17. Enduring multiple assassination attempts throughout his life, Vladimir Lenin was almost killed in 1918, with the bullets remaining inside the Soviet leader until his death six years later
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, born 1870 and more commonly known as Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary politician who served as the head of government during the creation of Soviet Russia and led its transformation into the Soviet Union. Under his reign as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union, the USSR endured a violent Civil War out of which a one-party state governed by the Russian Communist Party was formed. Suffering his first assassination attempt in Petrograd in January 1918, Lenin was spared by Swiss Communist Fritz Platten, who threw himself on top of Lenin and shielded him from the assassin’s bullets.
Enduring a second attempt on August 30, 1918, after a speech at the Hammer and Sickle, an arms factory in south Moscow, as Lenin departed the building a young woman called to him. Turning to face Fanny Kaplan, she fired three shots with a Browning pistol at the communist leader. Although one passed through his coat missing him, two found their mark: one in the neck, puncturing his lung, and another lodging in his shoulder. Unable to remove the bullets, Lenin survived the attempt but never fully recovered, with it widely believed the shooting was a major contributing factor behind the terminal strokes which killed him in 1924.