ABSTRACT
As Lenin was leaving a mass meeting at a Moscow factory on the night of 30 August 1918, two young women approached him, and one of them fired three shots from a pistol, hitting him in the upper chest and left shoulder. That morning a former officer had shot and killed the chief of the Petrograd Cheka, Mikhail Uritskiy. Lenin’s wounds were severe enough to require more than a month’s recuperation but did not impair his control over the party and government. Uritskiy’s assassin was a member of an underground officers’ group, and the woman who shot Lenin, Fanya Kaplan, was an Anarchist turned Social Revolutionary. Although the incidents were probably entirely the work of those two individuals acting independently of each other and the groups with which they were associated, the coincidence, like that of 6 July, intensified the existing crisis atmosphere and provided the pretext for a drastic reaction. On the night of the 30th, Sverdlov addressed a report to ‘All Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ Red Army Men’s Deputies, All Armies, All, All, All!’ telling them there had been ‘an utterly foul assault on Comrade Lenin’ by ‘Social Revolutionary hirelings’ of the British and French to which the working class would ‘respond with merciless, massive terror against all enemies of the revolution’. Three days later, on 2 September, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (see n. 10, Ch. 4) declared a ‘massive Red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents’.1
