In 1887, Vladimir Lenin’s older brother, 21-year-old Alexander Ulyanov, was involved in an attempt to assassinate the tsar, Alexander III, son of Alexander II, for which in May 1887, he was hanged. The event shocked the seventeen-year-old Lenin and certainly radicalized him. As the brother of an executed terrorist, Lenin was kept under police surveillance as he took his place to study law at Kazan University in Tatarstan.

While at university, Lenin became involved in politics and, after one student riot, was arrested. One of the arresting officers asked him ‘Why are you rebelling, young man? After all, there is a wall in front of you,’ to which Lenin replied, ‘The wall is tottering, you only have to push it for it to fall over.’

Lenin the Lawyer

Expelled from Kazan University, Lenin continued his studies independently before being allowed to finish his law degree in 1892 at the University of St Petersburg, obtaining a First Class degree and learning to speak Latin and Ancient Greek.

For eighteen months, between 1891 and 1893, Lenin worked as a lawyer defending petty thieves, cases he invariably lost. His only success in the courts came sixteen years later when he successfully sued a French nobleman for knocking him off a bicycle near Paris in 1909.

Moving to St Petersburg in 1893, Lenin became increasingly involved with revolutionary activity and there, two years later, formed a group, the League of the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. In 1895, Lenin was arrested and imprisoned for fourteen months in solitary confinement.

In 1897, he was exiled to eastern Siberia where he took the alias Lenin, reputably influenced by the Siberian river, River Lena. While in exile, in July 1898, he married fellow revolutionary, Nadezhda Krupskaya. They may have been Marxists and committed atheists but, on the insistence of Krupskaya’s mother, the pair married according to the Orthodox faith.

What Is To Be Done?

Following his exile, Lenin wrote his influential What Is To Be Done? and was instrumental in splitting the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Lenin and his wife lived in Munich, London, and Geneva before returning to Russia in November 1905, towards the end of the 1905 Russian Revolution.

Two years later, Lenin returned to exile and would not step on Russian soil again until almost a decade later in April 1917. Much of this time was spent in Switzerland where, as well as writing and guiding the direction of the revolution from afar, he found time to indulge his many hobbies. Lenin and Krupskaya became ardent hill walkers of the Swiss Alps and Lenin enjoyed swimming, cycling, music, skating and chess.

Lenin also enjoyed music. In a conversation with Russian writer, Maxim Gorky, Lenin professed to enjoy Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23, the Appassionata, saying he ‘could listen to it every day… But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head; they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people’s little heads, beat mercilessly. Hmm — what a devilishly difficult job I have!’

Mr and Mrs Lenin

Nadezhda Krupskaya was unable to have children and is believed to have suffered from Graves’ disease, which can affect fertility. But Lenin’s longstanding affair with Inessa Armand, whom Lenin first met in 1909, probably didn’t help. Krupskaya was prepared to give her husband his freedom but Lenin persuaded her to stay and eventually his wife and mistress became friends. Lenin and Krupskaya, together with Armand, travelled on the sealed train that transported Lenin and his associates back into Russia from Germany. Armand’s death from cholera at the age of forty-four in 1920 greatly grieved Lenin and may have precipitated his own decline.

In 1918, Lenin survived an assassination attempt when a woman called Fanny Kaplan shot him.

Lenin suffered three strokes; his third, in March 1923, left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Such was the pain experienced by Lenin during his final months, that he begged Stalin to obtain a dose of potassium cyanide to put him out of his misery. He specifically asked Stalin, probably because he knew only Stalin, a man so devoid of any humanity, would be strong enough to do it. But even Stalin baulked at the thought of it and couldn’t bring himself to administer the fatal dose.

The Soviet writer, Maxim Gorky, accused Lenin of being divorced from the workers and peasants he claimed to be representing, holding a ‘pitiless contempt, worthy of a nobleman, for the lives of the ordinary people… Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin. He does not know ordinary people. He has never lived among them’.

Following Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, the city of Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg) was renamed Leningrad in his honour. Vladimir Lenin became a messianic figure in the Soviet Union, lionized and worshipped until the fall of communism in 1991.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Vladimir Lenin’s would-be assassin was 28-year-old Fanny Kaplan. Born Feiga Chaimovna Roytblat in the Ukraine on 10 February 1890, Kaplan, one of seven children, was drawn to revolutionary politics from a young age.

Dora Kaplan / Fanny Kaplan

At the age of sixteen, she joined an anarchist group based in Kiev, was given the name Fanny Kaplan, sometimes Dora Kaplan, and charged with assassinating the city’s governor. But the bomb she was preparing detonated in her room, almost blinding her. She was arrested and, had she not been so young (she was still under twenty-one), she would have faced the death penalty. Instead, she was sentenced to ‘eternal penal servitude’ in Siberia. During her time of forced labour, her eyesight deteriorated to the point of near blindness.

Following the February Revolution of 1917 and the overthrow of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, Kaplan was released as part of a post-revolutionary political amnesty. She suffered from severe headaches and bouts of blindness but, following an intensive course of treatment, she regained partial sight.

Socialist Revolutionary

She made her way to Moscow and there fell in with the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), who, following the October Revolution, had fully expected to share power with their socialist colleagues, the Bolsheviks. Indeed, a Constituent Assembly consisting of SRs, Bolsheviks and others met in Petrograd on 18 January 1918, but when the assembled gathering rejected most of Lenin’s suggestions, he had it dissolved within the day.

And so, the embittered SRs plotted to undermine the Bolsheviks by targeting their leader. Thus, on 30 August 1918, Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin. Having done the deed, she followed SR protocol and allowed herself to be arrested, prepared to sacrifice her life for the cause.

Today I shot at Lenin

Interrogated by the Cheka, the Bolsheviks’ newly-formed security wing, Kaplan said, ‘Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution.’

The Cheka, desperate to know who Kaplan was working for, got nothing out of her. So, at 4 am on 3 September, Fanny Kaplan was escorted into a garage and executed with a single bullet to the back of her head. Her corpse was bundled into a barrel, and set alight. There were to be no remains of Kaplan, no identifiable martyr to the SR cause. The order came from Yakov Sverdlov who, just six weeks before, had ordered the execution of the tsar and his family.

(Pictured: Vladimir Pchelin’s depiction of the assassination attempt. Click to enlarge.)

Did Fanny Kaplan really shoot Lenin?

But did Fanny Kaplan really shoot Lenin? We will never know for sure but doubts are so rooted that the answer is almost taken as a no – she did not. Why would the SR entrust such an important mission to a poorly-sighted woman, who had never handled a firearm before, to shoot Lenin in the dark? Despite the large crowd milling around Lenin’s car, not one of the eighteen witnesses questioned actually saw Kaplan firing her revolver. The bullet removed from Lenin’s neck, almost four years after the event, was found not to have been fired from the Browning revolver alleged to have been used by Kaplan.

But Lenin’s near death at the hands of a deranged woman suited the Bolsheviks at a time when their survival looked far from certain. Lenin profited from a surge of sympathy that served both him and his party well.

Red Terror

The day following Kaplan’s execution, the Bolsheviks launched their campaign of ‘Red Terror’: ‘It is necessary, secretly and urgently, to prepare the terror,’ urged Lenin. Felix ‘Iron’ Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, openly declared, ‘We stand for organized terror – this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution.’ As the Soviets were keen on saying – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Lenin had survived, physically and politically, but his injuries, together with his intense workload, contributed to a series of strokes, the first in May 1922, and ultimately led to his early demise, aged 53, on 21 January 1924.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Lenin began his Testament with his concerns over the open antagonism between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, fearing that their hatred of each other would cause a split within the Centre Committee: ‘Relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split,’ he wrote. He suggested doubling the membership from 50 to 100.

Trotsky

But it is Lenin’s judgements on individual members of the Centre Committee that make his Testament such a fascinating document. Leon Trotsky, for example, is described as ‘distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.’

Bukharin

Of Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin wrote, he is ‘rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with the great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him.’

Pyatakov

There’s also mention of Georgy Pyatakov who is, in Lenin’s words, ‘unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but shows far too much zeal for administrating and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter.’

Kamenev and Zinoviev

Lenin also mentioned Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who, following the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October Revolution of 1917, had dared to doubt Lenin. Both men resigned from the Centre Committee and Lenin had called them ‘deserters’ before they recanted and were welcomed back to the fold. However, Lenin never forgot what he called the ‘October Episode’, and in his Testament wrote that although the incident was ‘no accident … the blame for [the October Episode] cannot be laid upon them personally.’ But of course, by even referencing the episode, Lenin was drawing attention to it, ensuring that Kamenev and Zinoviev’s temporary loss of faith was not forgotten.

Stalin

His most damning judgement however was reserved for Joseph Stalin (pictured with Lenin), whom Lenin had appointed General Secretary eight months earlier. Lenin was regretting his haste in promoting Stalin, questioning the amount of authority placed in the Georgian’s hands. While in the Testament other members of the Centre Committee received both criticism and praise, Stalin suffered only criticism. Lenin described Stalin as having ‘unlimited authority concentrated in his hands … I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.’

More damning still for Stalin, was Lenin’s 130-word addendum to his Testament, written a few days later, in which he declared:

‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.’

Nadezhda Krupskaya

Entrusted to his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s Testament was due to be read out at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923 but, fatefully, Krupskaya kept it secret in the hope that her husband would recover. He did not.

Following Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Krupskaya insisted that the Testament be read out at the Thirteenth Party Congress, due in May 1924.

Kamenev and Zinoviev, together with Stalin, had formed a ruling triumvirate within the party’s leadership, mainly to keep Trotsky from assuming power. Lenin’s Testament had criticized all three. They could not allow such a damning document to be made public.

Stalin had offered to resign over the issue. The committee, including Trotsky, rejected his offer. Stalin had survived. Despite Krupskaya’s protests, only edited highlights were read out to party officials and Lenin’s misgivings were suppressed and were never permitted to be mentioned again.

They would all pay dearly for their support of the wily Georgian: Bukharin, Pyatakov, Kamenev and Zinoviev would all be executed within thirteen years, while Trotsky, living in exile in Mexico, would be assassinated by a Stalinist agent in August 1940 – all on the orders of Stalin.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post Lenin’s Testament – a summary first appeared on Rupert Colley.

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