KAPLAN, FANYA

(1887–1918), anarchist-terrorist; arrested and executed for a failed attempt on Lenin's life.

Born into the family of a Jewish teacher in Ukraine, Fanya Kaplan (also known as Feiga Kaplan, Feiga Roitblat, Dora Kaplan) joined a local anarchist terrorist organization during the 1905 Revolution. For her participation in a bomb-making operation in Kiev, she spent ten years in the Nerchinsk penal complex in Siberia. Here she became acquainted with other female terrorists, most notably the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) Maria Spiridonova and Anastasia Bitsenko. A number of her prison comrades maintain that Kaplan went blind during her early years in Nerchinsk but partially recovered her vision in 1913; one memoirist also noted Kaplan's deafness. Released by the Provisional Government's amnesty for political prisoners following the February Revolution of 1917, Kaplan was receiving medical treatment in Ukraine when the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917. Kaplan later stated that she was a supporter not of the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition government, but rather of the Constituent Assembly promoted by the SRs and their leader Victor Chernov. In the spring of 1918 Kaplan returned to Moscow and there visited her former prison comrade, Bitsenko, who, like Spiridonova, had joined the Left SRs. Kaplan, however, appears to have had nothing to do with the Left SR Party and little to do with the SRs. When Lenin was wounded in August 1918, Kaplan's nervous behavior at the scene led to her arrest, although it subsequently emerged that no one had actually witnessed her role in the shooting. She was executed within days of being apprehended. Bolshevik authorities labeled Kaplan an SR and the attempt on Lenin's life an SR terrorist conspiracy; SR leaders strongly denied both accusations during their show trial in 1922.

See also: anarchism; lenin, vladimir ilich; show trials; socialist revolutionaries; terrorism

bibliography

Jansen, Marc. (1982). A Show Trial under Lenin: The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow 1922, tr. Jean Sanders. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Lyandres, Semion. (1989). "The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the Evidence." Slavic Review 48(3):432–48.

Sally A. Boniece