The Lenin Plot by Barnes Carr

Author:Barnes Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

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With Uritsky’s murder, the Cheka clicked into emergency mode. Grigory Zinoviev, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, had been the target of an assassination attempt just two nights before, and in June the commissar for the press, agitation, and propaganda, Moisei Markovich Goldstein, aka Volodarsky, was shot down. Now this. Zinoviev phoned Lenin at the Kremlin. Lenin immediately dispatched Dzerzhinsky to Petrograd to take over the case.

At first the Cheka blamed Uritsky’s murder on French and British agents. British Consul Arthur Woodhouse and Commander Andrew Le Page, assistant to naval saboteur Francis Cromie, were arrested.4 The American Red Cross found forty-six more British and twenty French locked up in the Peter and Paul Fortress as a result of the shooting of Uritsky. They were crowded into tiny damp cells with no exercise, no fresh air, no bedding, and almost no food. At the same time, forty-four Czechs were found in other cells, cold and nearly starving.5 Diplomatic protests got the British and French released. But hundreds of Russians were also arrested, including Lenya’s friends and family.

Kannengiser stonewalled Dzerzhinsky. He rambled on about God and hymns and eternal joy. They tortured him until he confessed. He insisted he had acted alone. He was locked up in Kronstadt Prison and executed several weeks later without trial. His family then fled to Poland.

The Allies might have been linked to the Uritsky assassination through Boris Savinkov. The Cheka had previously pinned Volodarsky’s murder on Savinkov; they saw him as the backstage director of the assassination. Now they suspected he was involved in Uritsky’s murder. A reward was offered for his capture, dead or alive. Later on, Grigory Ivanovich Semyonov (aka Vasiliev), an SR terrorist, was also implicated as one of the plotters.6

If Savinkov was tied to the Uritsky assassination, it probably would have been through Maximilian Filonenko, a cousin of Lenya’s. During the war, Filonenko had been adjutant to an imperial army commander and was known for cruelty to his soldiers. But after the revolution he had a change of heart and became a defender of soldiers’ interests. Savinkov helped him get assigned as a commissar at General Kornilov’s headquarters. Following the Bolshevik coup, Savinkov set up his terror headquarters in Moscow. Filonenko ran things for him in Petrograd, where Uritsky was shot.

Vladimir Ivanovich Ignatiev, a member of the executive committee of the socialist junkers party that Kannengiser had belonged to, said Lenya and Filonenko ran their own secret assassination squad. They planned an armed uprising in Petrograd, Ignatiev said, probably assisted by Savinkov. The murder of Uritsky was supposedly their third attempt on his life.7

Did Savinkov set up the Uritsky assassination through Lenya and Filonenko? He could have been a good candidate for the job. Assassination was Savinkov’s stock in trade. He had been practicing it for years, first against tsarists, then Bolsheviks, and he had been on the Allied payroll all summer. Also, Ignatiev said that Filonenko was taking money from the French, as was Savinkov.

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