Lenin Shot: Assassination Attempt Saves the Revolution
Fanya Kaplan shot Vladimir Lenin twice as he left a Moscow factory on August 30, 1918, embedding bullets in his neck and shoulder. She was an anarchist who opposed the Bolsheviks' dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. Lenin survived but never fully recovered; the bullets contributed to the strokes that incapacitated him by 1922 and killed him in 1924. The immediate consequence was the Red Terror: the Bolshevik secret police (Cheka) launched a campaign of mass arrests and executions that killed thousands of suspected enemies within weeks. The assassination attempt gave the regime the justification it had been seeking to eliminate all political opposition, consolidating single-party rule and establishing the template for Soviet political repression.
August 30, 1918
108 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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