30 August

‘One hears a great many people who are far from having any sympathy with the Bolsheviks, saying that it would be an absolute disaster if Lenin had succumbed to his wounds, as it was first thought he would. And they are quite right, for in the midst of all this chaos and confusion he is the backbone of the new body politic, the main support on which everything rests’. Leonid Krasin

After speaking to factory workers in Moscow on this day in 1918, Vladimir Lenin was shot twice by Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party. Seriously wounded, it sparked a series of reprisals known as the ‘Red Terror’ with thousands tortured, flogged, buried alive, shot, drowned or hacked to death in retaliation.