You probably all know about the attempt on the life of Ilyich.
The first attempt to assassinate Lenin took place shortly after the Bolsheviks took power. On January 1, 1918, at half past seven in the evening, shots were fired at the car in which the leader, Maria Ulyanova and the Swiss Social Democrat Fritz Platten were traveling. Platten, who was sitting next to Lenin, managed to bend his head with his hand, but he himself was wounded.
The second attempt on Lenin's life is hardly reflected in the historical literature.
In mid-January 1918, a certain soldier came to the reception to the head of the Council of People's Commissars Bonch-Bruyevich, who introduced himself as the Knight of St. George Spiridonov, and said that he was instructed to track down and then either capture or kill the head of Soviet power, for which he was promised 20 thousand rubles in gold … Voroshilov, a member of the Extraordinary Commission, who interrogated the soldier, learned that the assassination attempt had been prepared by the "Union of St. George's Knights" of Petrograd. On the night of January 22, 1918, the Chekists raided the apartment at 14 Zakharievskaya Street. The participants in the preparation for the terrorist attack were caught red-handed: rifles, revolvers, and hand bombs were found in the apartment.
The third attempt on Lenin's life happened like this: on August 30, 1918, after finishing his speech at the Moscow Michelson plant, Lenin was about to get into the car when three shots were fired. Wounded by two bullets, Lenin fell. The driver caught sight of a woman's hand with a Browning. But the face of the shooter was not considered by anyone. Stepan Baturin, an eyewitness to the incident, shouted: "Catch, hold!" At that moment, he saw a woman who "behaved strangely." When she was detained, shouts began to be heard from the surrounding crowd that it was she who was shooting. The arrested was 28-year-old Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan, who believed that "the continued existence of Lenin undermined the faith in socialism." Three days later, the Cheka sentenced her to death.
Interestingly, on this fact of the attempt on Lenin's life in the revolution, a criminal case has already been opened by the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation in connection with newly discovered circumstances. It turns out that the investigation in 1918 was carried out superficially: forensic and ballistic examinations were not ordered, witnesses were not interrogated, and other investigative actions necessary for an objective investigation were also not carried out. Researchers are questioning the version that Kaplan fired.
Promotional video:
But Lenin was not left alone even after his death.
March 19, 1934 - pistol shot
Lenin's body, never buried in the earth, has attracted many visitors at all times - first, those mourning the loss, then fans of communism who want to touch history and, finally, just tourists. Over the 90 years that the late leader of the proletariat lay in Red Square, more than 100 million people have visited the Mausoleum.
In March 1934, Mitrofan Nikitin, an employee of the Progress state farm, entered the tomb in turn. He did not attract attention to himself and did not arouse suspicion, but when he came close enough to the sarcophagus, he drew his pistol and managed to make two shots in the direction of the leader's coffin before the guards reacted to his actions. Not a single bullet hit the target, and the peasant, who did not want to be caught, shot himself in the heart and died immediately.
The people who were in the mourning room were taken out into the street, having previously forbidden to tell anyone about what they had seen. During a search of the body, OGPU officers found letters of "counter-revolutionary content" and Nikitin's suicide note. “People have gone mad, everyone has lost their heads from such a fabulously hard, meaningless life. Everyone lives only one day, what will happen tomorrow?.. This spring of 1934, again, a lot of people will die due to hunger, dirt, from epidemic diseases, - the unfortunate shooter complained. “Can't our rulers, who have settled in the Kremlin, see that the people do not want such a life, that it is impossible to live like this, there is not enough strength and will …”
The peasant understood that after what he had done he would not be alive: “I, Nikitin Mitrofan Mikhailovich, am happy to die for the people, I would be ready for the welfare of workers, peasants, employees to go to any torture, for the sake of a better life for the people. I, dying, protest on behalf of millions of working people, that's enough slavery, terror, hunger, pretty much all painful and difficult …"
The head of Joseph Stalin's security, Karl Pauker, on the evening of the same day, sent a memo to the head of the Special Sector of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Alexander Poskrebyshev. After 60 years, this note, along with Nikitin's letters, was found in Stalin's personal archive.
March 20, 1959 - with a hammer on glass
If a lot is known about the first attempt on Lenin's body, and the life of Nikitin himself has been restored from letters found with him, the available information about further encroachments on the leader and about the fate of the attackers themselves is rather scarce.
25 years after the first assassination attempt, when two leaders were already lying in the Mausoleum - for some time the deceased Stalin was the company of an older friend - among the visitors of the funeral room there was again a man with bad intentions. He threw a hammer into the glass of the sarcophagus where Lenin's coffin lay and broke it. The mummies of the Soviet leaders were not harmed, and the irreverent citizen was detained and declared mentally ill.
July 4, 1960 - foot on glass
Despite the fact that attempts to encroach on the leader of the world revolution ended in failure for their performers, and Lenin's mummy continued to look healthy and rosy, attempts to cripple her continued. In mid-July 1960, an unemployed resident of the city of Frunze (now Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan), a Tatar named Minibayev, made some progress in ideological vandalism. Unlike his predecessor, he did not take any instruments with him: Minibayev smashed the sarcophagus with a kick, having jumped on the barrier. Shards of glass, strewn across the face and hands of Lenin, somewhat damaged his skin. Minibaev was immediately seized. The investigation established that he had been hatching the idea of destroying the sarcophagus since 1949, and on July 13 he specially flew to Moscow to implement it. Nothing is known about the further life of the attacker and its duration.
and during the restoration of the symbol of the triumph of communism, the Mausoleum had to be closed. In addition to restoring the skin of the mummy, specialists had to carry out additional embalming. The mausoleum opened its doors to visitors only on 15 August.
1960s - stones and spits, a rocket and a sledgehammer
The guards of the Mausoleum, trained to identify and take out aggressive visitors, failed to protect the mummy from all ill-wishers. On September 9, 1961, a certain Smirnova L. A. was detained, who spat on the sarcophagus and with the words "On you, you bastard!" threw a stone wrapped in a handkerchief at him, breaking the long-suffering glass again. This time Lenin was not hurt. During interrogation on the merits of the charges brought, Smirnova pleaded guilty, explaining that the desire to "commit blasphemous actions" had arisen in her the day before.
Since November 1961, Lenin again became the only mummified inhabitant of the Mausoleum, since Stalin, recognized as the oppressor of the Soviet people, was buried at the Kremlin wall.
On April 24, 1962, Smirnova's act was repeated by a 37-year-old accountant from Pavlovsky Posad near Moscow, AA Lyutikov, a disability pensioner. The man, however, limited himself to one stone. The investigation established that in 1961-1962 Lyutikov "sent anti-Soviet letters to the editorial offices of newspapers, foreign embassies and Soviet institutions, scolding Khrushchev and the Soviet system in them."
A month before Lyutikov, on March 25, 1962, a resident of Stavropol, L. V. Trehalina, visited the Mausoleum. Trehalina was arrested while trying to fire a rocket into the sarcophagus.
Someone GV Vatintsev from Krasnodar Territory was not too inventive. On March 29, 1966, a "Russian, illiterate" man threw a sledgehammer into Lenin's tomb.
September 1, 1973 - explosives
In 1968, the CPSU Central Committee received a letter from a resident of the Kalinin region. Offended by the Soviet regime, the author, who had been convicted more than once before, threatened the country's leadership to blow himself up "at the ashes of Lenin in the Mausoleum, so that the vile communists would remember what their meanness leads to." A year earlier, a suicide bomber had already been blown up in the immediate vicinity of the leader, but he did it on the street, as a result of which there were human casualties, and the Mausoleum was not damaged.
In 1973, the embalmed leader was moved to a new sarcophagus made of bulletproof glass. When an explosion thundered in the mourning room on September 1, he saved the corpse of the leader of the revolution from damage. Living visitors did not have such protection, therefore, in addition to the suicide bomber, a married couple from Astrakhan died, and the security officers and a group of schoolchildren were seriously injured.
The commandant of the Kremlin, General Sergei Shornikov, reported to the then chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, that the guards of the Mausoleum mistook the terrorist for the class teacher who had brought his students to celebrate the first day of the school year with a pilgrimage to Lenin.
The killer was never identified. After the explosion, a part of his head and a hand remained from him, and an examination of the scraps of documents established that they belonged to a person who died a natural death. Accordingly, the unknown terrorist lived under someone else's passport.
