenin was supposed to speak at a rally in front of the workers of the Michelson plant. (On this day it was already the second meeting with the participation of Ilyich, before that he had visited the Grain Exchange). And he left for the plant without security, he was accompanied by a single person - his personal driver Stepan Kazimirovich Gil. So…

Confusion begins over time (we will talk about this a little later), nevertheless, in the official version, everything looks like this: for about an hour Ilyich spoke at a rally, then, accompanied by a group of factory workers who continued to ask him questions, he went out into the courtyard and approached car. Gil had already started the engine, opened the door so that Lenin could sit down ... Almost at the very car, Ilyich was stopped by the housekeeper Popova and complained about the injustice of the workers of the barrage detachments on the railways. Lenin promised to sort it out. And so, when he took the last step towards the car, took hold of the door handle, the first shot rang out. Then the second, third... Lenin fell. The crowd was numb.

After some time, a suspicious woman was detained at the tram arrow on Serpukhovka. In the post-official, Soviet version, she was allegedly pointed out by the boys who ran after her from the scene of the assassination with the words: “Here she is, the killer!” The terrorist was taken to the Zamoskvoretsky military commissariat, and they began to interrogate her. The criminal called herself Fanny Efimovna Kaplan, to the question: “Did you shoot Comrade Lenin?” - answered in the affirmative.

On September 3, 1918, Fanny Kaplan was sentenced to death without trial. In the courtyard of the 1st Auto-Combat Detachment named after the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, to the sound of running cars, the sentence was carried out by the commandant of the Kremlin, a former Baltic sailor Pavel Malkov. After that, Kaplan's body was pushed into a tar barrel, doused with gasoline and burned.

The details of the assassination attempt, or rather what the Bolshevik authorities decided to report on this matter, became known to the public at the beginning of 1922, when the first open political trial of the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party began. It was they who were accused of preparing this atrocity. Some of the defendants even confessed... This attempt, in fact, along with other terrorist activities of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, became the reason for the dissolution of their party, its ban, and so on.

S. Buntman: This is the official version.

Fanny Kaplan. (wikimedia.org)

A. Kuznetsov: Yes. The second version, rather marginal, says that Fanny Kaplan was not part of a group led by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, but was a member of an independently formed association of desperate people who personally hated the leaders of the Soviet state for ideological reasons.

For a while, this version walked around the literature, but no one seriously considered it.

S. Buntman: Then let's go back to the official version. So, time. When did those ill-fated shots sound?

A. Kuznetsov: The question seems to be quite simple, but it is extremely difficult to answer it. The fact is that the spread in time is five hours: from 18:00 to 23:00. For example, during interrogation, the aforementioned Stepan Kazimirovich Gil clearly showed that he and Comrade Lenin arrived at the Michelson plant at about 22:00. The rally went on for about an hour (everyone agrees on this). That is, it turns out that around 23:00 shots were fired.

S. Buntman: Yes.

A. Kuznetsov: Then a rather interesting situation arises: if the chronology is correct, then somewhere at 23:30 Fanny Kaplan is brought into the building of the military commissariat, at the same time, Comrade Sverdlov makes a statement that the right SRs organized an assassination attempt on Vladimir Ilyich.

S. Buntman: Telephone?

A. Kuznetsov: Yes. But Kaplan was never a member of the right SR party.

S. Buntman: But after all, while in hard labor, she met the famous revolutionary Maria Spiridonova, who, let's say, turned her from anarchism to Socialist-Revolutionary.

A. Kuznetsov: Left eserstvo. Fanny Kaplan met Maria Spiridonova at hard labor in Akatui. In prison, Spiridonova gave her a shawl, which Kaplan cherished very much. Yes, the women were friendly, however, having learned that the terrorist delivered to the commissariat was Fanny Kaplan, it was impossible to immediately conclude: “Ah! Well, everything is clear. These are the Right SRs.”

S. Buntman: Of course.

A. Kuznetsov: Moreover, practically no one in the leadership of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party knew Fanny Kaplan. At that time, she did not have a family: in 1911, all her relatives emigrated to the United States ...

By the way, a few words about the family. There is a rather interesting episode when Gorky, Ilyich, already quite cheerful, came to visit the wounded Lenin, with a grin, told him, they say, how the intelligentsia took revenge on me ... However, Fanny Kaplan did not come from an intelligentsia family. Formally, yes: her father was a melamed, that is, a teacher in a cheder. But, apparently, the situation in the family was far from intelligent. The family was very large. All Fanny's brothers and sisters were workers, she herself worked as a seamstress ...

S. Buntman: But Lenin had to say something.

A. Kuznetsov: Undoubtedly.

Returning to the question of time. At 23:30 Sverdlov makes a statement. So that it (the statement) does not look, to put it mildly, prepared in advance, the time of the shots was shifted to an early time. The second reason for this decision is the vision of Fanny Kaplan. The story here is as follows.

In the autumn of 1906, a powerful explosion occurred in the Kyiv hotel "Kupecheskaya" - as a result of careless handling, an improvised explosive device went off. A couple ran out of the affected room: the man managed to escape, and the woman, who received minor injuries and severe concussion during the explosion, was detained by the police. During a search, a revolver, a Browning, loaded with eight live rounds, and a passport in the name of Feyga Khaimovna Kaplan were found on her.

S. Buntman: Let's say a few words about the name Kaplan.

A. Kuznetsov: Of course. At birth, our heroine received the name Feiga, which means “bird” in Yiddish. She didn't like the name, the name Fanny seemed much more elegant - "clever one". And with the entry into the "Southern Group of Communist Anarchists," Kaplan completely changed her name to the sonorous party nickname Dora.

So, for what Fanny Kaplan did, the death penalty was due, but as a minor she was pardoned and ... sentenced to life imprisonment.

S. Buntman: In Akatui prison.

Alexander Gerasimov "Shot at the People". (wikimedia.org)

A. Kuznetsov: Yes. On the way to hard labor, she began to have monstrous headaches, then they passed, it became easier, and then Kaplan became blind for the first time. After some time, vision was restored, but then the attack repeated again. Since then, Fanny has constantly fallen into darkness, and when the blindness receded, blurry outlines of individual objects appeared before her eyes.

After the February Revolution, when Kaplan, like thousands of other revolutionaries, was amnestied, she went to Kharkov, where she underwent an operation to restore her vision at the clinic of the famous Leonard Hirshman.

S. Buntman: Yet she was visually impaired.

A. Kuznetsov: Quite right. Therefore, the question of the time of shots has become one of the key ones. In the daytime, from a distance of three meters, Kaplan could well have hit Lenin, but in the dark ...

S. Buntman: Now it is clear why they began to shift time.

A. Kuznetsov: We got to the point of absurdity. In the end, in his memoirs, Gil will remember that the assassination attempt took place at 19:30.

S. Buntman: At the end of August it is still daylight.

A. Kuznetsov: Of course. But Bonch-Bruevich in his memoirs will generally shift the time to 18:00.

S. Buntman: Very strange. Another question: did anyone see the shooter?

A. Kuznetsov: Gil writes in his memoirs: “When Lenin was already three steps away from the car, I saw that on the side, on the left side of him, at a distance of no more than three steps, a woman’s hand with a browning was stretched out from behind several people, and there were three shots were fired, after which I rushed in the direction from which they were shooting ... "

S. Buntman: That is, Gil did not see the killer, but only noticed "a woman's hand with a browning"?

A. Kuznetsov: Yes. Moreover, the hand "stretched out because of several people."

As for the person who detained Fanny Kaplan, he was the assistant military commissar of the Moscow Soviet Infantry Division, Stefan Batulin. During the investigation, he testified: “Going up to the car in which Comrade Lenin was supposed to leave, I heard three sharp dry sounds, which I took not for revolver shots, but for ordinary motor sounds. Following these sounds, I saw a crowd of people who had previously calmly stood by the car, scattering in different directions, and behind the carriage I saw Comrade Lenin's car, lying motionless with his face to the ground. I understood that an attempt had been made on Comrade Lenin's life. I did not see the man who shot at Comrade Lenin ... "

Batulin rushed to run along Serpukhovka, overtaking frightened people. At the tram switch, he saw a woman with a briefcase, who was behaving strangely. When he asked why she was here and who she was, the woman replied: “I didn’t do it.” Naturally, this answer seemed suspicious to Batulin. He asked her again if she had shot at Lenin. The latter answered in the affirmative. The armed Red Army soldiers surrounded the terrorist and Batulin and brought her to the military commissariat of the Zamoskvoretsky district.

Yes, interestingly, Kaplan was wearing a long skirt, besides, she did not see well, but from the testimony of eyewitnesses it follows that she managed to overtake the young and athletic Batulin.

S. Buntman: Yes, it's interesting.

A. Kuznetsov: Another story: when Kaplan was brought to the commissariat, she asked the soldier guarding her for some paper to put in her shoes lined with nails. He gave her some forms. She folded them several times and put them in her shoes as insoles. And then, already during the search, these forms were found at Kaplan's and almost sewn them into the case as pre-prepared forged documents.

Lenin and Sverdlov visiting the monument to Marx and Engels. (wikimedia.org)

S. Buntman: It turns out that there is only one detail that works in favor of Fanny Kaplan - this is the fact that she did not kill Lenin.

A. Kuznetsov: There is also an interesting story here. A day after the assassination attempt, they began to look for weapons. Kaplan was not found during the search. A day later, a Browning, from which Comrade Lenin was shot, was brought to the Commissariat by a factory worker. During interrogation, Gil testified: “The woman who fired threw a revolver at my feet and disappeared into the crowd. This revolver lay under my feet. With me, no one raised this revolver. But, as one of the two accompanying the wounded Lenin explained, he told me: “I pushed him under the car with my foot.”

S. Buntman: That is, the weapon was attached to the case a day after the assassination attempt?

A. Kuznetsov: Yes. Investigators have been appointed. The first was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Viktor Kingisepp, who was directly subordinate to Sverdlov. The second is Yakov Yurovsky, a fellow countryman of Sverdlov, who shot the royal family on his orders.

An investigation began, during which Kingisepp and Yurovsky conducted a very strange investigative experiment. Why strange? The fact is that the suspect must participate in the experiment, if he is alive (at that time, Kaplan had not yet been shot), and the investigator must monitor the progress of the experiment and record the testimony. However, on September 2, this did not happen at the Michelson plant. The picture of the assassination was simulated, Kaplan was not involved in the investigative experiment. A little later, a series of photographs taken by Yurovsky appeared in the case - a falsification of the incident, with the inscriptions "Kaplan shoots", "An attempt was made" and so on.

S. Buntman: After this investigative experiment, Fanny Kaplan was unexpectedly transferred from Lubyanka ... to the Kremlin.

A. Kuznetsov: Yes. By the way, there is another interesting story in this case. On the night of September 1, British Ambassador Bruce Lockhart was arrested, and at 06:00 Fanny Kaplan was brought into his cell on the Lubyanka. She was probably promised to save her life if she pointed to Lockhart as an accomplice in the assassination attempt on Lenin, but Kaplan remained silent and was quickly taken away.

Lockhart's impressions of this visit are unique: “At 6 o'clock in the morning a woman was brought into the room. She was dressed in black. She had black hair, and her eyes, fixed and fixed, surrounded by black circles. Her face was pale. The features, typically Jewish, were unattractive. She could be of any age, from 20 to 35 years old. We guessed it was Kaplan. Undoubtedly, the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign. Her calmness was unnatural. She went to the window and, resting her chin on her hand, looked through the window at the dawn. So she remained motionless, silent, resigned, apparently to her fate, until the sentries entered and took her away.

Here is the last reliable evidence of a man who saw Fanny Kaplan alive ...

S. Buntman: Who did shoot at Lenin?

A. Kuznetsov: At the trial of 1922 there will be two categories of accused. Some will be brought under escort in "black funnels", while others will come to court on their own by summons. The footage has been saved. They are in the documentary "Who Shot Lenin?". The picture shows a chronicle where Grigory Semyonov and Lydia Konoplyova enter the building of the House of Unions. According to the official version, it was these people who led the group that was preparing an assassination attempt on Vladimir Ilyich.

At the trial of 1922, Konoplev and Semenov openly denounced their supposedly party comrades, and the accusation, in fact, was based on their testimony. The main accuser at the trial was Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky, who asked the court to sentence all the defendants to death. After him, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin took the podium. Turning to the court, he appealed to make an exception for those comrades who, having surrendered the traitors, had done a deed useful for the revolution. Thus, Semyonov and Konoplev were released.

S. Buntman: Bullets? Were they really poisoned?

A. Kuznetsov: Of course not. Although at the trial Semyonov testified that he personally cut the bullet heads and smeared curare poison into them. From poisoned bullets, Lenin would have died instantly. However, wounded, he himself got into the car, then got out of it, climbed a rather narrow staircase to the third floor to his apartment in the Kremlin. That is, the injury was not severe. Two bullets hit him in the neck and arm, and the third wounded the housekeeper Popova.

S. Buntman: Who was behind this attack? Who benefited from it?

A. Kuznetsov: Some historians believe that Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was interested in Lenin's death. So many threads lead to it.

Sverdlov was not the person we are used to seeing in Soviet films. He was, on the one hand, a professional revolutionary, on the other, a real adventurer. Yakov Mikhailovich behaved very strangely these days. This was repeatedly recalled by Bonch-Bruevich, in whose memoirs one can find the phrase uttered by Sverdlov: “Here Ilyich is wounded, but we nevertheless manage without him. Nothing. We are working."

However, who knows what really happened.

The official version of the assassination attempt on Lenin in 1918 is well known, but the question of how true it is is still open. Relatively recently, in June 1992, the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia, having considered the materials of the criminal case against Fanny Kaplan, found that the investigation was carried out superficially, and issued a decision "to initiate proceedings on newly discovered circumstances."

There were so many of these "circumstances" that they are still being considered.

Apparently, the matter hung for a long time, so let's try, if possible, to figure it out ourselves and understand what happened on August 30, 1918?

Mysteries of the history of Russia / Nikolay Nepomniachtchi. — M.: Veche, 2012.

Fanny Kaplan. Photo 1918

Immediately after the shots were fired at the leader, the appeal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, signed by Yakov Sverdlov, was published. “A few hours ago, a villainous attempt was made on Comrade. Lenin. Two shooters were detained. Their identities are being revealed. We have no doubt that traces of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, traces of British and French hirelings will be found here too.

One of the detainees was the former Left SR Alexander Protopopov. It is known that he was one of the sailors, that during the speech of the Left Social Revolutionaries in July 1918, he personally disarmed Dzerzhinsky himself. Most likely, this was precisely what they did not forgive him for, and after his arrest, without being engaged in empty interrogations and clarifications of where he was and what he did during the attempt on Lenin, he was quickly shot.

But the second detainee was a woman, and Batulin, assistant military commissar of the 5th Moscow Infantry Division, detained her. In testimony given again in hot pursuit, he stated:

I was 10-15 steps from Lenin at the time of his exit from the rally, which means that I was still in the courtyard of the factory. Then he heard three shots and saw Lenin lying face down on the ground. I yelled, "Hold it! Catch” and behind me I saw a woman presented to me, who behaved strangely ... When I detained her and when shouts began to be heard from the crowd that this woman had shot, I asked if she had shot at Lenin. The latter replied that she We were surrounded by armed Red Guards, who did not allow her to be lynched and brought her to the military commissariat of the Zamoskvoretsky district.

Only a week had passed, and Batulin spoke differently. It turns out that he took revolver shots for ordinary “motor sounds” and only then realized what was happening when he saw Lenin lying on the ground. And he detained the woman not in the yard, but on Serpukhovskaya Street, where the crowd, frightened by the shots, rushed, and everyone fled, and she stood, which attracted the attention of the vigilant commissar.

The most surprising thing is that when asked by Batulin whether she shot at Lenin, the woman, not being arrested and not being in the Cheka, answered in the affirmative, however, refusing to name the party on behalf of which she fired.

So who was brought on that fateful evening to the Zamoskoretsk military registration and enlistment office? What kind of woman took responsibility for the assassination attempt on Ilyich? She turned out to be Feiga Khaimovna Kaplan, also known under the names of Fanny and Dora and under the names of Royd and Roitman. She was brought to the Zamoskvoretsky military registration and enlistment office. There Fanya was stripped naked and thoroughly searched. They did not find anything worthwhile, except for pins, hairpins and cigarettes. There was also a Browning in the briefcase, but Fanya did not explain how it got there. Then she was handed over to the Chekists, who took her to the Lubyanka. There she was taken up much more seriously and, so to speak, professionally. The protocols of these interrogations have been preserved, let us read at least some of them.

I arrived at the rally at eight o'clock, - said Fanya. - Who gave me a revolver, I will not say. Where I got the money, I will not answer. I shot with conviction. I have not heard anything about the organization of terrorists associated with Savinkov. Whether I have any acquaintances among those arrested by the Extraordinary Commission, I do not know.

Fanny Kaplan and Vladimir Lenin

And what can be understood from this interrogation? Never mind. And here is the protocol of another interrogation, in which there is a little more information.

I am Fanya Efimovna Kaplan, under this name I was sitting in Akatui. I have been wearing this name since 1906. I shot at Lenin today. I shot on my own. I don't remember how many shots. What revolver she fired from, I will not say. I was not familiar with those women who spoke with Lenin. The decision to shoot Lenin was long overdue for me. I shot at Lenin because I considered him a traitor to the revolution and his continued existence undermined faith in socialism.

Further events developed so rapidly that there are simply no more or less reasonable explanations for them. Judge for yourself. The investigation is in full swing, and suddenly, on September 4, a completely unexpected message appears in Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee: “Yesterday, by order of the Cheka, a shooter at Comrade was shot. Lenin's Right Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Royd (aka Kaplan)."

A unique document has been preserved - the memoirs of the commandant of the Kremlin Pavel Malkov, who carried out the sentence. Here is what he writes in particular:

“According to the instructions of the Secretary of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Avanesov, I brought Kaplan from the Cheka to the Kremlin and put him in the basement room under the Children's Half of the Grand Palace. Avanesov showed me the decree of the Cheka on the execution of Kaplan.

When? I asked shortly.

Today, immediately,” he replied. - And after a minute of silence: - Where do you think it's better?

Perhaps in the yard of the auto-combat squad, at a dead end.

I agree.

After that, the question arose of where to bury. It was allowed by Ya. M. Sverdlov.

We will not bury Kaplan. Destroy the remains without a trace,” he ordered.

Having received such a sanction, Malkov began to act. First of all, he ordered several trucks to be rolled out and engines started, and a passenger car to be driven into a dead end, turning its radiator towards the gate. Then Malkov went for Kaplan, whom, as you remember, he left in the basement room. Without explaining anything, Malkov brought her outside. It was four o'clock, the bright September sun was shining - and Fanya involuntarily closed her eyes. Then her gray, radiant eyes opened wide to meet the sun! She saw the silhouettes of people in leather jackets and long overcoats, distinguished the outlines of cars, and was not at all surprised when Malkov ordered: “To the car!” - she was transported so often that she got used to it. At that moment, some command was heard, the engines of the trucks roared, the passenger car howled thinly, Fanya stepped towards the car and ... shots rang out. She no longer heard them, because Malkov discharged the entire clip into her.

According to the rules, during the execution of a death sentence, a doctor must be present - it is he who draws up the act of death. This time they did without a doctor, he was replaced by the great proletarian writer and fabulist Demyan Bedny. At that time he lived in the Kremlin and, having learned about the upcoming execution, asked for it as a witness. While they were shooting, Demyan was cheerful. He did not turn sour when he was asked to douse the woman's body with gasoline, as well as at the moment when Malkov could not light damp matches in any way - and the poet generously offered his own. But when the fire broke out and the smell of burning human flesh, the singer of the revolution fell into a swoon.

The news of the execution of a vile terrorist who attempted on the leader of the revolution was met with great enthusiasm by the progressive proletariat. But the old revolutionaries and former political prisoners saw in this act a violation of the highest principles, for the sake of which they rotted in the casemates, and even went to the scaffold. Kaplan himself reacted very peculiarly to the news of the execution: according to people who knew him well, “he was shocked by the execution of Dora Kaplan,” and his wife Krupskaya “was deeply shocked by the thought of revolutionaries condemned to death by the revolutionary authorities, and wept bitterly” .

That's it, Lenin is shocked, but he can't do anything to save Dora. Krupskaya is crying, but also completely powerless. So who then is the leader, who decides the fate of the country and the people living in it? This name is well known, but more about it later. In the meantime, about the anti-Leninist conspiracy that matured by the end of the summer of 1918. The position of the Bolsheviks at that time was critical: the membership of the party decreased, peasant revolts broke out one after another, and the workers went on strike almost continuously. And if we also take into account the brutal defeats at the fronts, as well as the deafening defeat during the elections to local Soviets, then it became clear to all sane people: the days of Lenin's supporters in power are numbered. It is no coincidence that it was then that Leon Trotsky met with the German ambassador Mirbach and told him with communist frankness: "Actually, we are already dead, but there is still no one who could bury us."

But there were many, many who wanted to do it! Moreover, all potential conspirators considered the physical removal of Lenin as an indispensable condition for coming to power. I must say that Ilyich knew about it, he even asked in one of his conversations with Trotsky: “Will Sverdlov and Bukharin be able to cope if the White Guards kill us?” If we replace the word "White Guards", who, of course, could not get to the Kremlin, with any other, then Lenin's anxiety can be understood, he either felt or knew that tragic events were brewing.

This is confirmed by the employees of the German embassy in Moscow. In August 1918, they reported to Berlin that the leadership of Soviet Russia was transferring "significant funds" to Swiss banks, that the inhabitants of the Kremlin were asking for foreign passports, that "the air of Moscow is saturated with assassination as never before."

And now let's compare some facts... Who signed the first appeal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee about the assassination attempt on Lenin and, before any facts were clarified, indicated the address where the organizers of the assassination should be looked for? Yakov Sverdlov. Who instructed Kingisepp to conduct an investigation into the assassination case? Sverdlov. Who, in the midst of the investigation, ordered Kaplan to be shot and her remains to be destroyed without a trace? Sverdlov again.

Is his name repeated too often in connection with this case? No, given that, according to contemporaries, by the summer of 1918, all party and Soviet power was concentrated in his hands. Concentrated in fact, but not officially - after all, Lenin remained the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, that is, the head of the government. The version that Sverdlov was the organizer of the assassination attempt, and not without the participation of Dzerzhinsky, sounds wild, of course, but that's the problem, so far it has not been possible to refute it convincingly. What is worth at least one inexplicable fact that surfaced only in 1935, that is, sixteen years after the death of Sverdlov.

The then People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Genrikh Yagoda, decided to open Sverdlov's personal safe. What he found there shocked him, and Yagoda immediately wrote to Stalin that they found in the safe: “108,525 rubles worth of gold coins of royal minting, 705 gold items, many of which are with precious stones. Blank forms of royal-style passports, seven completed passports, including one in the name of Ya. M. Sverdlov. In addition, royal money in the amount of 750 thousand rubles.

And now remember the reports of the German embassy about the inhabitants of the Kremlin, asking for foreign passports and transferring significant funds to Swiss banks.

But back to where we started. Facts - a huge number of versions - too. In principle, it is possible to understand them, but to draw conclusions... Only the Prosecutor General can draw conclusions. I would like to hope that he will still have time to get acquainted with case No. 2162 and he will finally decide whether Fanny Kaplan shot at Lenin or did not shoot. And if it turns out that she did not shoot, she will give instructions on the rehabilitation of Fanny Kaplan as a victim of political repression.

According to the materials of the newspaper "Vostochno-Sibirskaya Pravda"

WHO SHOT LENIN?

Nikolai Nepomniachtchi - 100 great mysteries of the 20th century...

The year 1918 for the Russian Empire began two months earlier - October 25, 1917, or November 8, according to the new style. It was on the night of 25/26 that a coup d'etat took place in Petrograd, later called the Great October Revolution. Waking up on the morning of the 26th, a frightened Petrograd inhabitant was surprised to find that many shops and institutions were not working, Kerensky's government was overthrown, he himself fled, and the Bolsheviks seized power - the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, headed by a little-known person at that time. time in Russia Vladimir Ulyanov. This red-haired, short, son of a teacher from the provincial Volga town of Simbirsk, a lawyer by profession, a revolutionary with twenty years of experience, was well known only to the tsarist secret police.

The last time Vladimir Ulyanov was arrested in 1895, exiled to Siberia, and after the exile went abroad, where he spent 16 years. More a theoretician than a practitioner, he, possessing enormous organizational skills, created a party abroad, which set as its goal the seizure of power in Russia.

Taking care of the party fund, Lenin did not disdain either the offerings of large manufacturers, or the robbery of his party terrorists who robbed banks and steamships - two of them went down in the history of the party: the legendary Kamo (Ter-Petrosyan) and the no less legendary Koba, aka Joseph Dzhugashvili , whom the whole world will know under a different name - Joseph Stalin. But all money eventually runs out. Meanwhile, the First World War began. Lenin makes an absolutely incredible and fantastic offer to the Germans: to withdraw Russia from the war. Germany kept 107 divisions on the Eastern Front, almost half of its troops. Who would refuse such a tempting deal, especially since Lenin did not look like a joker? And in two years - from 1915 to 1917 - according to the estimates of modern researchers, more than 50 million gold marks migrated to the Bolshevik party fund - a rather big amount!

Lenin kept his word. On October 25, 1917, the Bolsheviks, fed on German money, seized power by force, and on March 3, 1918, Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty with Germany, according to which 1 million square kilometers of the territory of our country departed to the Germans. Lenin also pledged to pay Germany 50 billion rubles in indemnity.

Once in power, Lenin began with populist declarations, promising world peace, land to the peasants, freedom and democratic rights to everyone else. But Lenin's party was not popular among the masses, but the other party, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, was well known among the people. It was the Socialist-Revolutionaries who mainly carried out underground work, raised peasant uprisings, organized strikes at factories, it was for them that the halo of fighters against tsarism was fixed in the public mind. Therefore, when in the autumn of 1917, already after the October Revolution, elections were held for the Constituent Assembly - the main, as it was supposed then, the legislative body of the new revolutionary Russia - the Socialist-Revolutionaries won a convincing victory in them, while Lenin's supporters gained only a quarter of the votes. On January 5, 1918, when the Constituent Assembly began its first meeting, the Bolsheviks suddenly realized that they had lost power...

It was a black day in Lenin's life. And then, without any sentimentality, he dissolved the Constituent Assembly. And to be more precise in the definitions - dispersed. The proletarian writer Maxim Gorky later claimed that this was done by the “conscious anarchist” sailor Anatoly Zheleznyakov, who, by his own admission, was ready to kill a million people, but, together with his drunkard brother, managed to shoot only 43 officers, assuring that after that “he himself , you know, it’s nice to do, and the soul is calm, like angels sing ... ". The Social Revolutionaries organized a protest demonstration, but the Bolsheviks immediately shot it.

Yesterday's comrades-in-arms in the struggle against the king in an instant became enemies. The Right SRs organized their government in Samara, on the Volga. Thanks to the uprising of the Czechs, they took power in the Volga regions, and captured most of the gold reserves of the former tsarist government. The other part of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party - the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, although offended by the Bolsheviks, remained in the government, in the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Sabotage and Counter-Revolution, which was organized on December 7, 1917 and from which the KGB later grew) and in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, on the lowest floor of which the Soviets stood. These latter formally owned power, ever since the famous Leninist slogan "All power to the Soviets!". It will formally belong to them until the collapse of the red empire in 1991, although from the very first day of the revolution, power in Soviet Russia belonged only to the Bolshevik Communist Party, or rather its leaders: the big ones at the top, and the small ones at the bottom, in the localities.

To the internal troubles of the Bolsheviks, external troubles were added. In March 1918, the intervention of the former allies began - England, America and France. The Japanese landed in the Far East, the Turks invaded Transcaucasia, Kolchak seized power in Omsk, declaring himself the Supreme Ruler of Russia. In the south, Kaledin and Denikin were gathering the anti-Bolshevik army. By mid-summer 1918, the Bolsheviks barely controlled one-fourth of all of Russia. It seemed to everyone that Lenin's power was living out its last days ...

On June 20, 1918, Moses Volodarsky, the Bolshevik commissar for the press, was killed in Petrograd. A month and a half later, on August 30, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moses Uritsky, was shot dead. On the same day, August 30, 1918, in the evening in Moscow, 4 shots rang out in the courtyard of the Michelson plant. A small man in a cap, who was standing near the car, twitched and fell backwards to the ground. The crowd that surrounded him shied away, the women screamed. They ran up to the fallen man, turned him over.

Did he get caught or not? the victim said in a low whisper. Nobody could answer him. An hour later, terrible news spread throughout Moscow: Lenin was killed ...

... Six days before the assassination attempt, three people met on the boulevard near the Smolensky market: Dmitry Donskoy, Grigory Semenov and Fanny Kaplan. Donskoy, a military doctor by profession, also supervised the fighting groups of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. One of these groups was led by Grigory Semyonov, a member of the same party. Donskoy looked around nervously: all three of them could easily have been raked into the Cheka. Two days ago, Felix Dzerzhinsky returned to the chairmanship, having left his post after the events of July 6 in Moscow. Then the members of the Cheka, Blyumkin and Andreev, shot the German ambassador Wilhelm Mirbach, and Dzerzhinsky - he went to the Popov detachment, formally considered a detachment of the Cheka, to arrest Blumkin - disarmed and arrested himself. This infuriated Lenin: what kind of leader of the Cheka is he, who is being arrested by his own fighters?!

With Peters, who became chairman of the Cheka after the departure of Dzerzhinsky, Ilyich did not have a relationship. Felix ran to the Kremlin almost every day and reported everything in detail, consulted, followed instructions, while Peters only sent reports. Ilyich, on the other hand, preferred to keep the Cheka in the field of near vision. So he returned Felix to his place. Dzerzhinsky is now engaged in the liquidation of the "National Center", the Chekists are prowling around the city, and here on you - on a bench, Mr. Semyonov himself is sitting, under whose leadership Moses Volodarsky was killed in Petrograd, and with him the notorious terrorist Fanya Kaplan and the military Socialist-Revolutionary leader Dmitry Donskoy . Good company!

Semyonov introduced Fanny to Donskoy - they were formally strangers - and gave her the floor. Fanya declared that she was ready to kill Lenin ...

To the portrait of Kaplan: “Open sheet number 2122. Compiled in the office of the Akatui prison in October 1913, 1 day. Kaplan Feiga Khaimovna, exiled convict of the 1st category. Dark blond hair, 28 years old, pale face, brown eyes, height 2 arshins, 3 1/2 inches, ordinary nose. Distinguishing features: a longitudinal scar 2.5 cm long above the right eyebrow. Additional information: from the philistines of the Rechitsa Jewish Society. Born in 1887. girl. Has no real estate. Parents left for the USA in 1911. Has no other relatives. For making a bomb against the Kyiv governor, she was sentenced to death, he was replaced by life imprisonment. During the manufacture of the bomb, she was wounded in the head, she became blind in hard labor, later her vision partially returned. In prison, she wanted to commit suicide. According to his political views, he stands for the Constituent Assembly.”

From Donskoy's review of Kaplan: "A rather attractive woman, but, no doubt, crazy, in addition to this with various ailments: deafness, semi-blindness, and in a state of exaltation - complete idiocy." Note that Donskoy is a professional doctor ...

I didn't understand what you said? asked Fanny Dmitri Dmitrievich.

“I want to kill Lenin,” Kaplan replied.

- Why? Donskoy didn't understand.

“Because I consider him a traitor to the revolution, and his very existence undermines faith in socialism.

- What does it undermine? Donskoy asked.

I don't want to explain! Fanny was silent. “He removes the idea of ​​socialism for decades!”

Donskoy laughed:

"Go to sleep, honey!" Lenin is not Marat, and you are not Charlotte Corday! And most importantly, our Central Committee will never agree to this. You've come to the wrong place. I give good advice - get it all out of your head and don't tell anyone else!

Kaplan was discouraged by this response. Donskoy said goodbye to them and quickly began to leave. Semyonov caught up with him, talked about something, returned to Kaplan and unexpectedly announced that everything was in order.

- Donskoy approved my plan!

“But he said something completely different,” Kaplan did not understand.

“What do you want him to say to the first person you meet: go kill Lenin?! Conspiracy, my dear! I completely forgot in hard labor how it's done! Come on, now we need to get ready!

And they slowly moved along the boulevard towards the market ...

August 27, 1918. Kremlin. Lenin was working as usual in his office when Yakov Sverdlov came to see him...

To the portrait of Sverdlov: Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was born into a poor Jewish family in Yekaterinburg. 33 years. At the age of 16 he joined the party, was in underground work, in exile. In 1918 - Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the main legislative body of the Soviet Republic. Sverdlov is accountable to the Cheka, the Revolutionary Tribunal. He is the second person after Lenin in the party hierarchy. Energetic, ambitious, smart, flexible, soberly assesses the situation. In his personal safe, there are forms of royal-style passports - for a possible flight abroad (one of them is filled out in his name), as well as a large amount in the form of gold, diamonds and royal banknotes ...

Sverdlov brought Lenin an addition to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Today it was to be signed. After the assassination of the German ambassador in Moscow, the Germans tore up the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Lenin, with great difficulty, managed to extinguish the conflict by agreeing to new, even more predatory conditions of the Germans. They had to give railways, oil, coal, gold mining into a long-term concession. In addition, Russia was obliged to transfer 245,564 kilograms of gold to Germany, with the first export scheduled for September 5th. Sverdlov, showing Lenin an addition, expressed concern: famine was approaching Moscow, there was no fuel for cars, resistance to the authorities and outright sabotage were growing. And this treaty will only add fuel to the fire and give the Socialist-Revolutionaries a trump card in the struggle against them.

“Saboteurs, conspirators, and even hesitators must be shot on the spot!” Lenin said temperamentally. “Let them form troikas on the ground and shoot everyone without any delay!” For possession of weapons - execution! For speaking out against Soviet power - execution! Arrest the unreliable and take them to concentration camps, which should be organized right outside the settlements: let everyone see what awaits them for such actions!

Ilyich got up from the table and began vigorously waving his hand, as if dictating another telegram. Sverdlov knew that many telegrams of this content were sent to Penza, Samara, Kostroma, Saratov. The chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee was horrified when he watched this bloody hysteria of the leader.

“We already shoot hundreds a day, and many sympathizers of our government are repelled by these cruel methods, playing into the hands of Kolchak and Denikin. They have already become Bolsheviks to intimidate the people. In order for us to survive and defeat the counter-revolution, the sympathy of the masses is now essential, they must be won over to our side! Sverdlov objected.

- Here, drag it on! You are the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the head of the legislative branch, and I am a performer! I shoot saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries and all the rest of the bastards! And you solve problems on a global scale!

Lenin chuckled, not without malice. Sverdlov did not understand this Leninist absolute calmness. He once told Ilyich that the reserve of their power would last only two weeks - that's how much food and kerosene remained in Moscow. Lenin was delighted: he thought that everything had ended long ago. But what to do next?

— Requisition the surplus from the rich! War communism! Share with a neighbor. If you don't want to share - against the wall!

“But the people will not understand us,” said Sverdlov.

— Really? Lenin was surprised. - It's a pity! We have just started this experiment! The people will not understand the villain. Therefore, we need to pretend to be orphans: they offend us, help! Here's something to think about!

Sverdlov thought. Gathered his secretaries - Yenukidze, Avanesov, a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the All-Russian Cheka Kingisepp, the chairman of the All-Russian Cheka Peters, the Chekist Yakov Yurovsky, who until recently, on behalf of Sverdlov and Lenin, liquidated the entire royal family in Yekaterinburg. They retired, took all precautions so that this conversation did not go beyond the walls of the office. Sverdlov took a firm vow of silence from everyone. And he proposed his own plan for saving power: unexpected, cunning and - forced ...

... The combat flying detachment of Semenov was the central group of the Right Socialist-Revolutionary Party. On June 20, a member of this detachment, Sergeev, shot Moses Volodarsky on Semenov's orders. The Central Committee of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, having learned about this act of terrorism, was outraged that Semenov carried it out without permission and publicly refused to take responsibility.

Thus, Semyonov actually turned into the leader of the gang, and the death of Volodarsky now lay only on him. He subsequently testified: “This statement was an unexpected and morally huge blow for us ... I saw and spoke with Rabinovich, and as a representative of the Central Committee, Rabinovich, on behalf of the Central Committee, told me that I had no right to commit an act.”

Semyonov was well aware that sooner or later Donskoy and Gotz, the leaders of the Right SR party, would hand him over to the Chekists without much spiritual trepidation. After the murder of Uritsky, it was dangerous to remain in Petrograd, and Semyonov, together with Sergeyev, moved to Moscow. Then he called here another militant of his group - Konoplyova.

On the eve of her arrival, Yenukidze invited him to his place. He was Sverdlov's secretary and dealt with military intelligence issues. They had known Semyonov since their youth. Yenukidze treated Semyonov to supper, and they drank some wine. And Yenukidze offered his old friend, about whom he knew almost everything, including his involvement in the murder of Volodarsky, to work for the military intelligence of the Bolsheviks. It was a delicate matter.

- And what's the matter, Avel Safronovitch? Semyonov asked.

“Attempts on Lenin and Trotsky,” Yenukidze replied. “We need you to kind of prepare these murders. I picked up a group, obtained the consent of the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, found a suitable performer. Then all responsibility will fall on your Central Committee and this executor.

- Will there be an attempt? Semyonov asked.

"That's none of your business!" Yenukidze answered...

To the portrait of Semenov: Semenov-Vasiliev Grigory Ivanovich, was born in the Estonian city of Yuryev (Derpt, now Tartu), 27 years old, self-taught, from the age of 24 a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He was a commissar of a cavalry detachment, from the end of 1917 a member of the military commission of the Central Committee of the Right Social Revolutionaries, the head of the Right Socialist Revolutionary battle group. The writer Viktor Shklovsky, who knew Semyonov, characterizes him this way: “A man of small stature in a tunic and harem pants, with glasses on a small nose ... A dumb person and suitable for politics. Can't speak."

... And Semenov began to work. The plan drawn up by him was "edited" by the investigator of the Cheka, Yakov Agranov. According to him, Moscow was divided into four districts, each of which was supervised by a certain militant. Other militants must take turns on duty at rallies where the leaders of the republic came to speak. As soon as Lenin appeared, the duty officer informed the district “curator” about this, and he appeared to carry out the terrorist attack ...

To implement this plan, Semenov needed a meeting with Donskoy. Not satisfied with her, he twice went to Gotz, who lived in a dacha in the suburbs, but was refused everywhere. However, when he came to the meetings of his battle group, Semyonov said that both Donskoy and Gotz approved of their plans. Four perpetrators were selected for the assassination of Lenin: Usov, Kozlov-Fedorov, Konoplev and Kaplan ...

... August 30 at 5 pm Lenin is having lunch in the Kremlin with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. In the afternoon, a message came that the head of the Petrograd branch of the Cheka, Moses Uritsky, had been shot dead in Petrograd. Lenin asked Dzerzhinsky to leave immediately for St. Petersburg and investigate this murder. The leader's appetite was not disturbed by this circumstance. He ate with pleasure, joked with his wife, who tried to dissuade him from speaking. Lenin planned two of them this Friday: at the Grain Exchange and at the Michelson factory. Topic: "The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat." In response to his wife's reminder that the district party committee forbade Lenin to temporarily speak at rallies, he jokingly remarked that Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov strictly demanded that all leading persons participate in rallies and would strongly scold him for such a refusal.

Around eight in the evening, Lenin arrived at the Grain Exchange. The car was driven by the driver Kazimir Gil. One of Semyonov's militants, Kozlov-Fedotov, was at the Grain Exchange. Later he will testify at the investigation: “I had a loaded revolver with me and, according to the decision of the detachment, I had to kill Lenin. I did not dare to shoot at Lenin, because I hesitated on the question of the admissibility of killing a representative of another socialist party. The explanation is very strange: a professional militant behaves like a schoolgirl. Lenin spoke at the Grain Exchange for 20 minutes, answered questions for another half an hour, after which he left. From the testimony of the driver Gil: "I arrived with Lenin at about 10 pm at the Michelson plant."

On August 30 at 10 pm it is already getting dark outside. No one met Lenin, and he himself went to the factory shop, where the rally was taking place. At the rally, Lenin also spoke for half an hour. Answered questions for half an hour.

From the testimony of Semenov: "Kaplan, on my instructions, was on duty not far from the plant on Serpukhovskaya Square." This is about two hundred meters from the factory yard ...

Around 11 pm Lenin left the shop and went to the car. Together with Lenin, those who listened to the leader went out into the courtyard. He was about to get into the car when shots rang out. Lenin fell. Many in fear rushed to run from the yard to the street. Batulin, assistant commissar of the infantry regiment, shouted: "Stop the killer!" and also ran out into the street.

From the testimony of Batulin: “Running to the so-called“ Strelka ”on Serpukhovka, I saw ... near a tree ... with a briefcase and an umbrella in her hands a woman who, with her strange appearance, stopped my attention. She had the appearance of a man fleeing persecution, frightened and hunted. I asked this woman why she came here. To these words, she replied: “Why do you need this?”. Then I, after searching her pockets and taking her briefcase and umbrella, suggested that she follow me. On the way, I asked her, sensing in her a face that attempted on Comrade. Lenin: “Why did you shoot Comrade. Lenin?”, To which she replied: “Why do you need to know this?”, which finally convinced me of the attempt on the life of this woman comrade. Lenin.

The absurdity of these statements is obvious. But it is important to note that Kaplan stood where she was placed. It is also obvious what follows from Batulin's testimony: he was ordered to identify Kaplan. Another thing is surprising: why did Kaplan admit that it was she who shot at Lenin? Perhaps, given her tendency to exaltation, the organizers of the assassination "calculated" this confession too - for she was already led as a murderer, the crowd roared, demanding lynching, and Bakulin himself says that he saved the terrorist from reprisal. Kaplan had a congenital neurosis since 1906, when she was sentenced to death, and then pardoned. It was precisely because of this that she immediately took all the blame on herself, categorically refusing to answer other questions. Her hysteria, sobs were replaced by a stone silence.

Not only the absurdity of Batulin's testimony proves that Kaplan was not involved in the shooting. During the search, a Browning was found on her, but, apparently, no one fired from it, because it was not included in the case. The decisive evidence in the case is another "Browning", which on September 2, the worker Kuznetsov brought to the Zamoskvoretsky military commissariat, assuring that this is the same "Browning" from which Lenin was shot. In the first statement - to the Commissariat - Kuznetsov wrote: “Lenin was still lying, a weapon was thrown not far from him, from which 3 shots were fired at Comrade Lenin (a weapon of the Browning system), raising this weapon, I rushed to run after that person, who was assassinated, and other comrades fled with me to detain this villain, and the comrades who ran ahead of me detained this man who made the attempt, and together with other comrades, I escorted this man to the military commissariat. Kuznetsov's words - "scoundrel", "this man" clearly indicate that the detainee was a man. But in a statement to the Cheka, made on the same September 2, instead of the words "scoundrel" and "man" Kuznetsov writes another word - "woman." And this was obviously done not without the prompting of "competent comrades."

Lenin himself also testifies about the male killer. Driver Gil recalls: “I knelt down in front of Vladimir Ilyich, leaned towards him ... “Did they catch him or not?” he asked quietly, obviously thinking that a man was shooting at him.

The same Gil makes an amendment in the protocol of interrogation: "After the first shot, I noticed a woman's hand with a Browning." This amendment is very remarkable and it was completed the very next day, when it became known that Kaplan had been arrested and confessed. It is possible that Gil was gently pressured to write down this amendment. Lenin’s remark “Did he get caught or not?” very important. This is not a stipulation. After the first shot, which wounded the woman who was talking to Ilyich, Lenin instinctively turned around. This saved his life. The doctor Weisbrod, who treated him, stated: "Only an accidental and happy turn of the head saved him from death."

Immediately after the assassination attempt on Lenin, Semyonov reported to the Central Committee of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries that this was done by a "combatant". Subsequently, at the trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, this detail will come up and take Semenov by surprise: he will not be able to answer who he had in mind then. And again, as in the case of Volodarsky, the Central Committee of the Right Social Revolutionaries publicly declares that it has nothing to do with this assassination attempt ...

At the rally at the Michelson plant on August 30, two SR combatants were present: Novikov and Protopopov. Novikov will later act as a witness at the trial in 1922 and say that he detained the crowd at the door, leaving the workshop after the rally, giving Kaplan the opportunity to shoot Lenin, but the same driver Gil will note that there was no crush at the door.

Even more curious is the figure of Protopopov. He was shot without trial or investigation on the night of September 1, 1918. Protopopov - a former sailor - was the deputy commander of the combat detachment of the Cheka (the same detachment of Popov, who took an active part in the mutiny on July 6). It was Protopopov who arrested Dzerzhinsky, who arrived at the detachment in search of the murderer of Mirbach, an employee of the Cheka, Blyumkin. After the suppression of the rebellion, Protopopov was arrested. An investigation began, it was led by Viktor Kingisepp - he also led the investigation into the assassination attempt on Lenin. But in the verdict of the court on the rebellion of the Left Social Revolutionaries, the name of Protopopov is no longer there. He disappeared, unexpectedly resurfacing only on August 30. And, most likely, he is the "scoundrel" who shot at Lenin. But, guessing who fired, we will not clarify the whole picture of the assassination if we do not answer the main question: who was behind Semenov, Kaplan, Protopopov?

... On the evening of August 30, Sverdlov's appeal appeared: “A few hours ago, a villainous attempt was made on Comrade. Lenin. Upon leaving the rally Comrade. Lenin was wounded. Two shooters were detained. Their identities are being revealed. We have no doubt that traces of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, hirelings of the British and French will be found here too.

The appeal is dated to a specific hour: 10 hours 40 minutes. "A few hours ago" means at eight o'clock. But Lenin arrived at the plant only at 10 pm, and finished speaking at 11.00. And who are these "two shooters"? Kaplan and Protopopov? The first fit better into the scheme conceived by Sverdlov. Therefore, Sverdlov had no doubt that "traces" would be found.

We have already mentioned that Victor Kingisepp led the investigation. At one time, Sverdlov introduced him to the Revolutionary Tribunal. Kingisepp was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and was directly subordinate to Sverdlov. The second investigator in the assassination case is Yakov Yurovsky, a fellow countryman of Sverdlov, also from Yekaterinburg, who shot the royal family on the orders of the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Sverdlov appreciated the efforts of the Ural security officer and took him to Moscow. Sverdlov's secretary Avanesov was also present at the first and other interrogations of Kaplan.

Sverdlov did not let the matter out of his hands for a second. Semenov was in close friendship with another secretary of Sverdlov, Avel Yenukidze. Semyonov will be arrested on September 8, and soon he will become the most valuable member of military intelligence and the Cheka - and all this is through the efforts of Yenukidze. He will also give the organizer of the assassination attempt on Lenin a recommendation to the Leninist party. Stalin himself will read and edit Semyonov's main work, The Military and Combat Work of the Party of Social Revolutionaries in 1917-18. This work will be published in a separate pamphlet in Germany, and at the trial of the Right Social Revolutionaries in 1922, according to the decision of the Central Committee of the party, Bukharin, the first orator of the country of Soviets, will defend Semenov. After the process, Semyonov will be amnestied and sent to the south on a free ticket to rest. Touching concern for the main terrorist of the republic! All this suggests that even before the assassination attempt, Semenov was led by important people, such as, for example, Sverdlov and Yenukidze.

On September 1, on the orders of Sverdlov, the commandant of the Kremlin, Malkov, will take Kaplan from the VChK prison and transport her to the Kremlin, and on September 3, on the orders of the same Sverdlov, Kaplan will be shot and the body will be burned - in the same place, in the Kremlin, to the roar of motors, in the courtyard of the Auto-combat detachment. And this is one of the main pieces of evidence, indicating that Sverdlov was involved in the assassination attempt, because it was only beneficial for him to quickly destroy the witnesses. After all, the investigation has only just begun. On September 2, they brought a Browning - Kaplan was supposed to identify it. Face-to-face confrontations were required with witnesses who were supposed to confirm her presence in the courtyard of the Michelson factory - after all, they shot at the leader not only of red Russia, but of the entire world proletariat! However, here Kaplan's confession, most likely, would have collapsed, because no one in the yard could see her. Moreover, Sverdlov was informed: hysterics, tears roll over Kaplan, the revolutionary fuse has passed, and she can not only refuse recognition, but also tell the true story of the assassination attempt. Then Semyonov, Novikov will be dragged in, they will start talking about Protopopov, why and who shot him, and then… Sverdlov is even scared to think about it. It was necessary to quickly hide the ends in the water. No Kaplan - no investigation.

A. Balabanova, who visited the leader's family in September 1918, gives a remarkable description: "I got the impression that he was especially shocked by the execution of Dora Kaplan ...". This phrase makes us understand that it was not Lenin who made the decision about this, but someone else (it is clear who: Yakov Sverdlov). And that Ilyich was not very happy with this decision. But Sverdlov managed to convince him, to subordinate him to his decision, which means that the degree of Sverdlov's influence on Lenin in some matters was very strong.

Krupskaya recalls what happened in the Kremlin apartment when the wounded Lenin was brought from the rally: “Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was standing near the hanger, and he looked somehow serious and resolute. Looking at him, I decided that everything is of course. “How will it be now?” I dropped. “We have arranged everything with Ilyich,” he replied. "It's done, it's over," I thought.

The very word "conspired" is curious. "Conspired" can be between two buddies, accomplices. “Contracted” means that a secret agreement has been concluded, about which no one can and should not know. But what was "conspired" between Sverdlov and Lenin? An attempt on Lenin's life, when it was supposed to fire blank shots, but someone fired live shots by mistake? Or is it “conspired” that Lenin, assuming the worst, handed over all power to Sverdlov? That is how Krupskaya understood Sverdlov. So, Sverdlov had another reason to eliminate Lenin - he was clearing his way to sole power.

We already spoke at the beginning about the reasons that prompted Sverdlov to come up with this "plan of salvation." Recently, versions have appeared that Lenin was not shot at all, and all traces of bullets are staged. This would be the original version, but there are too many documents that talk about bullets and operations. German doctors took part in the latter, and it was probably impossible to force them to lie. Therefore, we agree that there were still shots and a wound too. Another thing is that it really turned out to be easy. Lenin himself went up to his room in the Kremlin, undressed himself, and on September 5 he got up and began to work. For the sake of this “jewelry work”, the experienced shooter Protopopov was probably invited to stage this slight wound. According to the plan of the directors of the assassination, it probably should have been even easier - tangent, touching only the skin, burning ... But the excitement, Lenin's involuntary turn - and everything changed. The wound turned out to be more severe, the bullet almost grazed a vital artery. Therefore, the angry "directors" shot Protopopov ...

All this, of course, is just speculation, we are unlikely to ever know the true picture of those events: there are no witnesses for a long time, no evidence either. And if they are, they are unlikely to be made public soon. We can only name the scriptwriter and director of this interlude: Yakov Sverdlov. In 1919, as if by the retribution of fate, he died. This production was completed by his spiritual disciple Stalin.

"The Assassination of Lenin" is a really talented staging by the Bolsheviks. But thanks to her, the regime survived. Having defeated their comrades-in-arms in the revolutionary struggle, the Bolsheviks single-handedly began to rule the country. Lies, intrigues, conspiracies, executions, terror became the fertile soil on which Stalin's dictatorial regime flourished. The Red Empire, with its incredible experiments on the souls and lives of millions of people, entered the life of mankind in the 20th century like a great monster...

Material E. Latiya, V. Mironova

On August 30, 1918, after speaking to the workers of the Michelson plant in Moscow, an assassination attempt was made on Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as a result of which he received severe wound.
After the end of the rally, Lenin went out into the courtyard of the plant, continuing his conversation with the audience and answering their questions.
According to the memoirs of Bonch-Bruevich, with reference to the driver Gil, the latter was sitting at the wheel and looked, half-turning, at Lenin approaching.
Hearing the shot, he instantly turned his head and saw a woman on the left side of the car at the front fender, who was aiming at Lenin's back.
Then two more shots rang out, and Lenin fell.
These memories became the basis of all historical works and were reproduced in the classic assassination scene in the Soviet film "Lenin in 1918": a brunette woman with a clearly Jewish appearance aims a revolver at the back of the leader of the Russian revolution...
According to the official version, the SR Fanny Kaplan (Feiga Khaimovna Roytblat), who was executed on September 3, 1918, was the perpetrator of this terrorist act.
Otherwise, neither contemporaries nor historians characterized her as a “Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist”, and there were no doubts about her involvement in the assassination attempt on the “leader of the world proletariat”.

However, all the circumstances of this attempt are still not entirely clear, and even the most superficial acquaintance with the documents shows how contradictory they are and do not give an unambiguous answer to the question of Kaplan's guilt...
If we turn to the documents, it turns out that the time of the attempt was never precisely determined and the time discrepancy reaches several hours.
The appeal of the Moscow Council, which was published in the newspaper Pravda, stated that the assassination attempt took place at 7:30 pm, but the chronicle of the same newspaper reported that this event took place around 9 pm.
A very significant amendment in determining the time of the assassination attempt was made by Lenin's personal driver S. Gil, a punctual person and one of the few real witnesses. In his testimony, which he gave on August 30, 1918, Gil stated: “I arrived with Lenin at about 10 pm at the Michelson factory” ...
Based on the fact that, according to Gil, Lenin's speech at the rally lasted about an hour, the attempt was most likely made around 23:00, when it finally got dark and night fell. Perhaps Gil's testimony is closest to reality, since the protocol of the first interrogation of Fanny Kaplan has a clear record of "11:30 p.m."
If we consider that the detention of Kaplan and her delivery to the nearest military commissariat, where the interrogations began, took 30-40 minutes, then the time indicated by Gil should be considered the most correct.
It is difficult to assume that Fanny Kaplan, suspected of the assassination attempt, remained unquestioned for more than three hours, if the assassination attempt was committed at 19:30.
Where did this discrepancy in time come from?
Most likely, the shift in the time of the assassination attempt to the brighter part of the day was quite deliberately made in his memoirs by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, the manager of the affairs of the Council of People's Commissars. His memoirs, which became the basis of the textbook story about the assassination attempt on Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, were reproached at the time of their appearance for inaccuracies and omissions, the introduction of inserts and details that the author could not remember ...
Bonch-Bruevich assures that he learned about the assassination attempt at 18:00 when he returned home from work for a short break. He needed this to create a false picture of Kaplan's detention, in the light of day, since he added clearly fictitious details ...

The so-called "driver Gil's story" is introduced into Bonch-Bruevich's memoirs, reported as if personally to the author. This gives the memoirs the necessary authenticity and they are invariably referred to in the future by both Soviet and Western historians.
But Bonch-Bruyevich's "driver's story" contradicts Gil's own testimony. He could not see what happened after the assassination attempt, that is, the episode of Kaplan's detention, as he was near the wounded and then took him to the Kremlin. The details connected with this episode were composed by Bonch-Bruevich and attached directly to the "Gil's story" for greater persuasiveness...
During interrogation, Gil gave the following testimony: "I saw ... a woman's hand with a browning stretched out from behind several people." Consequently, the only witness, Gil, did not see the man shooting at Lenin, but only noticed the outstretched female hand.
Recall that everything happened late in the evening, and he could really see at a distance of no more than three steps from the car. Maybe Gul misspoke?
But, unfortunately, this assumption should be discarded. The observant driver made an important amendment to the protocol: "I'm getting better: after the first shot, I noticed a woman's hand with a Browning."
Based on this, there can be no doubt: Gul did not see the shooting woman, and the whole scene described by Bonch-Bruevich, which became canonical, was invented ...
Commissioner S. Batulin, who, some time after the assassination attempt, detained Fanny Kaplan, at the time of the exit from the factory was at a distance of 10 - 15 steps from him. Later, he changed his initial testimony, indicating that he was 15 to 20 paces away and that: “The man who shot Comrade. I didn't see Lenin.
Thus, it should be considered an established fact that not one of the interrogated witnesses who were present at the scene of the assassination, who shot Lenin in the face, saw the man in the face and could not identify Fanny Kaplan as guilty of the assassination ...

After the shots, the situation developed as follows: the crowd began to scatter, and Gil rushed in the direction from which the shots were fired. What is important: not to a specific person, but in the direction of the shots. Here is a quote from the memoirs of Gul himself:
"... The shooting woman threw a revolver at my feet and disappeared into the crowd."
He doesn't give any other details...
The fate of the thrown weapon is curious. “No one lifted this revolver in my presence,” Gul claims. Only on the way one of the two people who accompanied the wounded V. I. Lenin explained to Gulya: “I pushed him under the car with my foot.”
During interrogations, Kaplan's revolver was not shown, and he did not appear as material evidence during the investigation.
Among the questions asked by Kaplan about the things found in her (papers and money in her purse, train tickets, and so on), only one was related to the assassination weapon. Apparently, the chairman of the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal A. Dyakonov, who interrogated Fanny Kaplan, did not have a revolver in his hands. He asked only about the weapon system, to which Kaplan replied: “I won’t say which revolver I shot from, I don’t want to give details” ...
Most likely, if the revolver lay in front of Dyakonov and Kaplan on the table, her answer about her unwillingness to go into details would look at least ridiculous.
While the missing material evidence was being pushed under the car, an eyewitness to the assassination attempt, S. Batulin, shouted: “Hold it, catch it!”
However, later, in a written testimony that Batulin sent to the Lubyanka on September 5, 1918, he delicately corrects his bazaar cry with a politically more literate exclamation: “Stop the murderer comrade. Lenin!
With this cry, he ran out of the factory yard to Serpukhovskaya Street, along which people, frightened by the shots and the general confusion, ran in groups and alone in various directions.
Batulin explains that with these cries he wanted to stop those people who saw Kaplan shoot Lenin and involve them in the pursuit of the criminal. But, apparently, no one took Batulin's cries and did not express a desire to help him in the search for the killer.
Such indifference of the working masses was critical for the creators of the legend about the murderer Kaplan, which is why Bonch-Bruevich has children who were in the yard at the time of the assassination attempt, who seemed to “run in a crowd after the shooter and shouted: “Here she is! There she is!" But in the newspaper, which was devoted to the fifth anniversary of the assassination attempt, the same vigilant Soviet children are already going to play in the street, where they help the worker Ivanov to catch the trail of the fleeing Kaplan ...

But Commissar Batulin, who presented his testimony twice, did not see any children, and what were the children to do on a gloomy and cold autumn evening on a dark street? ..
Having run from the factory to the tram stop on Serpukhovskaya Street, S. Batulin, not seeing anything suspicious, stopped. Only then did he notice behind him near the tree a woman with a briefcase and an umbrella in her hands. In his testimony on August 30, 1918, the commissioner repeats twice a detail he remembers: he saw a woman not running in front, but standing behind him. He did not catch up with her, and she could not overtake Batulin and run first or follow him and suddenly stop.
In those short moments of intense attention, he would have noticed a figure running with a ridiculous umbrella, hiding under a tree. In addition, women's clothing in 1918, with a long, toe-length dress, hardly allowed a woman to run as fast as a man ran.
And what is important, in those moments, Fanny Kaplan was not only running, but also walking, as it turned out a little later, it was difficult, because she had nails in her shoes that tormented her when walking ...
It remains to be assumed that Fanny Kaplan did not run anywhere at all, but perhaps she simply stood in one place all the time, on Serpukhovskaya Street, at a fairly distant distance from the factory yard, where the shots rang out.
But there was an oddity in her that struck Batulin so much. “She looked like a person fleeing persecution, intimidated and hunted,” he concludes...

Commissioner Batulin asks her a simple question: who is she and why did she come here? “To my question,” says Batulin. - she answered: "THIS was not done by me."
The most striking thing about the answer is its inconsistency with the question. At first glance, it is given simply out of place, but the impression is deceptive: the answer opens the eyes to many things.
Initially, he refutes the false claim that Fanny Kaplan immediately and voluntarily confessed to the assassination attempt on Lenin. However, the main thing in the answer is its psychological coloring: Fanny is so deep in herself that she does not hear the question being asked.

Her first reaction is an acquittal, but Kaplan acquits herself at a time when no one is blaming her. Moreover, her childish response shows that Kaplan, in fact, does not know the details of what happened. She could not hear the shots and saw only people running with cries of "Catch, hold!".
Therefore, she says in the most general form: "THIS was not done by me" ...
This rather strange answer aroused the suspicion of Batulin, who, having searched her pockets, took her briefcase and umbrella, offering to follow him. He did not have any evidence of the guilt of the detainee in the attempt, but the very fact of the detention of a suspicious person created an atmosphere of a completed task and inspired the illusion that the detention was justified ...
All the further, which served as the basis for accusing Fanny Kaplan of attempting to assassinate V.I. Lenin, does not fit into the legal framework.
“On the road,” continues Batulin, “I asked her, sensing in her a face that attempted on Comrade. Lenin: “Why did you shoot Comrade. Lenin? , to which she replied: “Why do you need to know this?” which finally convinced me of this woman's attempt on Comrade. Lenin.
In this simple conclusion, there is a synthesis of the era: class instinct instead of evidence, conviction of guilt instead of evidence of guilt...
At this time, unrest began around the detainee, stunned by the assassination attempt: someone volunteered to help Batulin accompany the detainee, someone began to shout that she was the one who fired. Later, after newspaper reports about the guilt and execution of Fanny Kaplan, it seemed to Batulin that someone from the crowd recognized this woman as the man who shot at Lenin. This unknown "someone", of course, was not interrogated and did not leave his testimony. However, in the initial, most recent testimony, Batulin only claims that there were screams from the crowd and that this woman fired.
By this time the crowd had gone berserk, the furious workers shouting, “Kill! Break into pieces!"
In this situation of mass psychosis of the crowd, which was on the verge of being lynched, Kaplan, to Batulin's repeated question: “You shot Comrade. Lenin? the detainee unexpectedly answered in the affirmative.
The confirmation of guilt, so undoubted in the eyes of the crowd, caused such a fit of rage that it was necessary to create a chain of armed people in order to prevent lynching and restrain the raging mass that demanded the death of the criminal.
Kaplan was taken to the military commissariat of the Zamoskvoretsky district, where she was interrogated for the first time...
During interrogation by Chekist Peters, Fanny Kaplan described her short life as follows: “I am Fanya Efimovna Kaplan. She has lived under this surname since 1906. In 1906 I was arrested in Kyiv in connection with the explosion. Then she sat like an anarchist. This explosion came from a bomb and I was injured. I had the bomb for a terrorist act. I was sued by the Military Field Court in the mountains. Kyiv. She was sentenced to eternal hard labor.
I sat in the Maltsev hard labor prison, and then in the Akatui prison. After the revolution, she was released and moved to Chita. Then in April she came to Moscow. In Moscow, I stayed with an acquaintance, convict Pigit, with whom I came together from Chita. And she stopped at Bolshaya Sadovaya, 10, apt. 5. I lived there for a month, then I went to Evpatoria to a sanatorium for political pardons. I stayed in the sanatorium for two months, and then went to Kharkov for an operation. After that she went to Simferopol and lived there until February 1918.
In Akatui, I was sitting with Spiridonova. In prison, my views were formed - I went from an anarchist to a socialist-revolutionary. She also sat there with Bitsenko, Terentyeva and many others. I changed my views because I got into the anarchists very young.
The October Revolution found me in a Kharkov hospital. I was dissatisfied with this revolution, met it negatively.
I stood for the Constituent Assembly and now I stand for it. Downstream in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, I more closely follow Chernov.
My parents are in America. They left in 1911. I have four brothers and three sisters. All of them are working. My father is a Jewish teacher. I was raised at home. She occupied [a position] in Simferopol as the head of courses for the training of workers in volost zemstvos. I received a salary for everything ready 150 rubles a month.
I fully accept the Samara government and stand for an alliance with the allies against Germany. I shot at Lenin. I decided to take this step back in February. This idea matured in me in Simferopol, and since then I began to prepare for this step.
The identity of the woman detained by Batulin was immediately established, since the protocol of the first interrogation began with the words: “I, Fanya Efimovna Kaplan ...”, but this did not prevent the Cheka from making a statement the next day that the woman who shot and detained refused to give her last name .. .
This message Cheka pointedly hinted at the presence of some data that indicated the connection of the assassination attempt with a certain organization. At the same time, a sensational announcement followed about the discovery of a grandiose conspiracy of diplomats who tried to bribe the Latvian riflemen guarding the Kremlin.
The next night, the British consul Bruce Lockhart was arrested, who really was in contact with representatives of the Latvian riflemen, who were allegedly in opposition to the Soviet regime, but in fact were agents of the Cheka.
Of course, the Cheka did not have any information about the connection between the attempt on Lenin and the so-called “Lockhart plot”, although Peters, who at that moment replaced F. Dzerzhinsky, who had left for Petrograd to investigate the murder of Uritsky F. Dzerzhinsky, had a tempting idea to combine the attempt on Lenin and the Lockhart case into one grandiose conspiracy unraveled thanks to the resourcefulness of the Cheka...
The first question that was put to Lockhart, who was arrested and brought to Lubyanka, was this: does he know a woman named Kaplan?
Of course, Lockhart had no idea who Kaplan was...
Against the background of the disclosure of the “Lockhart conspiracy”, Kaplan was interrogated and, accordingly, the nervous situation of these days could not but affect her fate.
At the disposal of the researchers there are 6 protocols of interrogation of F. Kaplan. The first was launched at 23:30 in the evening on August 30, 1918.
On the night of September 1, Lockhart was arrested, and at 06:00, Fanny Kaplan was brought into his cell on the Lubyanka. It is likely that Peters promised to save her life if she pointed to Lockhart as an accomplice in the assassination attempt on Lenin, but Kaplan remained silent and was quickly taken away.
The impressions left by Lockhart from this visit are unique, as they provide the only surviving portrait and psychological description of Fanny Kaplan at the moment when she had already committed suicide. This description deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
“At 6 o’clock in the morning a woman was brought into the room. She was dressed in black. She had black hair, and her eyes, fixed and fixed, surrounded by black circles.
Her face was pale. The features, typically Jewish, were unattractive.
She could have been any age, from 20 to 35 years old. We guessed it was Kaplan. Undoubtedly, the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign.
Her calmness was unnatural. She went to the window and, resting her chin on her hand, looked through the window at the dawn. So she remained motionless, silent, resigned, apparently to her fate, until the sentries entered and took her away. four
And this is the last reliable evidence of a person who saw Fanny Kaplan alive ...

In her testimony, Kaplan wrote: “In Hebrew, my name is Feiga. Always called Fanya Efimovna.
Until the age of 16, Fanya lived under the surname Roydman, and since 1906 she began to bear the surname Kaplan, but she did not explain the reasons for changing her surname.
She also had another name Dora, under which Maria Spiridonova, Yegor Sazonov, Steinberg and many others knew her.
Fanny got to the royal penal servitude as a very young girl. Her revolutionary views changed greatly in prison, mainly under the influence of well-known figures of the Socialist Revolutionary Party with whom she was imprisoned, primarily Maria Spiridonova.
“In prison, my views took shape,” Kaplan wrote, “I went from an anarchist to a socialist revolutionary.”
But Fanny is talking about the formation of views, and not about formal entry into the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, and her official party affiliation remains highly controversial. Fanny Kaplan herself, at the time of her arrest and her first interrogation, stated that she considers herself a socialist, but does not belong to any party. Later, she made a clarification that in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party she rather shares the views of Viktor Chernov. This was the only, albeit rather shaky, basis for declaring F. Kaplan as belonging to the Right SR party.
During interrogations, Kaplan, without restraining herself, said that she traitor to the revolution and that his continued existence undermines faith in socialism: "The longer he lives, he removes the idea of ​​socialism for decades."
Her maniacal aspiration is beyond doubt, as well as her complete organizational and technical helplessness.
According to her, in the spring of 1918, she offered her services in the assassination attempt on Lenin to Nil Fomin, who was then in Moscow, a former member of the Constituent Assembly, who was later shot by Kolchak’s soldiers. Fomin brought this proposal to the attention of V. Zenzinov, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, who conveyed this to the Central Committee.
But since, while recognizing the possibility of waging an armed struggle against the Bolsheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party had a negative attitude towards terrorist acts against the Bolshevik leaders, the proposal of N. Fomin and Kaplan was rejected. 6
After that, Kaplan was left alone, but in the summer of 1918, a certain Rudzievsky introduced her to a small group of very motley composition and indefinite ideology, which included: the old convict Socialist-Revolutionary Pelevin, not inclined to terrorist activities, and a twenty-year-old girl named Marusya 7. This was exactly the case, although later attempts were made to present Kaplan as the founder of a terrorist organization.
This version has firmly come into use with the light hand of the head of the actual combat organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries G. Semenov (Vasiliev).
Before the February Revolution, Semenov did not show himself in any way, he appeared on the surface of political life in 1917, distinguished by exorbitant ambition and a penchant for adventurism.
At the beginning of 1918, Semyonov, together with his partner and girlfriend Lidia Konoplyova, organized a flying combat detachment in Petrograd, which included mainly Petrograd workers - former Social Revolutionary fighters. The detachment committed expropriations and prepared terrorist acts. The first proposals for an attempt on Lenin's life came from the Semyonov group.
In February-March 1918, practical steps were taken in this direction, which did not give any result, but on June 20, 1918, a member of the Semenov detachment, worker Sergeev, killed the prominent Bolshevik Moses Volodarsky in Petrograd. Sergeev managed to escape.
Semyonov's turbulent activity worried the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party dissociated themselves from the murder of Volodarsky, which was not sanctioned by the Central Committee, and Semenov and his detachment, after sharp clashes with members of the Central Committee, were asked to move to Moscow.
In Moscow, Semyonov began to prepare attempts simultaneously on Trotsky, which was unsuccessful, and Lenin, which ended with shots on August 30, 1918. Semyonov managed to make several impressive expropriations, until he was finally arrested by the Cheka in October 1918. He offered armed resistance during his arrest and tried to escape, wounding several members of the Cheka in the process.
Semyonov was charged with creating a counter-revolutionary organization, which set itself the goal of overthrowing the Soviet regime. Semyonov was also accused of providing armed resistance during arrest.
All this perechia was more than enough for the inevitable execution, so the further fate of Semenov was not in doubt. But suddenly Semyonov, having weighed all the chances, realized that he could save himself from execution only by offering his services to the Cheka.
In 1919, he was released from prison already as a member of the RCP (b) with a special assignment to work in the Socialist-Revolutionary organization as an informer, which bought amnesty and freedom not only for himself, but also for Konoplyova, who remains an active assistant to Semenov and soon also enters into RCP(b).

At the beginning of 1922, Semenov and Konoplev, as if on command, made sensational revelations. At the end of February 1922, in Berlin, Semenov published a pamphlet on the military and combat work of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1917-1918. At the same time, the newspapers published the testimonies of Lydia Konoplyova sent to the GPU, which were devoted to "exposing" the terrorist activities of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in the same period.
These materials gave the GPU grounds to bring to trial the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal the Socialist-Revolutionary Party as a whole and a number of its leading figures, who had been in the prison dungeons of the Cheka-GPU for several years.
The trial of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party was the first major political trial staged with the help of denunciations, slander and false testimony.
At this trial, we are only interested in information that concerned the assassination attempt on V.I. Lenin on August 30, 1918 and the name of Fanny Kaplan.

Sources of information:
1. Wikipedia site
2. Big encyclopedic dictionary
3. Orlov B. "So who shot at Lenin?" (magazine "Istochnik" No. 2, 1993)
4. Bruce-Lockhart R. H. Memoires of a British Agent.
5. Bonch-Bruevich V. "Attempt on Lenin"
6. Zenzinov V. "The coup d'état of Admiral Kolchak in Omsk on November 18, 1918"
7. "Pelevin's testimony on the npouecce of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries." (newspaper "Pravda" dated July 21, 1922 N 161)

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PART 1 - THE BEGINNING.

So who shot Lenin?

On August 30, 1918, an attempt was made on the life of the Leader of the world proletariat, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) in Moscow.

For many years, no one doubted the answer to this question.
The official point of view is as follows: Fani Kaplan, a member of the Right Socialist-Revolutionary Party, was shot, who, according to the verdict of the military tribunal of the Moscow garrison, was shot on September 3, 1918, along with other enemies of the revolution - bandits, speculators, counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs.

In reality, things are much more complicated.

Arguing on the issue of the assassination attempt on Vladimir Ilyich, one involuntarily comes to the conclusion that the execution of the royal family in the Ipatiev House of Yekaterinburg on June 16, 1918, and the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30 at the Michelson plant in Moscow are links in the same chain.
But perhaps the most interesting thing is that the people who took an active part in the execution of the family of the last emperor of All Russia are somehow connected with the attempt on the life of the Leader of the world proletariat.

However, first things first.

... Fanny Kaplan On August 30, 1918, at twelve o'clock in the morning, a strange-looking woman was brought to the Zamoskvoretsky draft board.
The first impression is crazy.
Under the white hat, knocked to the side, is a frightened face to death.
In trembling hands - an umbrella and an old reticule.
Keeps himself confused, speaks incoherently, is depressed.

Armed guards were posted at the door of the room where the detainee was taken. When asked by the military commissar what her name is, she stammeringly answers: "Fani Kaplan."

He denies any involvement in the assassination attempt on Lenin.

Chekist Zinaida Legonkaya recalls:
“During the search, I stood with a revolver at the ready. Watched the movements of Kaplan's hands...
In the purse they found a notebook with torn sheets, eight hairpins, cigarettes ... ".

A completely legitimate question arises: “Where and how was this woman detained?

And, now, attention!
From this moment, perhaps, the most interesting begins!

According to the testimony of the assistant military commissar of the Fifth Moscow Division, Batulin, he detained the intruder right in the courtyard of the Michelson plant.
And after five days, he suddenly remembers that he detained her not at the factory, but at Serpukhovka, where she fled with everyone after the shots rang out.

Four spent shell casings were found at the scene of the assassination attempt.
Now they knew for sure - they shot four times.
But where are the weapons?
By a strange coincidence, it was not found on the same day.
It was found only the next day by a factory worker Kuznetsov, and a day later, he passes the found browning to the investigating authorities.
But what is completely incomprehensible: why were there four unused cartridges in the seven charging Browning that the worker Kuznetsov brought?
So it was fired three times?
Where did the fourth sleeve come from? Was there a second gun?
Shooting two people?

Another thing is not clear.
According to the memoirs of the already mentioned security officer Legonka, during the search of Kaplan, no weapons were found in her.
A year later, Legonkaya suddenly remembers that there was, it turns out, a pistol, and that she took the Browning "as a keepsake", but after a year, she decided to return it.

The photographs clearly show all the participants in the investigative actions: this is Kingisepp himself, Lenin's driver - Gil, and other participants in the experiment.

Quite unexpectedly, it turned out that the photographs mentioned were taken by Yakov Yurovsky, a Chekist from Yekaterinburg, who took an active part in the execution of the royal family.
But that's not all.
It is known for certain that he arrived in Moscow from distant Siberia along with another regicide Philip (Shoya) Goloshchekin, the Military Commissar of the Urals, on the personal call of the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) Yakov Sverdlov.
It is interesting to know why Sverdlov needed these people in Moscow?

No less strange is the fact that immediately after the assassination attempt on Lenin, the same Sverdlov signs the message “On the villainous attempt on Comrade. Lenin”, in which it is reported that the right SRs shot at the leader.
So Kaplan has already been interrogated?
No.
The message was signed at 22:40 on August 30.
The interrogation of Kaplan at the Lubyanka began an hour later - at 23:30.
It turns out that Sverdlov knew about the impending assassination attempt?
Of course he knew.
This was reported to him several times.

The role of the Chairman of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, is not clear in this whole story.
"Iron Felix", as L. Trotsky called him.

There is no doubt that Dzerzhinsky knew about the impending assassination attempt on Lenin.
Or, more precisely, information of this kind came to him. Approximate terms of the action were also known.
Nevertheless, on the morning of August 30, 1918, he leaves Moscow and rushes to Petrograd to personally lead the investigation into the murder of Moses Solomonovich Uritsky, chairman of the Cheka of the Northern Commune, leaving Ilyich in the "care" of Sverdlov, who, by the way, oversaw the Cheka (ie. e. was the immediate superior of Dzerzhinsky), and who did not lift a finger in order to strengthen the protection of Lenin.

What's this? Careless negligence or malicious intent?

The course of the investigation itself in the case of the assassination attempt on Lenin is also not clear.
What kind of investigation is this, which begins on August 30, that is, on the day of the assassination attempt, and ends on September 3 with the execution of Kaplan?

The investigator for especially important cases, V. Kingisepp, receives all the documents on this case only on September 7, four days after the execution of Kaplan.

What is this, a conspiracy, or slovenliness?

On this score, there are several versions.

Version one:

CONSPIRACY.

According to this version, the “Kremlin conspiracy” was being prepared no where else, but in the depths of the all-powerful Cheka.

The purpose of the conspiracy is the physical elimination of Lenin in order to disrupt the Brest peace, shameful for the Bolsheviks, according to which Russia was deprived of a number of its territories: Ukraine, Belarus, a number of western regions.
It is known that the majority of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party spoke out against the Brest Peace.
Only Joseph Stalin unconditionally supported Lenin on this issue.

The first blow to Lenin, in order to disrupt the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was inflicted by the Chekists.
On June 6, 1918, the German ambassador, Count Mirbach, was assassinated in Moscow.

One of the killers who threw a bomb at the ambassador's feet was a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, an employee of the secret department of the Cheka, Yakov (Moisha) Blyumkin.
By an absurd accident, he loses his mandate as an employee of the Cheka at the crime scene, signed by Dzerzhinsky himself.

“I did not sign such a certificate,” Felix Edmundovich justified himself at a special meeting of the Central Committee of the party, “I immediately went to a special detachment of the Cheka to arrest Blumkin.”

However, he failed to arrest the killer.
A member of the special detachment, Chekist Protopopov, allegedly first stunned Dzerzhinsky with the butt of a revolver, and then arrested him.

Version two:

THE HAND OF LENIN'S KILLERS IS DIRECTED BY THE ALL-POWERFUL LEV DAVYDOVICH TROTSKY.

This version has no basis, because for the whole of August and early September, the Commander-in-Chief of the Military Sea, which was Trotsky (Leiba Davidovich Bronstein - by the way, he borrowed the name Trotsky from the warder of the Odessa prison, in which he choked to visit).

Version: Kaplan shot at Lenin on the orders of Trotsky - was Stalin's answer to Lev Davydovich's article about the poisoning of Lenin by Stalin, which was published by Life magazine in 1939.

Version three:

INTERNAL PARTY STRUGGLE FOR POWER.

And already in the afternoon of the same date, a note came to the secretariat of the Council of People's Commissars addressed to Lenin:
"The echo of the shots in Petrograd will spread in the evening in Moscow."

Strange, but on the day of Uritsky's murder, after a note with a clear threat, Sverdlov had to, if not cancel Lenin's speech, then, in any case, give him reliable protection.
But no.
Sverdlov insists on speaking: “What are we going to be afraid of everyone now ...” - Bonch-bruevich, a devoted friend and personal secretary of Lenin, writes about this in his memoirs.
"Faithful Bonch," as Ilyich called him.
And Lenin leaves for the factory without security at all.

Let me remind you that in those days the so-called “August crisis of power” was taking place, and, naturally, there were people interested in replacing Lenin in any way.
One of the "interested" persons could be Sverdlov.

This, at first glance, incredible version has its own confirmation.
Bonch-bruevich saw how, on the day of the assassination attempt, Sverdlov opened Lenin's office and rummaged through his papers, despite the strictest ban.
The strictest!

Faithful Bonch himself heard Sverdlov say: "Well, Ilyich is sick, and we are doing just fine without him."

So, guessed Lenin, who was shooting at him?

He knows what Kaplan was accused of, although he himself saw it - a man shot at him, and the first thing he asked his driver Gil was: “Was he caught?”

He also knows that Kaplan was shot.

But what does it matter to him who exactly shot at him - he simply waved it off - let the Central Committee decide.
But who sent the assassins?
Apparently, Lenin knows the answer to this question, and is ready to act.

On the morning of March 16, 1919, Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Yakov Sverdlov suddenly died.
The sudden death, he was then only 33 years old, caused a lot of rumors.
He died from consumption, obtained in the royal dungeons.
Infected with the Spanish flu, died at the hands of workers ...

Half an hour before Sverdlov's death, Lenin visited him.
What they were talking about is unknown.
But the same Bonch writes that Sverdlov tried to say something to Lenin.
Then he calmed down, squeezed his hand, and died.
Lenin immediately went to his office, called Trotsky and said dryly: "He died."

On a cold March day, Moscow buried Sverdlov.
With all honors, at the Kremlin wall.
Lenin was also at the funeral, he was filmed, but then, for unknown reasons, the footage was removed from the newsreel.
Lenin, many drew attention to this, did not say a word of regret for the death of Sverdlov, not a word of sympathy for his widow ...

And, at the end of the story, no less intriguing moment.

Few people know, but in the period from July 8 to August 7, 1922, the trial of the right SRs took place in the Hall of Columns in Moscow.
The recently declassified FSB of Russia court materials told about it in detail.
In total - 92 volumes.

Documents available to historians tell about the true intention of the "Kremlin conspiracy" in 1918.
Now it became clear: it was necessary not only to kill Lenin, but also to accuse him of the murder, and thereby sign the death warrant of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

But something went wrong from the very beginning, something didn't work...

From the volumes of the trial, it becomes clear that it was not Kaplan who shot at Lenin.
She was not involved in the assassination at all.

The process called the names of the true participants in the assassination attempt on Lenin.
They turned out to be:

Grigory Ivanovich Semyonov - it was he who organized surveillance of Ilyich and sent killers to the Michelson plant.

This is Lidia Vasilievna Kanaplyova, Semyonov's fighting girlfriend, the woman who shot at Lenin.

All of them, both Grigory Semyonov and Lydia Kanaplyova, served in the Cheka since 1918.

And in the same year, 1918, on the instructions of the Cheka, they joined the party of the right SRs, as classic provocateurs.

In the evening of 1918, two people shot at Lenin.

These are the security officers: the sailor Alexander Protopopov (the same one who hid the security officer Blyumkin and arrested Dzerzhinsky) and the militant Lidia Kanaplyova.

Not a word was said about the sailor Protopopov at the trial.
He was the first on the list of persons executed by the Cheka on the night of August 30-31, 1918.
Apparently, "Iron Felix" did not forgive him for his arrest in the special detachment of the Cheka.

There was another participant in the assassination attempt on Lenin, this is the militant Konstantin Usov.

“I was instructed to kill Lenin in the Alekseevsky People’s House,” Usov said at the trial, “I did not dare to wrest God from thousands of workers.”

Interesting verdict. All participants in the assassination attempt on Lenin were then acquitted, which cannot be said about the rest of the defendants - members of the Right Socialist Revolutionary Party. “Semyonov, Konaplyova, Usov, as those who were honestly mistaken when they committed grave crimes, to be fully acquitted from any punishment” ...

After the trial of the Social Revolutionaries, the paths of terrorist lovers Grisha Semyonov and Lida Kanoplyova parted ways.
Semyonov will carry out secret military intelligence assignments in China, and will rise to the rank of brigade commissar.
Kanoplyova will go to teaching.
He will teach subversive work to the operatives of the GPU.

All of them, and Kanoplyova, and Semyonov, and Konstantin Usov, who “did not dare to wrest God from thousands of workers,” would be shot in 1937 ...

So who shot Lenin?

Additional materials for the article:

Lenin was shot on the orders of Sverdlov.

Valery Evgenievich, but the fact that the attempt on Lenin was made by Faina Kaplan is confirmed by a number of testimonies ...

There is no evidence in the materials of the investigation.
For example, an employee of the Cheka, Batulin, who detained Kaplan, writes: “I did not see the man who shot at Lenin.
I shouted: "Stop the murderer of Comrade Lenin!" - and ran out to Serpukhovka, along which frightened people were running.
I saw a strange-looking woman behind me. After searching her pockets and taking her briefcase and umbrella, he offered to come with me.
In Serpukhovka, someone from the crowd recognized this woman as the man who shot at Lenin.

But what else will be shouted from the crowd about a person whom they have recognized and are leading?
The workers who allegedly recognized Kaplan are not mentioned anywhere in the testimony by their last names.
Plus, there are other suspects: a certain high school student, a man in a sailor's cap.
Lenin himself, as soon as the driver Gil ran up to him, asked: “Did you catch him?” His, not hers.

But the same Gil later claimed: Kaplan threw a revolver at his feet.

At first he said that he saw only a hand with a revolver.
Then he remembered Kaplan, whose revolver was found four days later.

In 1922, the German professor Borhadt removed that bullet from Lenin's neck...

And it turned out to be from the wrong revolver.

It turns out who really shot at Lenin, we never know?

Most likely.
Kaplan's interrogation protocols don't clear up the picture.
In addition, she was half-blind.
Could the experienced SR fighters entrust such an important action to a sick woman?

The Socialist-Revolutionary Party declared that they were not involved in the assassination attempt.

According to their rules, any terrorist attack was to be publicized as the execution of the party's verdict.
In addition, Kaplan was not a Socialist-Revolutionary, in her youth she joined the anarchists.

On the same day, August 30, there was another attempt on the life of the chairman of the St. Petersburg Cheka, Uritsky.
One chain?

Maybe.
But Uritsky was avenged for the destruction of his friends by the poet Kannegisser, far from politics.
And what is curious: they tortured him for a year, knocking out the names of accomplices.
Whereas Kaplan, as soon as she testified, was immediately executed.
But how!
The commandant of the Kremlin, Malkov, shot her in the Kremlin garage, and then burned her body in the Alexander Garden.
By the way, the poet Demyan Bedny also participated in the act of burning.

Why such a hurry?

Perhaps some of her confessions jeopardized the picture created by the investigation.

There is a version that the attempt on Lenin was organized by the Cheka ...

If you look at who at that moment benefited from eliminating Lenin, another assumption pops up: Sverdlov won the most.
By July 1918, he became the second person in the state, the master of the Soviets.
But the role of the Soviets themselves sank to zero. And his importance was rapidly declining.

Too little to be suspicious...

What about indirect data? After all, organizing an assassination attempt was not an easy task.
The party did not advertise who and where will speak at the rallies.
Lenin himself learned about the route only the day before, having received a ticket to the Michelson plant on August 29.
Vouchers were issued by the propaganda department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Secretariat of the Central Committee, which were subordinate to Sverdlov.
Another important fact.
There were no leaders of the Central Committee in Moscow at that moment.
Trotsky - near Kazan, Stalin - in Tsaritsyn, Zinoviev - in St. Petersburg.
In which case there was no one to resist Sverdlov.
Moreover, after the assassination attempt in St. Petersburg, Bukharin tried to persuade Lenin not to go to the rally.
And he, according to Krupskaya, agreed.
But then Sverdlov intervened: “Well, are we going to start hiding?” And Lenin decided to go.
He had no security.

The commandant's office and the guards of the Kremlin were subordinate to Sverdlov?

Yes.
And immediately after the assassination attempt, he was one of the first to arrive in the Kremlin.
Krupskaya recalls: "Looking at him, I decided: it's all over."
Sverdlov's wife also reports that on the same evening he occupied Lenin's office, crushing under him the Council of People's Commissars, the Central Committee, and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

But what about Dzerzhinsky?

He went to St. Petersburg to investigate the murder of Uritsky.
That allowed Sverdlov to take control of the entire course of the investigation.
He transferred Kaplan from the Lubyanka to the Kremlin, where she suddenly began to confess, after which she was instantly shot.
The order to execute and burn the corpse was given by Sverdlov.

Why burn?

So that the Cheka could not resume investigations.
I emphasize: this is just a hypothesis. But Sverdlov quite definitely tried to take advantage of the results of the terrorist attack.
As soon as Lenin recovered, the head of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee dragged a decision through the doctors and the Central Committee: the leader needed to heal and rest.
Then the notorious Gorki were chosen.
Sverdlov closed contacts with Lenin on himself.
And Lenin did not manage to escape from under his guardianship for a long time.

Dzerzhinsky at that time left for Switzerland for two months without informing any of the members of the Central Committee.
He probably considered staying in Moscow unsafe for himself and Lenin.
It was only when Lenin returned to his office that he arrived in Moscow.

And five months later, Sverdlov was gone. Also a mysterious death.

The official diagnosis is "Spanish flu", i.e. influenza, a disease not fatal for a 35-year-old.
Moreover, the best doctors treated Sverdlov.
At his bed rested the entire color of the party.
Except Lenin.

But then he uttered heartfelt words at Sverdlov's funeral.

Stalin also spoke heartfelt words at Lenin's funeral.
And then he destroyed the entire Leninist guard.

Be that as it may, the attempt on Lenin gave impetus to the unbridled mythologizing of the image of the leader, unleashed the hands of the Cheka to legalize the Red Terror and establish a dictatorship of violence.
Only from September 1918 to October 1919, 1.3 million people were exterminated.
Such is the price of one shot and a crazy idea to drive humanity into happiness with an iron fist.

VERBATIM.

As the Moscow Kremlin security officer S. Krasikov says in his book “Near the Leaders”, after the death of Sverdlov, the Kremlin commandant's office did not find the keys to the safe in the office of the head of the Central Executive Committee.
Sent the safe to the warehouse.
He stayed there for 16 years.
In 1935, the safe was opened and gold coins of royal minting were found in it in the amount of 108,525 rubles (the value of 1935), 705 gold items with precious stones, 7 blank passports and the same number filled in in the names of Sverdlov's relatives.

Other versions of the assassination attempt on Lenin:

It was staged. As Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (09/03/1918) reported, "the traces of the bullet on the jacket did not coincide with the wounds on the body."

These are the intrigues of German intelligence, which avenged the murder of Ambassador Mirbach.

The organizers of the assassination attempt were Trotsky and Bukharin, who conspired with the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
This is what the Pravda newspaper claimed 20 years later.

The attempt was prepared by members of the Cheka.
The failure forced Dzerzhinsky to urgently leave abroad.

This is the work of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, admitted in 1922 the former head of the Central Flying Combat Detachment of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party Semyonov.
However, the Supreme Tribunal petitioned for his release, and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee approved this decision.

The telegram about Fanny Kaplan's assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918 was dictated by Yakov Sverdlov before... Shots were fired.

And four days later, on September 3, the failed killer was shot without trial, doused with gasoline and burned in a garbage barrel.

Only 16 years after the death of the chairman of the All-Union Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), Yakov Sverdlov, who became famous for his cruelty, his cache was discovered in the Kremlin during a planned inventory of warehouses.

Genrikh Yagoda, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, reported to Comrade Stalin about the find in a memo:

“On July 27, 1935, when the sealed cabinet was opened, the safe of the late Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was discovered. The keys to the safe have been lost."

The find was opened by an experienced bear thief, nicknamed Shnyr, delivered to the Kremlin straight from the prison bunk.
He fiddled with the intricate lock of the safe for more than two hours.
And all this time he involuntarily recalled the legend that went around in prison.
As if after the execution of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II, his head was cut off from his body, placed in a container with alcohol and delivered personally to Comrade Sverdlov, who was the organizer of the regicide in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 17, 1918.

The Chekists, who were present at the opening of the safe, hoped to find evidence of the involvement of the former head of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the assassination attempt on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan in August 1918 ...

It was Sverdlov who introduced black leather clothing into fashion, which became a kind of communist uniform.

The researchers of the Kremlin secrets, having carefully studied all the facts in the Kaplan case, were inclined to think that none other than ... Yakov Sverdlov invented and organized this attempt.
What for?
The right hand of Ilyich, Yakov Mikhailovich, craved action and power, while Lenin, in his opinion, only philosophized.
It was impossible to remove the leader from the political arena; all that remained was to eliminate him physically.

But Lenin sincerely considered Sverdlov his most faithful and irreplaceable ally.

“That work,” he said after the death of Yakov Mikhailovich in 1919, “which Sverdlov did alone - in the field of organizing, choosing people, appointing them to responsible posts - this work will be within our power only if for each from the industries in which he was solely in charge, to single out entire groups of people.

Thus, in 1920, two departments appeared at once - the Politburo and the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

And could Lenin say otherwise?
After all, it was Sverdlov who was the author of the first Bolshevik constitution of the 1918 model.
It was he who presided over the historic meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), when the decision was made to start the October Revolution. Finally, with the light hand of Yakov Mikhailovich, black leather clothes appeared and became fashionable, which became a kind of communist uniform.

Sverdlov and Lenin first met in April 1917.
However, Ilyich had heard a lot about "Comrade Andrei", as the underground workers called Yakov.

Having got acquainted with him, the leader instantly understood: this is the person he needs, an amazing organizer, capable of bringing any projects to life. And when the formal head of state, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Lev Kamenev, resigned, Lenin immediately recommended Yakov Sverdlov in his place.

This fact became decisive.

Moreover, on the scale of the whole state: it was largely thanks to Sverdlov that the Bolsheviks were able to come to power.

Many people think that historically the Bolsheviks were the most revolutionary, the most dangerous party for the autocracy and the bourgeoisie, - in the program “Yakov Sverdlov.
Bloody Mechanic of the Soviet Power,” world-famous historian Roy Medvedev told the Russian TV channel “Top Secret”.
- Actually it is not.
The autocracy did not even consider the Bolsheviks to be dangerous enemies.
Other political forces were more numerous, more seriously armed and more ready for decisive action.
The tsarist government was really afraid of the Left Social Revolutionaries, especially anarchists, therefore they always sentenced those who were objectionable to hanging, while the Bolsheviks, in the worst case, were exiled to distant lands.
There are very few documents about the Bolsheviks in the archives of the Okhrana, because they were not even followed as carefully as other parties.

This factor was used by Sverdlov in organizing an armed uprising.
Having placed in key positions exceptionally loyal people to himself and the party, he did not try to capture everyone and everything during the October Revolution.
It was enough to hit the vital objects of the capital of the empire - mail, telegraph, telephone.
And in the end - a small unknown party became the head of the vast Russian Empire.

To replenish the revolutionary treasury, the Bolsheviks were instructed ... to marry lonely rich merchants.

No less interesting is the issue of obtaining money for the coup...
Something, of course, fell from the Germans, something from the writer Gorky and other "sympathizers", but this was sorely lacking.
Therefore, an order was received at the local level: to obtain funds for revolutionary activities by any means. It was called beautifully - the expropriation of the expropriators.

The revolutionaries raised funds in every possible way, - says Roy Medvedev. - Seize money from banks - please!
To print fake ones, send them abroad and, having "bleached" them, let them go for the needs of the party - please.
The Bolsheviks were even instructed to marry single rich merchants...

Most of the money came from Yekaterinburg, where Yakov Sverdlov was engaged in their extraction.
It was then, demonstrating his talents, that he became indispensable.

The combat detachment of the RSDLP (b) in Yekaterinburg, which he oversaw, differed from similar ones in other regions in its special cruelty.

Yes, and "militants" Sverdlov regularly checked "for compliance" and devotion to the idea.

Much later, some of them published in their memoirs how they dressed as policemen, caught their revolutionary comrades and "arrested" them, and then interrogated them - seriously, without shying away from torture.

Those who could not stand the pain, the "broken" were killed without hesitation ...

Such cruelty was not at all typical even for those bloody years, says Alexander Polev, professor at the Institute of Psychoanalysis at Moscow State University.

But, apparently, it was she who played an important role in the fate of the royal family, which was not accidentally transferred from the West Siberian Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg.

And the militants of Sverdlov, tested by the bloody terror of the times of expropriation, who had already occupied very significant posts in the party leadership, habitually played the role of executioners.

On the night of July 16-17, 1918, the Romanovs and the servants went to bed, as usual, at 22:30.
And at 23.30, two special representatives came to the mansion and handed the decision of the Ural Council to the “best” of Sverdlov’s people - the commander of the security detachment Ermakov and the commissioner of the Extraordinary Investigation Commission Yurovsky - the second commandant of the “special purpose house”, as the Ipatiev mansion was called when it contained the royal a family.

The Romanovs and the staff were told that in view of the advance of the “whites”, the mansion could be under fire and, for security reasons, it was necessary to go to the basement.
Former Russian Emperor Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, their daughters Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia and son Alexei, as well as doctor Botkin and three servants went down to the basement room.
There, Yurovsky announced the verdict, after which everyone was shot.
For fidelity, those who had already fallen were shot and even stabbed with bayonets. The bodies were dumped into a truck and taken away.
The blood was washed from the floor, walls and stones...

A month after the execution of the Romanov family, in August 1918, Yakov Mikhailovich decided to get rid of Lenin as well.
In those days, representatives of the Central Committee often spoke to the people.
Who and where - was not said in advance.

Vladimir Ilyich found out that on August 30 he was to go to the Michelson factory and the grain exchange only the night before, having received a “ticket”.

The distribution of the latter was handled directly by the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

In the complete works of Lenin, a note from Sverdlov, dated the same August 29, has been preserved: “The members of the Council of People's Commissars should be warned that those who have received vouchers do not have the right to refuse to speak” ...

Of course, the whole truth about the true customer of Kaplan's assassination attempt on Lenin is no longer known, but some very interesting facts are known.
According to the testimony of the driver Lenin - Gil, Ilyich's speech at the factory began at ten in the evening and lasted at least an hour.
Consequently, the Kremlin could not find out about the assassination attempt after it until eleven.
However, the appeal to the people "A few hours ago a villainous attempt was made on the life of Comrade Lenin" was signed by the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Yakov Sverdlov, at 22:40.
Before Lenin was shot!
Even more surprising is the further behavior of Sverdlov.

Fanny Kaplan is arrested.
At the Lubyanka, she was interrogated for only half a day, and by the evening, at the direction of Yakov Mikhailovich, she was transported to the Kremlin.
There are no protocols of interrogations from September 1 and 2, however, on September 3, the commandant of the Kremlin, Malkov, personally shoots Kaplan in the government garage. Then the body of the failed killer is carried to the Alexander Garden, pushed into an iron barrel, doused with gasoline and set on fire.
Again, at the direction of Sverdlov: "Destroy the remains without a trace!" Inexplicable haste and consequences, and reprisals ...

In his Kremlin office, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee hid almost 100 kilograms of gold.

After the assassination attempt on Lenin, Sverdlov was one of the first to be in his apartment, - writer Valery Shambarov told Top Secret.
- Krupskaya recalled how she took an interest in her husband's health.
And Yakov Mikhailovich hurriedly answered her: "Everything has been agreed between Ilyich and I" ...

The chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee quickly took over the Central Committee of the party, the Council of People's Commissars - even the leader himself did not have such completeness of power ...

But Ilyich quickly began to recover, after a couple of days he began to walk and was going to return to business.
And Sverdlov came up with a new mechanism for eliminating the leader: isolate him, and himself become the only thread connecting with the outside world.
He dragged through the doctors the decision of the Central Committee that it was "useful" for Ilyich to live in Gorki, and closed all Lenin's contacts on himself: either he came personally, or he sent documents - of course, carefully selected.

Even the set and printing of newspapers for the leader (significantly different from those that came out in mass circulation) Sverdlov personally controlled.

And he punished the commandant Malkov: if Lenin asks to go back to Moscow, tell him that the Kremlin apartment is being renovated.
The fact that the repair had long been completed, Ilyich accidentally found out and was terribly angry.

However, Sverdlov was already a little worried. Two documents came out from under his pen: the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee “On the transformation of the Soviet republic into a military camp” and the decree of the Council of People's Commissars “On the Red Terror”.

And at the beginning of 1919, Yakov Mikhailovich single-handedly accepted the directive on decossackization.

This directive prescribed to completely destroy all anti-Soviet Cossacks and all rich Cossacks, - says Roy Medvedev.
- But the Cossacks were not in the mood at all - they did not know at all what Soviet power was.
And almost all of them were rich!
That is, almost without exception they were sentenced to physical extermination.
The district revolutionary tribunals that carried out reprisals considered the cases of the Cossacks not individually, but in lists, and it took no more than a few minutes to decide on an individual human fate.
The verdict was always the same - execution ...

This cruel and senseless directive nevertheless set the Cossacks against the Soviet regime and had an extremely negative impact on the outcome of the civil war: most of the Cossacks sided with the Whites...

For many decades, researchers have wondered: did Yakov Sverdlov understand what atrocities his directives would lead to, or did he arrange bloodshed for the sake of bloodshed?
However, Sverdlov's actions were too rational to suspect he had a mental disorder.

The fact that Yakov Mikhailovich was by no means crazy is also confirmed by the contents of his personal safe, which then, in 1935, was opened by a safe-bear thief nicknamed Shnyr.
There was neither the head of the emperor, nor secret documents.

According to the inventory signed by the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Genrikh Yagoda, the following was found in the safe:

gold coins of royal minting - in the amount of 108 thousand 525 rubles;
gold items, many of which are with precious stones,
- 705 items; royal credit tickets - in the amount of 705 thousand rubles (in 1935, lunch in the dining room cost 1 rub. 50 kopecks, bread - 1 rub. 50 kopecks per kilogram, a kilogram of sugar - 4 rubles 60 kopecks, shoes - 100 -120 rubles, winter coat - 250-300 rubles).
In addition, clean forms of royal-style passports, as well as passports filled in for different names, one of them is German ...

Sverdlov did not need documents.
Playing with the destinies of millions of people, he could not beat his own.
The banal flu "Spanish flu" that raged in Russia in 1919 equalized the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee with hundreds of thousands of citizens of the state destroyed with his direct participation.

It was rumored that Sverdlov's illness did not come out of the blue.
According to a fairly common version, in Orel he was severely beaten by workers.

Sverdlov, on a private train, was returning from a business trip back to Moscow, when he saw a rally at the station, he intervened, yes, apparently, he didn’t talk about that ...

The guards were at first confused, but then they recaptured Sverdlov from the protesters, loaded him into a car, and the train moved at full speed towards the capital.
Yakov Sverdlov was getting worse and worse every minute.
He got home already unconscious, delirious.
As his common-law wife recalled, he always tried to get up and look for some resolutions that "the Socialist-Revolutionaries want to steal."
And then he began to demand to himself a young son - to convey something important to him.
Perhaps it was the keys to his precious safe.

On August 30, 1918, V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) spoke to the workers of the Michelson plant (today the Moscow Electromechanical Plant named after Vladimir Ilyich in Zamoskvorechye). They tried to dissuade Lenin from appearing in public, referring to the murder of Uritsky, which occurred on the morning of the same day, but he was adamant. After the speech, Ulyanov went to the car, when suddenly three shots fired from the crowd.

Fanny Kaplan was caught on Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street, at the nearest tram stop. She confirmed to the worker Ivanov who grabbed her that she was the culprit of the assassination attempt. Ivanov asked: “On whose orders did you shoot?” According to the worker, the answer followed: “At the suggestion of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. I have done my duty with valor and I will die with valor."

However, after her arrest, Kaplan denied any involvement in the incident. Only after a series of interrogations did she confess. However, no threats forced the terrorist to extradite her accomplices or organizers of the assassination. “I arranged everything myself,” Kaplan insisted. The revolutionary frankly stated everything that she thinks about Lenin, the October Revolution and the Brest Peace, noting in passing that the decision to kill the leader matured in Simferopol in February 1918, after the idea of ​​the Constituent Assembly was finally buried.
However, apart from the statement of Kaplan herself, no one else was sure that it was she who shot at Lenin. A few days later, one of the Mikhelson workers brought to the Cheka a Browning with inventory number 150489, which he allegedly found in the factory yard. The weapon was immediately brought to the case. It is curious that the bullets subsequently removed from Lenin's body did not confirm their belonging to the pistol featured in the case. But by this time, Kaplan was no longer alive. She was shot on September 3, 1918 at 4 pm behind the arch of building No. 9 of the Moscow Kremlin. The verdict (actually an oral order of Sverdlov) was carried out by the commandant of the Kremlin, a former Baltic man Pavel Malkov. The body of the deceased was "packed" in an empty tar barrel, doused with gasoline and burned there. (Source: Fanny Kaplan: what happened to her after the assassination attempt on Lenin © Russian Seven russian7.ru).

In 1918–1921 V. I. Lenin spoke at the plant six times. In 1922, at the request of the workers, the plant was named after Vladimir Ilyich.

In October 1918, a wooden obelisk was erected at the site of the assassination attempt; in 1920, during the May Day community work day, as the newspapers reported, "workers planted a slender oak tree in the presence of Comrade Kalinin."

On November 7, 1922, a memorial stone was laid at this place with the inscription: “The first stone of the monument at the site of the attempt on the life of the leader of the world proletariat, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. August 30, 1918 - November 7, 1922" and the second - on the reverse side of the stone: "Let the oppressed of the whole world know that at this place the bullet of the capitalist counter-revolution tried to interrupt the life and work of the leader of the world proletariat, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin."

The matter of perpetuation did not go further than this for quite a long time, until after the war - in 1947 - a monument to Lenin was erected, which had stood in front of the plant for 20 years. In 1967, another one was erected, and since three monuments to Lenin in the same place were already too much even for the Bolsheviks, one of them was removed inside the plant, and only two remained in front of the plant - the “first stone” and a five-meter bronze statue beside.

An object of cultural heritage of federal significance.