One hundred years ago, one of the most high-profile assassinations in world history occurred. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was seriously injured in Moscow during a meeting with workers. The shooter Fanny Kaplan was immediately seized and shot three days later. But too many secrets remained to keep the biography of the famous terrorist.
Anarchist Dora
Fanny Efimovna Kaplan (Feiga Haimovna Roytblat) was born in Volyn in a Jewish teacher's family. During the events of 1905, a fifteen-year-old girl who received a home education unexpectedly sided with the anarchists, whose ideas were very popular - adventures and risk were always in fashion. Already then, under the name "Dora", she began a revolutionary career and declared her decisive and bold character.
Penal servitude
In 1906, she participated in organizing the assassination of the Kiev governor-general. The bomb prepared for the attack exploded ahead of time, the girl received an eye injury, which subsequently led to loss of vision. An arrest and death sentence followed. Fanny saved her young age and almost pure biography, the shooting was replaced by life imprisonment. In the shackles, the prisoner was transported several times from one prison to another, since her accompanying documents showed a tendency to escape. Seven years later, the life sentence was reduced to 20 years, and only the February Revolution freed the terrorist, who granted amnesty to all political prisoners.
Convinced Social Revolutionary
Acquaintance at penal servitude with the revolutionary-minded Maria Spiridonova completely changed the political views of Kaplan. Now she shared the ideas of the Social Revolutionaries, and their communication with the revolutionary continued even after returning to Moscow. Fanny stopped in the capital with Anna Pigit, in that very famous house on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, where the "strange company" from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel lived.
In the summer of 1917, Kaplan went to Yevpatoriya - the Kerensky government organized a sanatorium to improve the health of political prisoners. During the treatment, she met Dmitry Ulyanov, who worked here as a doctor. The brother of the future leader helped with a referral for a new acquaintance in the Kharkov Eye Clinic. The operation was successful and vision began to return gradually, she began to distinguish silhouettes and read with a magnifying glass.
