Among the many legends and myths of Soviet history, the assertion that the Socialist-Revolutionary Kaplan shot Lenin seemed indisputable for a long time. But with a more thorough and unbiased acquaintance, even with the known documents and facts, more questions arose than answers.
1992, June 19 - the prosecutor's office of Russia, having examined the materials of the criminal case on the Kaplan charge, established that the investigation was carried out superficially, and issued a resolution “to initiate proceedings on the basis of newly discovered circumstances”.
In the Soviet school, the story was canonized that the organizers of the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918 were the leaders of the Right SR combat group G. Semenov and L. Konopleva, and the performer was F. Kaplan. This statement was based on Semyonov's self-revealing brochure "Military and Combat Work of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries in 1917-1918", published in 1922 in Berlin and at the same time printed at the GPU printing house on Lubyanka in Moscow.
The publication was timed to coincide with the trial of the leaders of the Right Socialist Revolutionary Party in Moscow (June 8 - August 7, 1922); F. Kaplan's investigation case appeared on it as "material evidence" of the terrorist activities of the Social Revolutionaries. The testimony of Semyonov, Konoplyova and other former right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had become Bolsheviks by 1922, formed the basis of the indictment, and after that they were not questioned for a long time.
It was then that the leaders of the combat right SR group told how they organized surveillance of Lenin's movements in Moscow, how Kaplan was instructed and how they gave her bullets poisoned with curare poison. When asked why the poison did not work, Semyonov and Konopleva answered during the trial that they did not know its properties - to lose its effect at high temperatures. The conclusion of the expert professor of chemistry D. Shcherbachev that high temperatures do not destroy such poisons was not taken into account, as well as the speeches of a number of SRs who denied Kaplan's membership in their party.
From the materials of the pre-revolutionary investigation case, it can be seen that Kaplan is an old political prisoner, from 1906 to March 1917, imprisoned in the Maltsevskaya prison in Eastern Siberia for the manufacture, storage and carrying of explosives, half-blind and half-deaf, with a clearly affected psyche - hardly whether she was suitable for the main role in the assassination attempt on Lenin. However, she was a convenient "dummy" figure, because, having arrived in Moscow in February 1918, she told everyone about her intention to kill Lenin "for betrayal of socialism."
Experts were surprised at the discrepancy between the bullet marks on Lenin's coat with the places where he was wounded. When they compared the bullets that were extracted during Lenin's operation in 1922 and during the embalming of the leader's body in 1924, they found out that they were not from the same pistol. According to the materials of the investigation, there were two pistols: the Browning was brought to the Cheka by a factory worker who was listening to Lenin's speech, three days after the assassination attempt; the fate of the second is unknown. Moreover, there is no exact evidence that he was at all.
Zinaida Legonkaya, a member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), who took part in the search of Kaplan on the night of August 31, 1918, stated in writing that the search "was thorough", but nothing significant was "found." A year later, in September 1919, Legonkaya "supplemented" her previous testimony, stating that she had found a Browning in Kaplan's briefcase. Was he really?
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One of the latest examinations, after examining the surviving Browning and the bullets that hit Lenin, concluded that “one of the two bullets was fired, possibly from this pistol. It is not possible to establish whether the second one was fired from it”.
In recent years, experts have come to the conclusion that the danger of injury to Lenin, presented in the descriptions of doctors of that time, was exaggerated: he himself was able to climb the steep stairs to the third floor and go to bed. A day later, on the first of September, the same doctors recognized his condition as satisfactory, and a day later Lenin got out of bed.
Another thing is also unclear: what was the reason for not allowing the investigation to be completed? Kaplan was shot on September 3, 1918 on the personal instructions of the head of state Ya. M. Sverdlov. V. E. Kingisepp, a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, who led the Kaplan case on behalf of Sverdlov, complained that he was being interfered with.
The necessary documents, he said, were received with a great delay. So, on the repeated testimony of the assistant commissioner S. N. Batulin on September 5, 1918, Kingisepp wrote in blue pencil: "The document is remarkable for its 19-day wandering" - and put the date - September 24.
Kaplan was interrogated by the chairman of the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal A. M. Dyakonov, the People's Commissar of Justice D. I. Kurskiy, the Chekist J. H. Peters. VChK officer I. A. Fridman later recalled that Sverdlov was present at one of the interrogations. In the case, 14 people were involved (arrested and taken to the Cheka for interrogation). All were acquitted and released. There are 17 witness testimonies in the investigation file, but none of them categorically claims who did shoot. Although all the witnesses stated that the woman had shot. They wrote their testimony after Kaplan's confession (they knew about this, saw her being taken away), no one saw the face of the shooter or the shooter.
Batulin, who detained Kaplan on August 30 in the factory yard, where there was an attempt on Lenin's life, testifying for the first time, said that when people began to scatter from the shots, he noticed a woman who was acting strangely. When asked why she is here and who she is, Kaplan replied: "It was not me who did it." Testifying for the second time on September 5, after the newspapers announced the execution of Kaplan, Batulin admitted that he had not heard the shots, believed that these were ordinary motor claps, that he had not seen the person who shot Lenin.
But he ran, like everyone else, and saw a woman with a briefcase and an umbrella in her hands by the tree. “I asked this woman why she came here. To these words she replied: “Why do you need this?” Then, having searched her pockets and took her briefcase and umbrella, he invited her to follow me. On the way, I asked her, smelling in her a face that had attempted to kill Comrade Lenin: “Why did you shoot Comrade Lenin?” - to which she replied: “Why do you need to know?” - which finally convinced me of this woman’s attempt on Lenin’s life.
According to Batulin, during the shots he was 15–20 steps from Lenin, and Kaplan was behind him, although the investigative experiment then established that Lenin was shot almost point blank. If Batulin, who heard well, could not understand what happened: shots or motor claps, then the half-deaf Kaplan apparently did not hear anything at all, and when she understood, she said that it was not she who did it. Such "evidence", supplemented by confusing confessions of Kaplan (she did not sign part of the protocols of her interrogations, no graphological examination was carried out, and it is not clear who wrote the protocols of "confessions"), raise doubts that she shot Lenin.
Kaplan was known as a sick, hysterical woman with a difficult fate, faithful to the traditions of political prisoners to take the blame. Her candidacy satisfied the organizers of the assassination attempt: she would not betray anyone, she did not know anyone, but she would "take the blow". Only the one who organized the assassination attempt, who did not allow the investigation to be completed, and later tore out several pages from the investigation file, knew everything.
This happened most likely in 1922, when it was important for the trial of the leaders of the right-wing Socialist-Revolutionary party to show the crime of one of its members. The torn out pages, according to indirect data, contained evidence of those who claimed that a man had shot at Lenin. Moreover, Lenin, turning to the shot, was probably the only one who saw the shooter. He asked the chauffeur Gil who ran up to him: "Have you caught him or not?"
Among modern researchers there are those who believe that the Socialist-Revolutionary Kaplan shot at Lenin, and those who believe that Kaplan was not a Socialist-Revolutionary and did not shoot at Lenin. The latter name those who could have done it then: L. Konopleva and Z. Legonkaya, A. Protopopov and V. Novikov. There is no convincing evidence that either of them did it yet.
L. V. Konopleva from the family of an Arkhangelsk teacher. In the Socialist-Revolutionary Party since 1917. According to Semyonov's brochure, it was from Konoplyova that the proposal came in 1918 to "make an attempt on Lenin's life" and for some time "thought of herself as a performer." But there is no data confirming this. But there are others: since the fall of 1918, Konopleva collaborated with the Cheka, in 1921 she joined the RCP (b) on the recommendation of NI Bukharin, MF Shkiryatov and IN Smirnov. 1922 - she exposed her former colleagues in the Socialist-Revolutionary party, and then worked in the 4th department of the headquarters of the Red Army. 1937 - she was accused of having links with Bukharin and was shot.
ZI Legonkaya - tram driver, Bolshevik, took part in the search of Kaplan. In September 1919, on denunciation, she was arrested as taking part in the attempt on Lenin's life. She quickly presented an alibi: on the day of the assassination attempt, she was in class at the instructor's communist school for red commanders.
The information about A. Protopopov is also scarce. It is known that he was a sailor, Socialist-Revolutionary, in June 1918 became deputy commander of the Cheka detachment, and on July 6 he actively supported the speech of the leaders of his party. When Dzerzhinsky came to the detachment to arrest Blumkin, it was Protopopov who hit and disarmed Dzerzhinsky. Further, his traces are lost.
V. Novikov in Semenov's brochure is called the Socialist-Revolutionary who helped Kaplan in carrying out the assassination attempt. During interrogation with partiality in the NKVD in December 1937, he confessed only one thing: he had shown Kaplan to Lenin, but he himself did not go into the yard of the plant and waited for the "result" on the street.
As for the "customers" of the assassination attempt, since 1918 they were searched for among the Right SRs, among the representatives of the Entente. Finally, the version prevailed that the assassination attempt was organized by the Right SRs. But the investigation could not prove Kaplan's involvement in the Socialist-Revolutionary party, although she called herself a "socialist".
Nowadays, some of the researchers put forward a different version: the organizers of the assassination attempt were the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Sverdlov and the chairman of the All-Russian Cheka Dzerzhinsky. For a long time, we were inspired by the idea of the monolithic nature of the Bolshevik leadership, but the executions of the 1930s greatly shaken it. Then they explained that Soviet history was divided into "good" under Lenin and "bad" under Stalin, and that this monolith was unshakable under the first leader.
Now it becomes clear that the struggle for power was waged all the time under the Bolsheviks. The attempt on Lenin's life was primarily a struggle within the government. And the Bolsheviks took advantage of it for widespread deployment of mass terror and strengthening their position. The shots and accusations against the Right SRs, who at that time were conducting successful military operations against the Bolsheviks in the name of restoring the power of the Constituent Assembly, made the SRs a defensive side, helped to discredit them in the eyes of the population.
This action hastened the introduction of the "red terror" and the bitterness of the "white". In the late summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks had many reasons for concern; the number of the RCP (b) was decreasing, peasant uprisings, workers' strikes and military failures testified to the crisis of power.
Employees of the German embassy wrote that in August 1918, even before the assassination attempt on Lenin, "something like a panic mood" had developed in Moscow. 1918, August 1 - the staff of the German embassy reported to Berlin that the leadership of Soviet Russia was transferring "significant funds" to Swiss banks, and on August 14 - that they were asking for foreign passports, that "the air of Moscow … is saturated with an assassination attempt as never before."
The Bolsheviks took all measures to maintain power. They decisively liquidated the political opposition: in June - a ban on participation in the work of the Soviets for Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, in July - the defeat and expulsion of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries from ruling posts. Lenin's injury for some time pushed him away from the exercise of power and put before him the question of an honorable departure. The meetings of the Council of People's Commissars were conducted in his absence by Sverdlov, who confidently declared to the head of the government's affairs V. Bonch-Bruyevich: "Here, Vladimir Dmitrievich, we are still coping without Vladimir Ilyich."
Technically, organizing an attempt on Lenin's life was quite simple at that time. It is only necessary to imagine that the leaders of the militant Socialist-Revolutionary organization Semenov and Konopleva began to cooperate with Dzerzhinsky not from October 1918, when they were arrested, but from the spring of 1918. Then it will become clear why those shots sounded in the right place and at the right time and why the work of the investigation was ineffective.
Kaplan was shot by order of Sverdlov, without even informing the investigation about it. The related version helps to understand why Semyonov and Konopleva were released under the surety of the Bolsheviks A. S. Enukidze and L. P. Serebryakov and did not suffer in any way during the period of the Red Terror. GI Semenov, before being shot in 1937, served in the military intelligence of the Red Army and was a brigade commander …
In short, the assumption of the Kremlin conspiracy in August 1918 has the right to exist, as, indeed, many other versions about this confusing historical event.
N. Nepomniachtchi
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