Trotsky's challenge hung in the smoky air, a silken glove slapped across Jake's face. The attack was as brilliant as it was insulting. In a room full of theorists and orators, Trotsky had painted Jake as a mere functionary, a glorified bookkeeper with a gun. He had conceded Jake's competence only to frame it as a limitation. You are a policeman, not a prophet. In the intellectual currency of this room, it was a devastating critique.
Jake felt the eyes of everyone, especially Lenin, settle on him. His performance so far had been a masterful defense, a display of practical, grounded intelligence. But Trotsky had changed the game. He was no longer being asked about the present; he was being asked to divine the future. A simple, pragmatic answer would only prove Trotsky's point. He had to meet the challenge on its own terms. He had to offer them a vision.
He took a slow, deliberate breath, his mind racing, sifting through the vast, terrible archives of his historical knowledge. He needed a prophecy, and he had a century of them to choose from.
The conversation had shifted to the main topic of the upcoming Fifth Party Congress: the final, definitive strategy for defeating the Mensheviks and establishing the Bolsheviks as the sole vanguard of the Russian proletariat.
Zinoviev, ever the pragmatist, argued for a concentration of forces. "Our strength is in the industrial heartlands," he declared, his voice booming. "St. Petersburg. Moscow. The Urals. We must pour all of our resources, our best agitators, our entire treasury, into winning the factory committees and the soviets in these key cities. The provinces are a distraction. The capital is the key. Seize the heart, and the body will die."
Trotsky, from his position as an independent but influential voice, scoffed, a look of intellectual disdain on his face. "A purely Russian focus is naive. It is peasant thinking," he countered, his words flowing in a smooth, confident torrent. "The Russian revolution cannot and will not survive in isolation. It will be crushed by the reactionary powers of Europe. Our true task is not to seize the Winter Palace, but to ignite the German proletariat. To foment revolution in the industrial heartland of Europe. A Russian spark to start a global fire. That must be our grand strategy."
It was the classic debate, raging in real-time in front of him: Revolution in One Country versus Permanent Revolution. Jake was watching a history textbook come to life.
Lenin, acting as moderator, eventually turned his penetrating gaze to Jake. "The man from the Caucasus has been quiet. Comrade Stalin, you have heard the arguments. Where do you believe the party must strike?"
This was his moment. He could side with Zinoviev's practical approach, which would be safe. He could endorse Trotsky's internationalism, which would be bold. Instead, he chose a third path. A path they could not possibly have seen.
"Comrades," Jake began, his voice quiet but carrying a strange, heavy authority that made the others fall silent. "You are both looking at the wrong map."
He looked from Zinoviev to Trotsky. "You are looking at the map of 1907. At the factories and the borders as they exist today. I believe we must look at the map of 1914."
The room was silent. The date was a meaningless abstraction to them, a random number pulled from the air. He saw confused, dismissive looks on several faces.
"The industrial heartlands are vital," he conceded, nodding to Zinoviev. "An international revolution is our ultimate, necessary goal," he added, acknowledging Trotsky. "But both of these noble objectives will be decided by a coming conflict that has nothing to do with class, and everything to do with empires and steel."
He leaned forward, his voice dropping, becoming intense, prophetic. "We speak of the contradictions of capitalism. But the greatest contradiction is about to explode. The British Empire fears the German fleet. The German Kaiser fears encirclement by the French and the Russians. The Austro-Hungarians fear the Serbs, and the entire rotten structure is built on a powder keg in the Balkans."
He was laying out the causes of World War I, not as a historian, but as a strategist forecasting the future.
"There will be a war between the great powers," he declared, his voice ringing with a chilling, absolute certainty that captivated the room. "Not a small war, like the one we just fought with Japan. But a war of such unprecedented scale and barbarity that it will consume a generation and shatter the old world forever. It is an historical inevitability. It will send millions of Russian peasants, armed with rifles, into the trenches to die for the Tsar's imperial ambitions. And it is there, comrades, in the mud and blood and senseless slaughter, that their centuries of loyalty to the Little Father in St. Petersburg will finally die."
He paused, letting the horrifying vision sink in. "Our true recruiting ground is not the factory of today. It is the trench of tomorrow."
The men around the table were utterly still, their expressions a mixture of shock, fascination, and disbelief. He had taken their political debate and placed it on a vast, apocalyptic canvas.
"Therefore," he concluded, laying out his strategic masterstroke, "our primary, secret task for the next several years is not just to organize the workers. It is to infiltrate the army. We must do it quietly, systematically. We must place our best, most disciplined agitators not in the factories, but in the barracks. We must create Bolshevik cells in every major regiment of the Imperial Russian Army. We must print special pamphlets for the soldiers, speaking not of Marx, but of their stolen land, their poor wages, their brutal officers."
"We must be ready," he finished, his voice a low, powerful whisper. "So that when the great imperialist war begins, when the state is at its weakest and the people are armed and desperate, we will be the ones to turn their guns. We will turn them away from the German worker in the opposite trench, and we will point them directly at the Romanov dynasty in the Winter Palace. That must be the party's secret, primary objective."
The room was stunned into absolute silence. He had not just offered a plan; he had offered a prophecy. He had presented a vision that was both terrifying and intoxicatingly logical. It reframed their entire struggle, shifting the timeline and the battlefield.
Trotsky was staring at him, his mouth slightly agape, his usual intellectual arrogance completely gone, replaced by a look of grudging, fascinated respect. He had challenged the policeman and found a prophet.
But it was Lenin who was the most captivated. He was leaning forward, his body rigid, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the table. He was staring at Jake with an intense, analytical gleam in his narrowed eyes. He was not just seeing a clever strategist making a bold forecast. He was seeing a man whose mind seemed to operate on a completely different temporal plane, a man who spoke of the future with the certainty of someone who had already read the book.
"Explain your reasoning for this 'inevitable war,' Comrade Stalin," Lenin said, his voice low and intense, cutting through the silence. "Explain it in detail. From the beginning."
Jake had captured the full, undivided attention of the master. He had won Trotsky's challenge. Now, he had to justify his impossible prophecy without revealing its impossible source.
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