In August 1918, a woman shot and nearly killed Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin as he toured a factory in Moscow. The assassin was Fanya Kaplan, a disgruntled socialist whose political party had been banned earlier that year by Lenin’s Bolshevik communists.
Before her execution several days later, Kaplan said she acted alone. But there were many who shared her grievances. The Bolsheviks had quickly established dictatorship less than a year before, in the 1917 October Revolution. They ceded vast territories to Germany in exchange for peace, and dissolved the country’s first experiment with democratic rule.
