Did I ever tell you how I stumbled upon a famous artifact? The kind of thing that shouldn’t exist anymore. I wasn’t looking for it. But, that’s how these things always go. This one was tucked away. A tall wooden stand, ascetic and severe, cradled a walnut case with a lacquered sheen. Cold light fell on it from above — directional, almost surgical. Brass-rimmed. UV-filtered. Velvet-lined. Inside: a Mauser C96. German-made, over-engineered, baroque in its absurdity. And then I saw the plaque.

“Pistol used by Fanny Kaplan in the attempted assassination of V.I. Lenin, August 30, 1918.”

That name.
Fanny Kaplan.

Do you remember her?
An anarchist. Half-blind. Nearly deaf. She spent over a decade in the Tsar’s most pitiless prisons — Kara, Akatuy, the empire’s forgotten oubliettes. Tortured into silence, then erased from memory. Until she reappeared in 1918 with a gun in her hand.

History calls her an assassin.
But long before she pulled the trigger, the regime had already transformed her into ammunition.

And beneath the plaque — the explanation:

“The pistol used by Fanny Kaplan in her assassination attempt on Lenin was never officially logged in the CEKA’s inventory. Those who examined the weapon in the immediate aftermath of the attack were surprised to find it wasn’t the standard-issue Nagant M1895, but a German-made Mauser C96 — a large, fixed-magazine handgun, difficult to conceal yet lethally precise, and unusually sophisticated for someone with Kaplan’s profile.

This anomalous choice was promptly classified as an ‘operational irregularity.’ The weapon was quietly taken into custody by Arkadi Kogan, a CEKA officer from Dzerzhinsky’s inner circle, who labeled it ‘a symbolic object with destabilizing potential.’

In 1922, the pistol was transferred to the custody of Section IX — a division within the NKVD responsible for ‘Objects of Political and Esoteric Significance’ — led by Iakov Blumenstein, a man infamous for his obsession with revolutionary relics and his private archive of occult manuscripts.

Following Blumenstein’s death during Stalin’s 1937 purges, the weapon was moved to the “black archive” of Department K-14 — a shadowy unit tasked with handling what could neither be explained nor destroyed.

The last known reference to the pistol appears in a 1956 internal report, signed by General Petrușin, who noted tersely that the weapon had been ‘re-evaluated in light of the new ideological climate’ and subsequently transferred to the private collection of Dr. Lev Vasilievich Berzov — a military psychiatrist and unofficial advisor to the Ministry of Defense, rumored to possess an entire wing filled with artifacts of… symbolic value.”

I stood there, staring at the weapon behind glass, knowing — as one sometimes does without proof — that some things don’t just survive history. This wasn’t just a pistol. It was a relic that refused to settle quietly into any sanctioned version of the past. And as I looked at it, I couldn’t help but wonder:

Did Kaplan really miss?

Because, apparently, some bullets thread through the fabric of history itself, and travel farther than anyone intended.