1918: Vladimir Lenin Was Shot in Moscow

(Vintage propaganda poster by Russian artist V. Shcherbakov This repro of a 1920 print shows Lenin, and says " A ghost wanders around Europe, a ghost of communism.")

On the evening of August 30, 1918, Lenin came to the Michelson factory in the south bank of Moscow, where the workers were waiting for his arrival. When Lenin stepped off the car, a man walked quickly to the workshop, where there was the square. His driver, Jill, turned around and parked a dozen meters from the entrance to the workshop. At that moment, a middle-aged woman with a handbag went to the car and asked Jill, "Hey, it seems that Lenin is here?" "A speaker". Jill said calmly. He did not tell the name of Lenin. So the woman walked away and into the workshop.

About an hour later, a large group of walkers emerged from the workshop, almost full of yards. Jill knew the meeting was over and started the car. A few minutes later, Lenin came out of the workshop. He walked slowly, talking to the workers. A moment later, Lenin was ready to step out of the crowd and onto the bus, just as a shot rang out from the crowd. Jill immediately turned his head to the gun, and he saw the woman who had just been asking him, standing in front of the left side of the car and pointing his gun at Lenin. There were two more shots, and Lenin slowly fell to the side of the car. The killer was Fanny Kaplan, a 35-year-old social revolutionary. After the incident, Jill took Lenin in his car and sped away to the Kremlin. The doctor diagnosed that she shot Lenin’s neck, but not in danger. On the night of August 30, the central committee of the Bolsheviks first published a communique of Lenin’s assassination, “The killer is blind”.

For decades, almost no one suspected that Kaplan had fired the two ”sinful bullets”, which seemed to be an unassailable conclusion. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union(1991), as more and more classified documents and historical archives became public, there were many doubts about the assassination of Lenin and its handling of it. In order to fully understand the incident, the Russian prosecutor and the security services have decided to reopen the case of Lenin’s assassination.

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