On this date in history; 8-30-18

Fanny Kaplan shot and wounded Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, helping to spark the Red Terror in the Soviet Union. 

About Kaplan:

Kaplan was born into a Jewish family, one of seven children. She became a political revolutionary at an early age and joined a socialist group, the Socialist Revolutionaries (Esers).

later...

Kaplan became disillusioned with Lenin as a result of the conflict between the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik party. The Bolsheviks had strong support in the soviets; however, in elections to a competing body, the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks failed to win a majority in the November 1917 elections and a Socialist Revolutionary was elected President in January 1918. The Bolsheviks, favoring soviets, ordered the Constituent Assembly to be dissolved. By August 1918 conflicts between the Bolsheviks and their political opponents had led to the banning of most other influential parties - most recently, of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had been the Bolsheviks' principal coalition partner for some time, but had organized a revolt in July because of their opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. Kaplan decided to assassinate Lenin.

According to official accounts, on August 30, Lenin was speaking at a Moscow factory called "Hammer and Sickle". As Lenin left the building and before he entered his car, Kaplan called out to him. When Lenin turned towards her, she fired three shots. One passed through Lenin's coat, the other two hit him in the left shoulder and jaw.

Lenin was taken back to his living quarters at the Kremlin. He feared there might be other plotters planning to kill him and refused to leave the security of the Kremlin to seek medical attention. Doctors were brought in to treat him but were unable to remove the bullets outside of a hospital. Despite the severity of his injuries, Lenin survived. However, Lenin's health never fully recovered from the attack and it is believed the shooting contributed to the strokes that incapacitated and later killed him.

Kaplan was taken into custody and interrogated by the Cheka. She made the following statement: 

My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.

When it became clear that Kaplan would not implicate any accomplices, she was shot dead on September 3, 1918.

. . .

An official decree for Red Terror was issued only hours after the Kaplan shooting, calling for "a merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the revolution." In the next few months, about 800 Right SRs and other political opponents of Bolsheviks were executed without trial. During the first year the scope of Red Terror expanded significantly and the number of executions grew into the thousands.

-wikipedia

With regard to the Red Terror:

The campaign of mass repressions was officially initiated as retribution for the assassination of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky, and attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918. While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror" Even before the assassinations, Lenin was sending telegrams "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod in response to a suspected civilian uprising there, and "crush" landowners in Penza who protested, sometimes violently, to requisition of their grain by military detachments:

"Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people.
(1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers.
(2) Publish their names.
(3) Seize all their grain.
(4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ...
Yours, Lenin.
P.S. Find tougher people."

-wikipedia

(emphasis mine)

Communist leader Grigory Zinoviev declared in mid-September of 1918:

To overcome of our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest (i.e. the other 10 million people), we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.

-wikipedia

And who is Grigory Zinoviev? 

Between 1903 and the fall of the Russian Empire in February 1917, he was a leading Bolshevik and one of Lenin's closest associates, working both within Russia and abroad as circumstances permitted. 

...

After the murder of Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934, which started Stalin's Great Purges, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their closest associates were once again expelled from the Communist Party and arrested in December 1934. They were tried in January 1935 and were forced to admit "moral complicity" in Kirov's assassination. Zinoviev was sentenced to 10 years in prison and his supporters to various prison terms.

In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and 14 others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial again. ...Like other defendants, Zinoviev was found guilty and executed on August 25, 1936.  

-wikipedia

_____________________________

Notes:

• Kaplan originally supported Lenin
• Lenin was shot by one of his own, who had soured on him.
• Kaplan was killed by people she'd once supported.
• The Red Terror was being planned even before Kaplan's attack. 
• Immediately after the attempt, the Red Terror was unleashed against people judged to be guilty because of their social class, not their deeds.
• Zinoviev summarizes the objective of the Red Terror and is a strong advocate.
• Zinoviev soured on his leaders from time to time.
• Zinoviev was arrested at the start of The Great Purge (which is just another form of the Red Terror).
• Zinoviev was killed by those same leaders. 

Nothing like that could ever happen here...could it? 

All this sets up a warning which will be posted here soon. 

Which way are you facing?