Charles Rammelkamp

I GAVE HER THE GUN

But I’d be a fool
to tell you my name.
It doesn’t matter.

But I knew all about
Fanny Kaplan’s confession
to the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police.

"Today I shot Lenin,"
she said. August 30, 1918.
"I did it on my own.

"I will not say from whom
I obtained my revolver.
I will give no details.

"I considered Vladimir Lenin
a traitor to the Revolution
The Bolsheviks banned our party.

“I’d already spent eleven years
in hard labor, after my assassination attempt
on the Tsarist official in Kyiv."

Fanny put two bullets in Lenin,
weakened for the rest of his life.
She was executed four days later.


Charles reads "I Gave Her the Gun":



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Charles confesses: "Fanny Kaplan was peeved at fellow Russian Jew Vladimir Lenin for banning her party, the Socialist Revolution Party. The SRs had won a plurality in Russia’s first-ever democratic election, following the October Revolution of 1917, but the Bolsheviks disbanded the Constituent Assembly in January, 1918, and the SRs were crushed in the course of the Russian Civil War. Fanny couldn’t let that pass, after all she’d been through! In my forthcoming collection from Apprentice House about Grigory Rasputin, Catastroika, Kaplan's assassination attempt on Lenin is covered from a couple different angles. 'I Gave Her the Gun' is another, from the unnamed co-conspirator’s point of view."

CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press. An e-chapbook has also recently been published online Time Is on My Side (yes it is). Another chapbook, Mortal Coil, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing. Two full-length collections are forthcoming in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books.