From the very outset, terror was a main feature of Bolshevism. Echoing Marx, Lenin criticized the otherwise sanctified Paris Communards for having failed to eradicate the accursed bourgeois enemies. At that moment, Fanya (Dora) Kaplan, the 28-year-old quasi-blind Socialist Revolutionary former political prisoner and survivor of the most ruthless jails in the czarist repressive system (katorgas), shot the dictator on August 30th, 1918.

The Bolsheviks were thus given the propaganda ammunition to unleash mass terror. The Cheka was born as the “sword and shield of the Revolution,” while Kaplan was expeditiously executed. In his novel Europe Central, William Vollmann made her a very strange, enigmatic character. The late Harvard historian Richard Pipes expressed some doubt regarding the Cheka’s official story about the attempt on Lenin’s life. So, the FSB narrative about a young woman from Ukraine who entered the Russian Federation in July to organize a terrorist attack on Darya Dugina, or maybe on her father, the eccentric “philosopher” and fascistic ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, is not without precedent.

I’m not saying Kaplan was killed on false charges. All I’m trying to say is that the assassination attempt was assigned to her without any investigation. Also revealing to me is the fact that the Leningrad boys (the siloviki) grew up in a city once run by one of Stalin’s closest associates, Old Bolshevik Sergei Kirov, who was himself assassinated on December 1st, 1934. Putin’s circle of Leningraders includes his closest associate, Nikolai Patrushev, and the former façade president, Dmitry Medvedev.

On August 21st, 1968, the USSR crushed the audacious reformist experiment known as the Prague Spring. That year, a 16-year-old high school student from Leningrad named Vladimir Putin decided to pursue a KGB career. Now, Putin is Russia’s autocrat, and his opponents are besmirched, harassed, jailed, and murdered. Democratic activist Alexei Navalny fell into a coma, most likely as a result of poisoning, in a strictly supervised hospital in Omsk. His “crime”? Fighting for human rights, civic dignity, and the rule of law. I have great admiration for Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and the beleaguered democrats in Putin’s police state.