When assassins struck at the Soviet hierarchy in the early days of the Russian Revolution, British Ambassador Captain Francis Cromie found himself targeted for his covert assistance to counter-revolutionaries, as Lenin cracked down on foreign interference. Lenin suspected the British government was behind the attempt on his own life, in what became known as the Lockhart Plot, named for British representative to Moscow Robert Bruce Lockhart. A single day captures the complex mingling of suspicions and confirmed conspiracies responsible for the Cheka’s rapid rise to power.
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The day dawned foggy and damp in Petrograd on August 30. At nine o’clock in the morning, a slight, good-looking young man wearing an officer’s cap and leather jacket sat nervously in the crowded ground floor waiting room of the Cheka headquarters in Palace Square. Leonid Kannegisser had dark hair obscured by the cap, full lips and a long, sensitive, poet’s face. He was 24 years old, the author of dreamy but credible verse. His bearing and dress revealed him to be a child of privilege and, in fact, he was the son of a millionaire. Previously he had been an ardent supporter of Kerensky; now he was an anti-Bolshevik socialist with links to White counter-revolutionary groups. Conceivably one of them put him up to the deed he was about to perform, but nobody has found evidence linking him directly with Cromie or Reilly, let alone with Lockhart. Probably, what the young poet intended to do was entirely separate from their conspiracy, and singularly illtimed from their point of view.
It would have been sticky and warm at that time of year in that roomful of supplicants waiting for news of loved-ones under arrest, with armed guards, including one with a machine gun, watching over them. The young poet may well have been sweating under his cap and leather jacket. But he did not take them off. In fact, he kept the jacket tightly closed. Beneath it he had hidden a Colt pistol. He was waiting for Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka. He intended to kill him.
Moisei Uritsky had played a prominent part in organizing the revolution; now, a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, he oversaw the Petrograd secret police. By most accounts, the chief of the Petrograd Cheka did not thirst for blood; indeed, his reign had been comparatively mild, and if he had had his way it would have been milder still. Kannegisser, however, thought Uritsky did have blood on his hands, including the blood of one of his best friends. The young romantic believed it was innocent blood. According to his father this, and not political conviction, was his motivation.
At about eleven o’clock, very near the time that Captain Berzin was entering “Mr. Massino’s” unoccupied flat on Torgovaia Street, Uritsky was arriving at his headquarters in a chauffeur-driven automobile. He entered the building, nodded at the crowd, and headed for a staircase at the other end of the room. Kannegisser let him pass. Perhaps he took a deep breath. Then he pulled out the gun and opened fire, hitting his man in the body and head. Onlookers screamed. Uritsky fell. Kannegisser fled. Cheka officers drew their weapons and ran after him. They too began shooting.
The young man had left his bicycle outside. The scene that followed evokes Keystone cops, but it was real, and real lives were at stake. The young poet sprang onto his bike and sped off, pedaling furiously. Shots rang out in historic Palace Square; bullets ricocheted. As he raced around the Winter Palace, then along the Neva Embankment into Millionnaya Street, his cap flew from his head and one of the pursuers stopped to pick it up. Did the assassin, for that is what he had just become, momentarily lose his pursuers? He did manage to get off the bike and, according to some accounts, dash into an “English Club”; or, according to others, gain entrance into the British embassy itself. According to Kannegisser’s own testimony, he ran into the courtyard of Number 17, Millionnaya Street, and then through the first door that caught his eye. An early report said that was the house of “the Northern English Society,” where the Petrograd English Association had its premises. Ransome, interpreting events from Stockholm a few days later for the Daily News, corrected this account. Number 17 was not the address of the English Club but did contain a “flat belonging to some members of the British mission.” Major R. McAlpine, who had worked closely with Cromie arranging the coup in Archangel, also lived on Millionnaya Street, at Number 10. This is as close to an English connection as has ever been established for the poet assassin. Perhaps it means something, but equally, perhaps it does not.
Somehow, Kannegisser managed to acquire a coat, for purposes of disguise. It cannot have been much of a disguise, however. Within minutes Cheka agents tracked him down and arrested him. They identified him in part by the cap, which they now held and which they had seen him wearing only minutes earlier. Also, the young man did not deny the charge. He had achieved his purpose: Moisei Uritsky was dead.
* * *
That evening, August 30, Vladimir Lenin addressed a meeting of workers in the hand grenade shop of the Michelson Armaments factory in Moscow. If he did not have the Lockhart Plot specifically in mind when he spoke, certainly he had in it Leonid Kannegisser and the threat posed by counter-revolutionaries, although he made no mention of events in Petrograd that day. His subject: “liberty and equality”; his conclusion: “We have only one alternative: victory or death.” At this grimly resolute declaration the crowd broke into “stormy applause passing into ovation.” Afterward, the Bolshevik leader made his way from the factory to his car. Part of the crowd followed. One woman was trying to tell him about her nephew whose allotment of flour had been confiscated. He stood with one foot on the running board of the automobile, surrounded by admirers, patiently listening to her. It was a little after 8 p.m.
(At that moment in Petrograd, despite earlier events, Reilly probably would have been dining with his “wife” at a restaurant or entertaining her on Torgovaia Street. Berzin would have been thinking of his return to Moscow by train the next morning. Cromie would have been headed for the safety of Reverend Lombard’s secret attic room. And, in Moscow, Lockhart and Moura would have been dining together in the flat at 19 Khlebnyi pereulok for nearly the last time.)
Close to the factory exit just used by Lenin, across from the car, stood a booth. A small woman lingered unobtrusively behind it. Fanny Kaplan had not attended the speech but waited outside. She might once have been pretty. Now she had black hair, great black circles under her eyes, large ears, a pointed chin and a face etched by years of hardship. She wore a wide-brimmed white hat, held a briefcase in one hand and a green umbrella in the other. Later it would be said that she had kept a gun in the briefcase, or in her pocket. A few people noticed her, but none paid her much attention.
Ten years earlier, Fanny Kaplan had been an anarchist. The Tsar’s police had arrested her in 1906 for planning terrorist activities involving bombs. The Tsar’s judge had sentenced her to “eternal” hard labor. According to possibly unreliable records gathered by the Bolsheviks in 1918, she had quit the anarchists during her imprisonment to join the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Eleven years of harsh incarceration nearly broke Fanny Kaplan’s body. She suffered from debilitating headaches; she grew deaf; she went temporarily blind and recovered her eyesight only imperfectly. But she remained a defiant if nervously distracted and balky individual. The first Russian revolution, the moderate one of February 1917, set her free. Eventually, she moved to Moscow, where she stayed with left SR friends she had made in prison. Then came the second Russian Revolution, the communist one of October 1917. She did not favor Bolshevism. Ten months later, August 1918, she and all the other left SRs believed the Bolsheviks already had sold out the peasantry, had knuckled under to German imperialism; in short, had betrayed socialism.
It is unlikely, but not impossible, that the conspirators whose plot we have been tracing had advance knowledge of what was about to take place. After all, both Reilly and Lockhart had maintained contact with the Socialist Revolutionaries, both left and right. It is inconceivable, however, that they would have approved it, a week before their own coup was scheduled; the timing was wrong from their point of view. “The fools have struck too early,” exclaimed one of Reilly’s contacts when he learned what Kannegisser had done. He would have said the same when he learned about Fanny Kaplan. As with the assassination of Uritsky, the attempted assassination of Lenin almost certainly was serendipitous as far as Bruce Lockhart was concerned, and singularly ill-timed.
Now, on a warm summer night outside a factory, the leader of the Bolsheviks stood amid a scrum of well-wishers, talking with a woman about flour shortages. Fanny Kaplan stood at the back of the crowd. Crack, crack, and crack: like a car backfiring: Lenin lay crumpled on the ground. One spent bullet rested beneath his collarbone having first passed through his neck and part of his lung; another lodged in his shoulder, less dangerously; the third had ripped through his overcoat and hit a woman standing next to him. The crowd panicked and scattered. What happened next is in dispute. One witness said that Kaplan ran with the rest; another said she remained standing motionless under a tree. Red Guards arrested several suspects, including the wounded woman, and someone, probably assistant military commissar, 5th Moscow Soviet Infantry Division, Batulin, grabbed Kaplan. She seemed odd to him. He searched her but found nothing suspicious. “Why do you want to know,” she asked when he began to question her, which seemed odd yet again. He brought her to the local police station. Suddenly she stood up from the couch on which she had been sitting: “I shot Lenin. I did.” She refused to say anything more.
Meanwhile aides had lifted the grievously wounded Bolshevik leader into his car. It raced toward the Kremlin. No one knew whether the architect of the Russian Revolution would live or die.
***
News of the assassination of Mosei Uritsky by Leonid Kannegisser in Petrograd reached the Lubianka in Moscow by lunchtime, eight or so hours before Lenin would be speaking at the armament factory. Felix Dzerzhinsky conferred with the Bolshevik leader. It is inconceivable that they did not discuss what might be the connection between Kannegisser of Petrograd and the organization of Whites led by Captain Cromie also in Petrograd, and note that their agents, Engel’gardt/Shtegel’man and Sabir, had just returned to that city. They must have noted too that Kannegisser had fled along Millionaya Street, close to the British embassy, the “English Club,” and the flats of numerous embassy personnel. Lenin instructed the head of the Cheka to “find the threads and links among the counterrevolutionaries.” Even before the assassination of Uritsky, “Comrade Dzerzhinsky [had] intended to travel to Petersburg [sic] to investigate,” reported an official communication released a few days later. After consulting with Lenin he pushed the plan forward, rushed to the railway station and onto the train. He had before him a journey of 450 miles, perhaps an eight-hour trip.
Agents of the Petrograd Cheka met him at the station and brought him to the prisoner. By now it would have been early evening, August 30, just before Lenin was to speak in Moscow. Dzerzhinsky conducted a brief interrogation. Did the young poet belong to a conspiratorial group? Did he belong to any particular political party? How had he obtained his revolver? There is no record that Dzerzhinsky asked about links with the foreign conspirators but he surely did. In any event, Kannegisser only shook his head. He admitted that he had shot Uritsky; other questions he would not answer.
Perhaps Dzerzhinsky broke off for a brief supper; then back to work, but a second session with Kannegisser proved no more illuminating than the first. Then the thunderbolt at the darkest hour: news from Moscow of the attempt on Lenin, and the Soviet leader’s life hanging in the balance. Felix Dzerzhinsky rushed to take the next train home. As it rocketed through the countryside he would have been sitting wide awake (for he rarely slept) and ramrod straight (for he never bent). He would have stared out the window, his gray-blue eyes unseeing, his quick, cold brain analyzing pluses and minuses, context and history. Savinkov’s risings at Yaroslavl, Murom and Ryabinsk; the left SR assassination of Mirbach; the developing civil war with the Whites to whom the fearsome Czech Legion was offering support; and all this funded, at least in part, by Allied diplomats whose masters now had established three strategic military outposts on Russian soil. How could he not have concluded that the two recent shootings fit within a wider pattern? How could he not believe that those same Allied diplomats must be at the root of the two most recent assaults? He had thought he had Lockhart and his accomplices under control. He had thought he would soon have Cromie’s organization under control too. Events of the day forced him to rethink.
Dzerzhinsky on the train: he concluded it was time for decisive action. He would collect and print Marchand’s letter about Allied agents sabotaging the revolution. His agents would pick up Lockhart, and Captain Cromie. In fact, they would sweep up all British and French nationals in Moscow and Petrograd who might be involved with the conspirators, including consuls, vice consuls, and members of military missions. It was time to meet White terror with systematic all-encompassing Red Terror. When his train pulled into Moscow, Dzerzhinsky rushed to the Lubianka.
***
Earlier that night, Fanny Kaplan sat in a cellar room beneath the Cheka’s dreaded headquarters. She was high-strung, distracted, but also in a state of nervy exaltation. Someone described her at about this time as “a holy idiot.” Had she really been the one to pull the trigger? If so, had she acted alone? Could she have been a decoy, and the real assassin have escaped? Three hard men, highranking officers of the national Cheka, one of them Jacov Peters, confronted her, but they got as little from her as Dzerzhinsky had gotten from Kannegisser.
“To what party do you belong?”
“Don’t belong to any party.”
“Who sent you to commit the crime?”
“Committed the attempt on my own behalf.”
“Why did you shoot at Comrade Lenin?”
“I regard him as a traitor. The longer he lives the further he will push back the idea of socialism. . . . I made up my mind to shoot Lenin a long time ago. I was the one who shot him. I decided to take this step back in February.”
She would not tell them how she obtained the gun. She never said how she shot it, while holding briefcase and umbrella. No one asked how, as dusk turned dark and she partially blind already, could see to shoot at all. A hundred years later no one knows whether the SR mounted a serious attempt to kill Lenin, and if so whether Kaplan was the shooter or accepted responsibility for an act she did not commit.
* * *
That same night, while Dzerzhinsky rode the train, Jacov Peters anticipated his thinking and ordered raids on the French consulate and on the residences of its staff and agents. One Cheka squad went for René Marchand’s letter. Another squad went for Colonel Henri de Verthamon, French demolition expert. The Cheka had de Verthamon under close watch, but nevertheless, he heard them coming up the stairs and escaped through an attic window over the rooftops. Then the squad took his flat apart, ripping up chairs, sofas, and clothing. They found a cipher key and ciphered letters; also 28,822 rubles; also “a ton of General Staff maps of Murmansk, Odessa, Kiev, and regions occupied by the Czechoslovaks.” Then they found thirty-nine capsules for dynamite sticks hidden in four coffee-cans.
In Petrograd the Cheka scooped up the British consul, Arthur Woodhouse, and the assistant naval attaché, George Le Page when they went for a late-night stroll, but they missed Cromie who likely had holed up again with the Reverend Lombard.
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The next morning, Saturday, August 31, Cromie made his way to the embassy, a sanctuary he thought, protected by diplomatic immunity and therefore inviolable. Others of the embassy staff trickled in. No one knew where the consul was. Everyone, however, knew about the death of Moisei Uritsky.
Also that morning, the Petrograd Cheka communicated with Lieutenant Sabir and Engel’gardt/Shtegel’man, possibly after consultation with Felix Dzerzhinsky back in Moscow. It may have had evidence linking Uritsky’s murder with the Anglo-French. At any rate, the shooting the previous day demanded a swift, pitiless, coordinated response. It was time to reel in all the counter-revolutionary conspirators. Undoubtedly acting on instructions, Engel’gardt/Shtegel’man telephoned the British embassy. He spoke with Harold Trevenen Hall. He had “very important news,” he told him.
Hall reported to Cromie. Cromie instructed him to find out what the news was. Hall “went to them about mid-day.” Engel’gardt/Shtegel’man told him “it was very important to get in touch with the other organizations at once . . . the time for action was ripe and could not be delayed [for more than] two days at a maximum.” Hall took the bait. He did not dispute. He promised to organize a meeting of principals. The two Bolsheviks (but of course Hall did not know that is what they were) suggested the conference take place at the Hotel de France. Hall preferred the embassy. Perhaps he thought they all would be safer there. The Russians should come at four o’clock that afternoon. Just as Sidney Reilly had failed to hear warning bells when they chimed in Moscow, so now Harold Trevenen Hall failed to hear them chiming in Petrograd.
Nor did Captain Cromie hear them. Hall returned to the embassy, they conferred again, and the naval attaché agreed the meeting should go forward. According to Reilly’s autobiography, Cromie failed to turn up for a noon meeting with him. Possibly the naval attaché was too busy. When the Reverend Lombard stopped by the embassy to see him, Cromie said with relish: “things have begun to move.” He dispatched Hall to pick up one of the chief conspirators, presumably a Frenchman, identified only as “Monsieur Le General.” He sent another of the embassy staff and a chauffeur to pick up General Yudenich. Other plotters would make their way to the embassy on their own. The Bolsheviks later claimed that these were meant to include Savinkov and one of his chief associates, M. M. Filenenko.
The hands on the clock ticked forward inexorably. It was a little after four p.m. Hall returned to the embassy to report that “Monsieur le General” was not home. But at least a few of the counter-revolutionaries had arrived, including “a famous financier,” Duke Shakhovski, whose presence at the embassy, Ransome would cable to the Daily News a few days later, was “quite enough to justify Soviet suspicions of some sort of dealings going on with anti-Soviet parties.” (Ransome called him Prince Shakhovskoi.) Another conspirator present may have been someone called “Mukhanov,” as later the Cheka would question witnesses about him. By now the building was crowded, which was odd because, since the departure of the ambassador and most of his staff, usually fewer than a dozen people worked there. Then Engel’gardt/ Shtegel’man and Lieutenant Sabir walked in.
They made small talk with Trevenen Hall for a few minutes. Then Sabir excused himself: “Our organization has detectives posted outside and I am going to tell them to keep a sharp lookout.” In retrospect, Hall thought this suspicious and probably he was right. Sabir reappeared. He and Engel’gardt/Shtegel’man and Cromie and Hall, found a room on the second floor of the building and “started talking” again. Seven or eight minutes passed. The two Britons did not know it, but already “Comrade [Semen Leonidovich] Geller,” an officer of the Petrograd Cheka, and a detachment of secret policemen led by him, had arrived. Geller and a few others had entered the building, guns drawn, and occupied the ground floor. Quite possibly when Sabir had gone outside a little earlier, he had done so to tell them it was time to act.
The four men in the second-story room heard a car outside; simultaneously someone tried their door. Hall thought it would be General Yudenich. He went to open it. Cromie stood and walked over to look out the window. What he saw must have alarmed him. At the same time Hall opened the door, saw a stranger with a gun, and slammed the door shut again. Cromie pulled a revolver from his pocket. He told Hall: “Remain here and keep the door after me.” He then pulled open the door: “Clear out you swine.” These were the last words he ever uttered.
Precisely what happened next cannot be discovered, and anyway the details are unimportant. Cromie, gun in hand, drove before him the man who had tried to open the door. If there had been only one intruder perhaps all would have ended well for him. But there were many, and they had come upstairs, and someone began shooting. Who fired first cannot be ascertained. Most accounts say Cromie alone among the Britons fired a gun, but this is not certain either. In the end one or possibly two Bolsheviks died, and so did Captain Cromie in a hail of bullets. As Cromie lay dying, Reverend Lombard tried to help him; the Cheka pulled him away. Two women went to him; the Cheka would not let them give succor either.
The Bolsheviks had committed a breach of international law by entering an embassy whose occupants were supposed to be automatically protected. Cromie has gone down as a defender of international law. Of course, with his anti Bolshevik plotting, he had been breaking international law for months. This the Chekists had finished. Now they confiscated “a mass of weapons,” and “massive correspondence.” They began herding everyone in the British embassy into various rooms to be interrogated. They would arrest between thirty and forty people including twenty-five “English agents” and five Russian “counterrevolutionaries.” For most of them a difficult period was about to commence. According to a British report, the Cheka, most oddly, soon released Prince Shakhovskoi. However, the Petrograd Pravda reported on September 6 that he was being held as a hostage and, along with the other hostages, would be shot “if the Right SRs and White Guards kill but one more Soviet official.”
* * *
Midnight in Moscow eight hours after Cromie’s death: streets deserted and dimly lit; most people at home lying in bed, catching up on sleep in lieu of food; or lying awake, anxious and ruminating on events of the day. No one knew precisely what would happen next in the city, or the country, except that it would be bloody. “Let the iron hand of the rising proletariat fall on the vipers of expiring capitalism,” Yakov Sverdlov, head of the Soviet Central Committee, had just demanded. No one doubted the iron hand part.
Jacov Peters was not lying in bed. Despite the hour, he sat at his desk in his office at the Lubianka. Earlier he had taken part in the questioning of Fanny Kaplan. Now, he reached for the telephone and requested that the operator make a connection. At the other end, a phone began to ring. Pavel Malkov picked up. Although only 31 years old, a year younger than Peters, he too was a longtime Bolshevik, promoted to be commandant of the Kremlin, and despite the hour he too was still at his desk.
Peters spoke: “Drive over at once, I’ve urgent work for you.” The younger man cradled the receiver, fixed “his invariable Colt” to his waist, summoned his chauffeur, and hurried to his automobile. The chauffeur spun the crank, the engine caught, the two men jumped into the rumbling car. Through darkened empty streets they sped. “I ran up to Peters’ study,” Malkov remembered. By now it was after one o’clock in the morning. The Cheka man rose from his desk and handed to Malkov “Search and Arrest Warrant 6370,” dated September 1, “good for a day.” “ ‘You will go and arrest Bruce Lockhart,’ ” Peters commanded.
Malkov left the Cheka headquarters and returned to the automobile. Across the dimly lit city he flew again, this time to Khlebnyi pereulok. He and the driver exited the car, found the building superintendent who let them into the building, and accompanied them up the stairs, which they illumined with flashlights. Malkov knocked at door number 24. This woke Moura, but not her lover. She went to the door, opened it slightly, still on the chain, saw the men outside and would not let them in. Hicks now appeared, however, in his dressing gown and slipped the chain. They all went to wake the sleeping envoy. “Mr. Lockhart,” Malkov announced, “by order of the Cheka you are under arrest.”
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