The main event at the end of August 1918 will be the famous assassination attempt on Vladimir Lenin. Almost simultaneously with the SR attacks, the Cheka announced the disclosure of the so-called Lockhart conspiracy. The conspiracy was organized by diplomatic representatives and special services of Great Britain, France and the United States with the aim of overthrowing Soviet power.
On August 30, 1918, the head of the local Cheka, Moisey Uritsky, was killed in Petrograd, and the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, was wounded in Moscow. Uritsky was shot by the people's socialist Leonid Kannegiser. He was part of an underground anti-Bolshevik group led by his cousin M. M. Filonenko. And Filonenko maintained close contact with B. V. Savinkov, who gave the order to liquidate Uritsky. Kannegiser, by his own admission, decided to take revenge on Uritsky for the death of his friend, officer V. B. Perelzweig, who was shot by the Petrograd Cheka in the case of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy in the Mikhailovsky Artillery School. Immediately after his arrest, he declared: “I am a Jew. I killed a Jewish vampire who was drinking the blood of the Russian people drop by drop. I tried to show the Russian people that Uritsky is not a Jew for us. He's a renegade. I killed him in the hope of restoring the good name of Russian Jews."
Fanny Kaplan, who shot Lenin, was also from the family of a Jewish teacher. She was a professional revolutionary and, at the age of 16, was preparing a major terrorist act. During the preparation for the terrorist attack, an improvised explosive device went off as a result of careless handling, Kaplan was wounded in the head and partially lost her sight. She was arrested and sentenced to hard labor. All her youth - up to 28 years old, she spent in prisons and penal servitude, where she became blind and actually turned into an invalid. But after the amnesty of the Provisional Government in 1917, she managed to leave for treatment in the Crimea and partially restore her eyesight. On August 30, 1918, a workers rally took place at the Mikhelson plant in the Zamoskvoretsky district of Moscow. Vladimir Lenin spoke at it. After the rally in the yard of the factory, Kaplan shot at the leader of the revolution. Lenin was hit by two bullets: in the neck and in the arm,the third bullet hit a woman standing next to Lenin. Kaplan was immediately seized, and when asked on whose orders this was done, she replied: “At the suggestion of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. I have done my duty with valor and will die with valor."
During interrogations, Kaplan said that she reacted extremely negatively to the October coup, and supported the idea of convening a Constituent Assembly to organize power in the new Russia, sympathized with the Komuch (Constituent Assembly Committee) government in Samara and SR Chernov, but refused to answer whether she was associated with any or anti-Bolshevik political forces. Later, in 1922, during the trial of the leaders and activists of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, one of them, Grigory Semyonov, testified that at the beginning of 1918 the Fighting Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries decided to resume its activities and was the first to eliminate the persecutor of the Petrograd press and the organizer of rigging elections in Petrograd Soviet V. Volodarsky, then planned to kill Leon Trotsky, but he went to the front. Then it was decided to kill Lenin,to which Fanny Kaplan volunteered as a performer. Semenov also said that the bullets were smeared with instant poison, but the high temperature during the shot caused it to decompose. Lenin, in any case, recovered from his injury rather quickly (he was already actively working in mid-October).
However, later it was believed that Kaplan could not shoot Lenin so successfully, since she still saw poorly (she could only distinguish silhouettes) and that the bullets that hit Lenin did not match the caliber of the Kaplan Browning. They never received official confirmation. A few days after the assassination attempt on Uritsky and Lenin, Kannegisser and Kaplan will be shot. That is, the main witnesses were promptly "cleaned out".
Almost simultaneously with the SR terrorist attacks, the Cheka announced the disclosure of the so-called "Lockhart conspiracy" ("conspiracy of ambassadors"). Robert Lockhart (Lockhart) was the head of the British diplomatic mission in Moscow. According to the official version, the conspiracy was organized by diplomats and special services of England, France and the United States with the aim of overthrowing Soviet power, denouncing the Brest-Litovsk Peace and resuming hostilities between Russia and Germany on the Eastern Front. In addition to Lockard, the conspiracy was attended by the ambassadors of France J. Noulens and the United States, D. R. Francis.
The conspiracy was revealed as follows. In June 1918, F. Dzerzhinsky sent two Latvians, Jan Buikis and Jan Sprogis, to Petrograd with the task of infiltrating the anti-Soviet underground. With the help of British sailors, the Chekists managed to get acquainted with the head of the counter-revolutionary organization, the naval attaché of the British embassy, F. Cromie. The naval attaché introduced them to British intelligence agent S. Reilly and advised them to go to Moscow, supplying them with a letter to be handed over to Lockhart, who planned to establish contacts with influential commanders of the Latvian riflemen. In Moscow, after a meeting with Dzerzhinsky and Peters, it was decided to "slip" the commander of the artillery battalion of the Latvian division E. P. Berzin, passing him off as a colonel for solidity. On August 14 and 15, Berzin met with Lockhart, and then on August 17, 19, 21 with Reilly. Reilly eventually gave Berzin 1.2 million rubles as payment for the overthrow of Soviet power by Latvian regiments in Moscow.
Lockhart tried to bribe the Latvian riflemen who guarded the Kremlin to arrest and liquidate the Soviet government, and then let British troops moving south from Arkhangelsk into Moscow. Also, the Westerners planned to organize a series of terrorist attacks on railway transport in order to disorganize management and transport in Russia. On September 3, 1918, the Izvestia All-Russian Central Executive Committee published an official message about the conspiracy: “The conspiracy led by British-French diplomats, led by the head of the British mission Lockhart, French Consul General Grenard, French General Laverne and others, aimed at organizing the seizure, with the help of bribing units Soviet troops, the Council of People's Commissars and the proclamation of a military dictatorship in Moscow."
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On August 30, after the assassination attempt on Uritsky and Lenin, the Chekists decided that a counter-revolutionary coup had begun. The Chekists in Petrograd broke into the British mission and arrested its members; the resisting Cromie was killed. Lockhart was arrested on 31 August. After the arrest, Lockhart himself refused to answer questions from the Chekists. As a diplomat, he was soon to be released and exiled from Soviet Russia. In October 1918, foreign diplomats left Soviet Russia.
The Soviet government's response to the assassination attempts and the Western conspiracy was massive terror. On September 2, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Yakov Sverdlov, announced that the response to the attempt on Lenin's life, the murder of Uritsky and the Lockhart conspiracy would be the "Red Terror." On September 5, a decree of the Council of People's Commissars (SNK) on the red terror will also be issued.
Thus, the history of the assassination attempt on Lenin is dark. Kaplan, a sick, half-blind woman, apparently could not carry out a successful assassination attempt. She was taken and quickly liquidated in order to hide the real conspirators. All the evidence of her guilt surfaced only in 1922, at the fabricated trial of the Social Revolutionaries, and from the lips of the decoy provocateurs Semenov and Konopleva. The threads of the conspiracy are drawn to Yakov Sverdlov and Leon Trotsky (agents of the West), who tried to eliminate Lenin and seize power in Soviet Russia in order to complete a global experiment to create a "new world order" based on false communism (world revolution and world union of republics). Trotsky was to become the head of Russia and complete the destruction of Russian civilization and the Russian people. The resources and wealth of Russia were to become the material basis for the creation of a "world government" and state. Therefore, Western diplomats and special services were involved in the conspiracy. However, man proposes and God disposes. The plans of the masters of the West for the future of Russia have once again failed.
It is also worth noting the fact that Lenin decided to abandon the policy of "balancing" between the two Western imperialist camps (Trotsky pursued it). Lenin resolutely suppressed it. In this situation, the Entente powers were the most powerful and dangerous enemy. The German bloc was already crumbling, and Moscow could soon abandon the most difficult conditions of Brest. If the winners - England, USA, France and Japan - can gain a foothold in Russia, it will be much more difficult to knock them out. Therefore, Lenin, in opposition to the Entente, went on to further rapprochement with Germany, up to a military alliance. This was reflected in a secret agreement - the so-called. "Brest-2".
On August 27, an additional secret treaty was signed in Berlin between Soviet Russia and the Second Reich. In accordance with this agreement, Russia now recognized the independence of not only Ukraine, but also Georgia. Confirmed the renunciation of the lands of Estonia and Livonia (Latvia), subject to access to the ports of Revel (now the capital of Estonia Tallinn), Riga and Vindava. Russia promised, to the best of its ability, to expel the troops of the Entente countries from its territory. In the Murmansk area, if Soviet Russia itself fails, the Germans promised assistance to the German-Finnish troops. In exchange, Soviet Russia managed to bargain for Germany's obligation to return after the war Crimea and Belarus, Rostov-on-Don and part of Donbass, an obligation not to claim Baku (at that time it was one of the most important oil regions in the world). Germany also promised not to occupy any territories of Russia and not to support separatist movements, to influence the Turks who had already stormed Baku in the interests of Russia and, as a gesture of goodwill, withdraw its own troops from the territories of Belarus east of the Berezina River in the coming months.
The contract also included the material part. Soviet Russia undertook to pay Germany, as reparations and expenses for the maintenance of Russian prisoners of war, a huge indemnity - 6 billion marks, including 1.5 billion in gold (245.5 tons of pure gold) and credit obligations, 1 billion supplies of raw materials. Already in September, the first "gold echelons" were sent to Germany, containing 93.5 tons of gold. Later, Russian gold was transferred to France as an indemnity imposed on Germany under the Versailles Peace Treaty.
It is clear that Western governments and special services did not like this at all. Already on August 30, they tried to kill Lenin, and the Western agent of influence, Trotsky, was to take his place. Dzerzhinsky confused the cards for the conspirators. He did not like the unhindered rampant of the Western special services in the territory under his jurisdiction, he was not an agent of the West. He managed to introduce his agents into the Western network, and the naval counterintelligence did a good job. As a result, the Chekists had information about the organization of the coup. And immediately after the attempt on Lenin's life, Dzerzhinsky struck back at Western agents, made mass arrests in Moscow and Petrograd, and thwarted the plans of the conspirators.
However, subsequent events showed that the positions of Western agents in the Soviet leadership are still very strong. Sverdlov, immediately after Lenin was wounded, intercepted the control levers. Dzerzhinsky was sent on "leave" and forced to hide until Lenin recovered, he was replaced by Sverdlov's creature - Peters. The cases of the attempt on Lenin's life and the "conspiracy of ambassadors" were divided. The case of the attempt on Lenin's life was quickly hushed up, the witnesses were removed, cutting off all the threads to the customers. Of the many arrested, none were executed. Foreigners fled or were expelled from the country. Of the accused who appeared before the tribunal, some were acquitted, some were sentenced to short terms of imprisonment and soon pardoned, released.
Thus, the emissaries of the "world behind the scenes" had strong positions in Soviet Russia, although they could not seize the place of the leader of the party and the country. And they will be able to clean up the "fifth column" in the USSR only before the outbreak of World War II (this is one of the secrets of the "great purge").
Author: Samsonov Alexander
