Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

Lenin made his exit, but just before entering his waiting vehicle, he fell to the ground, shot in the chest and the left arm (the bullet passed into his shoulder). His driver, Stepan Gil, and some members of the factory committee placed him in the backseat of his car. Lenin was white as a sheet, blood still pouring out despite tourniquets; he also suffered internal bleeding.366 They drove to the Kremlin. When the call came in to the Kremlin, Commandant Malkov gathered pillows from the tsars’ collection at the Grand Kremlin Palace and took them over to Lenin’s apartment in the Imperial Senate, where the wounded leader had been brought. No one knew how to stop the bleeding, and Lenin passed out from blood loss and pain.367 The head of the Kremlin garage rushed out to find oxygen tanks: one tank was rented from the A. Bloch and H. Freiman pharmacy on nearby Tverskaya Street for 80 rubles, another at a different pharmacy farther down for 55 rubles. (The automobile department head, in his report, wrote that “since the money was paid out of my own pocket, I would ask that it be returned to me.”)368 The first person a prostrate Lenin asked for was Inessa Armand, his former mistress, who arrived with her daughter.369 Bonch-Bruevich ordered the Kremlin guard to high alert.370 Sverdlov summoned a famous doctor; meanwhile, Bonch-Bruevich’s wife, Vera, a doctor, checked Lenin’s pulse and injected him with morphine.