The Assassination of Lenin by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne [Cawthorne, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2018-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

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At nine o’clock in the morning, Peters came to tell Lockhart and Hicks they could go home. Apparently he had spoken to Chicherin who had protested at their arrest. On their way home, they bought a newspaper. Lenin, they read, was still unconscious. Articles railed against the Allies, but there was no mention of their arrest, nor any attempt to tie them to the assassination attempt.

Trotsky, it appears, was prepared for the worst. “In Lenin we have a person who was created for our era of blood and iron,” he told the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on 2 September. “Any fool can shoot through Lenin’s skull, but to recreate that skull is a difficult task even for nature itself.”

Arriving home, Lockhart and Hicks found the flat had been turned upside down. The cook and the two manservants were missing and the porter told them that Moura had been taken away by the Cheka. After he had shaved and bathed, Lockhart went to see Major Wardwell, head of the American Red Cross, in the hope that he might help secure the release of Moura and the servants. Wardwell promised to do his best. Chicherin had promised him an interview the next day.

Clearly the man Pravda called ‘the unique leader in the world’ and ‘the genius of world revolution, the heart and the brain of the great worldwide movement of the proletariat’ who had an ‘almost prophetic ability to predict’ must surely have the superhuman capacity to recover from any adversity. The newspaper reported: ‘Lenin, shot through twice, with pierced lungs, spilling blood, refuses help and goes on his own. The next morning, still threatened by death, he reads papers, listens, learns, observes to see that the engine of the locomotive that carries us towards global revolution has not stopped working.’

On 2 September, Lockhart himself went to the Foreign Commissariat and demanded to see Karachan. Whatever the grievances the Bolsheviks had against him, he said, it was inhuman that they should try and punish him through Moura. He appealed to Karachen’s sense of decency. Karachen, too, promised to see what he could do. That day was Lockhart’s thirty-first birthday. He and Hicks spent it alone together with a meal of sardines, black bread and coffee.

Lockhart’s diary for Tuesday, 3 September read: ‘Papers today full of the most fantastic accounts of an Allied conspiracy which I am said to head.’

The newspaper was calling it ‘the Lockhart Plot’.

“We are accused of having conspired to murder Lenin and Trotsky, to set up a military dictatorship in Moscow, and by blowing up all the railway bridges to reduce the populations of Moscow and St Petersburg to starvation,” Lockhart said. “The whole plot had been revealed by the loyalty of the Lettish garrison, who the Allies had sought to suborn by lavish gifts of money. The whole story, which read like a fairy tale, was rounded off with a fantastic account of my arrest. I had been surprised, it was stated, at a conspirators’ meeting.”

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