Fanni Kaplan - Biography

Biography

There is some confusion as to Kaplan's birth name. Vera Figner, in her memoirs, At Women's Katorga, gives the name Feiga Khaimovna Roytblat-Kaplan (Фейга Хаимовна Ройтблат-Каплан). Other sources give her original family name as Ройтман (transliterated from Russian as Roytman, which corresponds to the common German/Yiddish name Reutemann). She is also sometimes called "Dora."

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). In 1906, when she was 16 years old, Kaplan was arrested in Kiev over her involvement in a terrorist bomb plot, and committed for life to the katorga system (a form of forced labour). She served in the Maltsev and Akatuy prisons of Nerchinsk katorga, Siberia, where she lost her sight (partially restored later). She was kept in the Maltzevskaya prison, where she was severely caned with birches (розги) on her bare body as disciplinary corporal punishment. Fully undressed corporal punishment was not usual for political prisoners at that time. She was released on March 3, 1917, after the February Revolution overthrew the imperial government. As a result of her imprisonment, Kaplan suffered from continuous headaches and periods of blindness.

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.