The Unsuccessful Assassination Attempts on Lenin

On January 14, 1918 the first of ten assassination attempts was made on Vladimir Lenin.

Generally, the topic of assassination attempts on Lenin was poorly covered by Soviet historians, while the amount of disclosed information for free public access was all the more limited.

Before the October Revolution of 1917 there were no recorded cases of any assassination attempts on Lenin. The first planned attempt on his life took place a month and a half after the Bolsheviks seized power and took over Petrograd (now St. Petersburg).

On 14 January Lenin delivered a speech at the Mikhailovsky Manezh in Petrograd, greeting the first detachment of the First Socialist Army, which was to be sent to the front. The incident occurred at 7.30, as Lenin, along with his sister Maria and the Swiss communist Fritz Platten, was driving back to Smolny Palace, where he resided. The driver was going slow, taking precautions against black frost, snow-wreaths and thick fog. When passing the bridge over the Fontanka River, there came the sound of the bullets banging against the car. Platten managed to push Lenin’s head down, saving the leader’s life, while the driver thought to speed up. When the car was examined upon arrival at the Smolny Palace, its body was found peppered in several places, with two bullets having broken right through the windshield, one of them wounding Platten’s finger.

Though the news of the event itself was made public, the plotters were kept secret; all the more, the state security forces were neither able to catch nor identify the perpetrators right away. The terrorists disappeared and the details of the attempt were kept secret, as members of the Petrograd police were rumored to have been implicated in the matter. Disclosing the details would also have been politically unwise, as nobody was supposed to even think of raising their hand against the leader of world communism. As it was revealed later, some of the attackers were former White Guard officers. This fact only came up when the terrorists fled to the city of Novocherkassk, which had become one of the centers of the White movement. Some of the participants, who survived through the Civil War of 1918-1922, and found themselves in emigration, were able to share the classified secrets of the attempt. It was prepared by Prince Dmitry Shakhovskoy, at the cost of half a million rubles.

Fritz Platten, who had taken Lenin’s bullet, was arrested years later on espionage charges. In the course of the search of his house, the police found a revolver that had not been declared. This gave grounds for the Soviet government to suspect Platten of planning attempts on other government members.

Though the investigation ruled out any chance of Platten’s involvement with foreign intelligence services, he was still sentenced to four years for illegal possession of a gun. In 1942, while still in prison, Platten died of heart disease, ironically on Lenin’s birthday, 22 April. In 1956, Platten who actually saved the life of the Bolshevik leader was posthumously rehabilitated.

Lenin was attacked about ten more times, the most successful attempt being the one performed by the woman terrorist Fanny Kaplan on 30 August 1918, when the two bullets she fired reached their goal and seriously injured Lenin. However, as new never-before-seen information emerges, doubts arise as to whether the attempt actually took place due to a series of serious discrepancies in the whole assassination plot story, starting from the fact that Kaplan proved to have been almost blind by the time the attempt was performed. The full true story, however, seems will never be fully unraveled.

Feliks Edmundovich AKA Iron Felix

(1877–1926)

   Born into a family of Polish landowners, Dzerzhinsky joined the Socialist Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania while a student. As a political activist, he was arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist authorities on several occasions, and the February 1917 revolution found him in a Moscow prison cell. As a revolutionary and a prisoner, Dzerzhinsky took great interest in operational tradecraft and the counterintelligence operations of the tsarist secret service, Okhrana. Dzerzhinsky specialized in ferreting out informers from among revolutionaries.

   Following the Bolshevik coup of 7 November 1917, Vladimir Lenin asked Dzerzhinsky to form a security service, which took the name All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Chrevzuychanaya komissiya po borbe s kontrarevolutsei i sabotazhem). 

Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka—as it was referred to by most citizens—became a secret police empire responsible for the security of the state and the party. Dzerzhinsky described the Cheka as “the party’s fighting detachment.” Most of his deputies were not Russians but came from the Polish, Latvian, and Jewish minorities. Many had served in the Bolshevik underground in and outside the tsarist state.

   During the Russian civil war, Dzerzhinsky often traveled as the party’s representative to various military fronts as a troubleshooter, and he was instrumental in ordering and managing the Red Terror in 1918 that followed the attempted assassination of Lenin. On the first day of the terror, the Cheka executed without trial more than 500 men and women. During its short existence, the Cheka executed close to 150,000 Soviet citizens and imprisoned tens of thousands in forced labor camps. Dzerzhinsky publicly noted that the Cheka stood for terror, and regretfully that sometimes the sword of the revolution fell on the innocent as well as the guilty.

   Given his long political apprenticeship outside the Bolshevik Party, Dzerzhinsky kept out of party politics as long as Lenin was alive.

However, following Lenin’s death in 1924, Dzerzhinsky supported Joseph Stalin in his struggle with Leon Trotsky. As a result, the Cheka, which Dzerzhinsky created, became the Stalinist NKVD, a weapon that the leadership could use against dissidents within the party. The interrogators who had destroyed countless intellectuals, clergy, and refractory peasants showed little disinclination a decade later to purge the party of enemies.

   In 1922, as part of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the Cheka was folded into the new GPU (State Political Administration). The GPU lost none of the power of the Cheka. Moreover, Dzerzhinsky was rewarded for his work in building the security service by being made chair of the Council of the National Economy. This appointment led to greater participation by the security service in the Soviet economy, and the employment of thousands of prisoners in logging, gold mining, and manufacturing. Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 following a speech to a party meeting. He was remembered by security professionals as a knight of the revolution. His statue at the service headquarters at Lubyanka was torn down immediately following the failed 1991 August putsch but recently has been placed back in its position of honor.

   Following Dzerzhinsky’s death, an admirer noted that his two most striking qualities were fanaticism and mercilessness. Dzerzhinsky was an aesthetic and workaholic who lived in his office the first year he managed the Cheka, subsisting on the meager rations fed his troops in the field. He sought to mold a service of revolutionary priests, describing his Chekist colleagues as having “clean hands and warm hearts.” He was also a formidable manager who controlled a security service with a staff of 250,000. He had little real interest in foreign intelligence, and the foreign intelligence section was mainly directed at the penetration of émigré movements. Under Dzerzhinsky’s leadership, the Cheka organized the Trust operation to lure émigrés to return to the Soviet Union. By the time of his death, the security service had eliminated the threat of émigré political action against the infant Soviet state.

sofia kovalevskaya

Sofia Kovalevskaya was the middle child of Vasily Korvin-Krukovsky, an artillery general, and Yelizaveta Shubert, both well-educated members of the Russian nobility. Sofia was educated by tutors and governesses first at Polibino, the Krukovsky family country estate, near Pskov, then in St. Petersburg. She joined her family's social circle which included Dostoevsky (who even proposed to her elder sister Anna, but was rejected).

Sofia was attracted to mathematics at a very young age. Her uncle Pyotr Krukovsky was not the brightest or most educated man, but he had a passion for mathematics and told Sofia about squaring a circle and asymptotes, even before she was old enough to know what these words meant.

When Sofia was 11 years old, the walls of her nursery were temporarily (for a shortage of wallpaper) papered with pages of Ostrogradsky's lecture notes on differential and integral analysis from her father's university days. She noticed that certain things on the sheets she had heard mentioned by her uncle.

Fascination with maths

It was under the family's tutor Josef Malevich that Sofia undertook her first proper study of mathematics, and she says that it was as his pupil that she began to feel an attraction for mathematics so intense that she started to neglect other studies.

Sofia’s father decided to put a stop to her math lessons, but she borrowed a copy of Bourdeu's Algebra, which she read at night when the rest of the household was asleep. A year later a neighbour, Professor Tyrtov, presented her family with a physics textbook which he had written, and Sofia attempted to read it. 

She did not understand the trigonometric formulae and attempted to explain them herself. Tyrtov realised that in her working with the concept of sine, she had used the same method by which it had developed historically. Tyrtov argued with Sofia's father that she should be encouraged to study mathematics further but it was several years later that he permitted Sofia to take private lessons.

Marriage and family life

Sofia was forced to marry so that she could go abroad to enter higher education, as Russian universities in the 19th century were closed to women. Her father would not allow her to leave home to study at a university, and women in Russia could not live apart from their families without the written permission of their father or husband. 

Meanwhile, Sofia and her elder sister Anna were part of an active young intelligentsia, who believed in the power of education to hasten a peaceful revolution of the tsarist social structure that would improve human nature, and to provide equal rights for women. So in 1868 the two sisters arranged fictitious marriages to radical compatriots. 

Sofia married Vladimir Kovalevsky, a promising young paleontologist. This marriage caused problems for Sofia and, throughout its 15 years, it was a source of intermittent sorrow, exasperation and tension. Her concentration was broken by her frequent quarrels and misunderstandings with her husband.

University studies in Europe

In 1869 Sofia traveled to Heidelberg to study mathematics and the natural sciences, only to discover that women could not matriculate at the university. Eventually she persuaded the university authorities to allow her to attend lectures unofficially, provided that she obtains the permission of each of her lecturers. 

Sofia studied there successfully for three semesters and, according to the memoirs of a fellow student, immediately attracted the attention of her teachers with her mathematical ability. Professor Königsberger, the eminent chemist Kirchhoff, and all of the other professors were ecstatic over their gifted student and spoke about her as an extraordinary phenomenon.

In 1871 Kovalevskaya moved to Berlin to study with Weierstrass, Königsberger's teacher. Despite the efforts of Weierstrass and his colleagues, she was not permitted to attend courses at the university. Ironically this actually helped her since over the next four years Weierstrass tutored her privately. 

Doctorate degree

By the spring of 1874, Kovalevskaya had completed three papers. Weierstrass deemed each of these worthy of a doctorate. The three papers were on partial differential equations, Abelian integrals and Saturn's Rings. The first of these is a remarkable contribution which was published in Crelle's Journal in 1875. The paper on the reduction of Abelian integrals to simpler elliptic integrals is of less importance, but it consisted of a skilled series of manipulations which showed her complete command of Weierstrass's theory.

In 1874 Kovalevskaya was granted her doctorate, summa cum laude, from Göttingen University in Germany. Despite this doctorate and letters of strong recommendation from Weierstrass, Kovalevskaya was unable to obtain an academic position. This was for a combination of reasons, but her gender was the major handicap.

https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/science-and-technology/sofia-kovalevskaya/