“Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.” That common platitude seems entirely apropos today, on the 92nd anniversary of the attempted assassination of Communist Russian leader Vladimir Lenin by young Fanya Yefimovna “Fanni” Kaplan.

The Ukranian-born Kaplan was born in 1890 to a Jewish family and joined the Socialist Revolutionaries (or Esers) early on in life. At 16, she was busted for her involvement in a terrorist bomb plot and sent to one of Tsar Nicolas II’s Siberian prison for 11 years. Kaplan’s brutal tenure there was cut short after the February Revolution led by Lenin.

But her disillusionment with the leader came hard and fast, as Lenin’s Bolsheviks sought and succeeded to dissolve the elected Constituent Assembly, a key instrument of democracy during the revolution. Lenin’s move in 1917 to put all power in the hands of the workers councils—or Soviets—convinced Kaplan to take matters into her own hands.

As portrayed in the clip below from Mikhail Romm’s 1939 propaganda film Lenin in 1918, Kaplan got three or so shots off after the leader spoke at a Moscow factory. Lenin, who was 48 years old at the time, was hit in the shoulder and jaw—he survived, but the injuries were thought to contribute to his death by stroke 6 years later.

Fanny was shot dead five days after the attempt at age 28, and within a few hours the Red Terror—a four-year program of mass arrest and execution of counterrevolutionary enemies of the state—had begun.
 

RIP Fanny Kaplan. Such a shame you didn’t properly finish him off.

So many loyal Russian communists were killed or exiled for trying to stay true to their ideals.  Today most people picture communism as the failed Soviet state, and assume that’s all communism ever could be; Marx was rolling over in his grave when they displayed his face along side Lenin and Stalin in Red Square.

I doubt if she had killed him it would have been any better.  They were beset on all sides by enemies, from without and within, during a bitter civil war.  That kind of atmosphere breeds paranoia, and paranoia leads to totalitarianism.

Lenin didn’t lead the February Revolution, he wasn’t even in Russia at the time but staying in Switzerland sitting out the first world war, before he returned to Russia (helped by the Germans) in April 1917.

The Fanny Kaplan Story would make a great movie.