John Hopkins

It is the evening of the 30th of August, 1918, outside the Mikkelsen Engineering Factory in Moscow.

As another shift ends, weary workers spill from the building, heavy boots scraping across the yard floor.

Instead of filing out through the factory gates tonight, however, the workers linger in the yard.

They have been told that their leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, will address them here, and now they must wait patiently for his arrival.

Fanny Kapler, a slight, frail-looking woman in her late twenties, stands slightly aside from the rest.

Her coat is plain, her face gaunt, and her posture rigid.

Noticeably, she doesn't push forward with the others as the motorcade arrives.

As the door of his car swings open, Lenin steps down onto the gravel, compact and purposeful, his cap pulled low, his jacket buttoned tight.

To most of the workers, he is the architect of a new world.

To Fanny, he is the man who has strangled it.

She was just 16 when she was first involved in a violent plot against a Tsarist official in Kiev, a representative of the old regime she believed was killing Russia.

The years of hard labor that followed her trial damaged her body, but sharpened her belief that Russia must be remade.

When the Tsarists fell, she thought her sacrifice had meant something.

But these Bolsheviks have outlawed her party, silenced dissent, and crushed rival revolutionaries.

They have brought not freedom, but merely tyranny with a different face.

Now the crowd fall silent as Lenin hastily mounts a small platform to speak.

Production must increase, he says.

Discipline must hold.

The revolution depends on factories like this one.

The workers lean in to catch his words.