Born into a Jewish family, Kaplan served a sentence of hard labor during the tsarist years for her revolutionary activities.

Vera Figner (in her memoirs, At Women's Katorga), stated that Kaplan's original name was Feiga Khaimovna Roytblat-Kaplan (Фейга Хаимовна Ройтблат-Каплан).

However, other sources have stated that her original family name was Roytman (Ройтман), corresponding to the common German and Yiddish surname Reutemann (רויטמאן‎).

In 1906, when she was 16 years old, Kaplan was arrested in Kiev over her involvement in a terrorist bomb plot to blow up the city's governor, Vladimir Sukhomlinov.

She served in the Maltsev and Akatuy prisons of Nerchinsk katorga, Siberia, where she lost her sight, which was partially restored later.

[10]Kaplan referenced the Bolsheviks' growing authoritarianism, citing their forcible shutdown of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the elections to which they had lost.

[16][3]: 442 Grigory Semyonov, a military commander in the SR who later turned state's evidence against the group, testified in 1922 that Kaplan had been a member of his organization and that he regarded her as the "best person to carry out the attack on Lenin".

[6][17] Some historians such as Dmitri Volkogonov, Arkady Vaksberg and Donald Rayfield have questioned the actual role of Kaplan in the assassination attempt.

[18] Vaksberg stated that Lidia Konopleva, another SR, was the culprit and believed that it would be all too comforting that Lenin narrowly avoided being assassinated by a woman whose personality is so far from the stereotype of a national hero.

[citation needed] Furthermore, the bullet removed from Lenin's neck after his death was found to have been fired from a weapon other than the one that Kaplan had.

[6][21] Semion Lyandres went so far as to argue that Kaplan was not even an SR.[3]: 433 Despite her refusal to name accomplices, the official announcement of the assassination attempt had Sverdlov blame the Right SRs although it denied any involvement.

[3]: 432  Moisei Uritsky, the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs in the Northern Region and the head of the Cheka in Petrograd, had been assassinated nearly two weeks prior to the attack on Lenin.

[22] The Cheka did not find any evidence linking both events,[citation needed] but their occurrence in quick succession appeared significant in the context of the intensifying civil war.

[10] An official decree announcing the Red Terror was issued only hours after the Kaplan shooting and called for an "all-out struggle against enemies of the revolution".

[citation needed] In the 1934 Hollywood film British Agent directed by Michael Curtiz, Corinne Williams and Zozia Tanina portray Kaplan.

[citation needed] In the West German TV series Bürgerkrieg in Rußland [de] (1967), Peggy Parnas portrays Franja Kaplan.

[citation needed] Pamela Adlon's character in History of the World, Part II, Fanny Mudman, is loosely based on Kaplan, most notably when she attempts to kill Lenin.