Leon Trotsky believed the revolution was a symphony, and he, its sole worthy conductor. Koba was a man banging a drum in the corner—loud, distracting, and ultimately irrelevant to the music of history he was composing.
He stood in the St. George Hall of the Winter Palace, the former heart of Tsarist autocracy. Beneath a massive, gilded chandelier, his figure cast a long shadow over the assembled commanders of the Petrograd garrison. These were his men now. He was in his element, his voice echoing in the cavernous space, painting visions of world revolution with eloquent, fiery strokes.
He felt a profound sense of rightness, of destiny fulfilled. He was the architect of the Red Army, the mind and the voice of the revolution's military might. This was his stage.
As he spoke, he felt the power of his words settle over the uniformed men. They were disciplined soldiers, not a rabble like Koba's sailors. They understood hierarchy. They understood genius. They would follow him into the fire.
After the speech, as adoring officers crowded around him, an adjutant approached, his expression troubled. He handed Trotsky a thin report.
"A message from the political commissar at the Kronstadt naval base, Comrade Trotsky."
Trotsky took the report, his good mood instantly souring. Kronstadt. Koba's personal fiefdom. He read the summary. Morale was low. There was grumbling about the new command structure. Several sailors had been disciplined for openly calling Koba their true commander.
The adjutant leaned closer, whispering nervously. "They say the 'Golden Demon' is one of them. That he understands their spirit. They are… resistant to the new committee's authority, sir."
Trotsky waved a dismissive hand, not even bothering to hide his contempt. "Propaganda. Drunken sentiment. Give them an extra ration of vodka and deliver a speech about their sacred duty to the international proletariat. They are children who require a firm hand, not a cheap folk hero."
His arrogance was a fortress. He genuinely could not comprehend how a crude, anti-intellectual thug like Koba could inspire such passionate loyalty. He saw it as a character flaw in the masses, a failure of their political education, not as a genuine strength in his rival. He was a man who understood theory, not people, and he believed theory would always win.
He left the splendor of the Winter Palace for the cold, terrifying efficiency of the Cheka's new headquarters. The building radiated a palpable sense of dread. It was a place of quiet, methodical terror, and Trotsky approved of its grim purpose.
He was shown to an office that was the polar opposite of his own grandiloquent style. It was sparse, clean, and utterly soulless. Behind the desk sat Vyacheslav Menzhinsky.
The man was a bureaucrat of the abyss. Thin, with a neat mustache and spectacles, he looked more like a provincial schoolteacher than a secret policeman. He listened to Trotsky impassively, his long, slender hands neatly folded on the desk before him. He did not radiate fanaticism like Dzerzhinsky, but a cold, bottomless patience.
"Your target is a German nurse," Trotsky began, adopting the tone of a master instructing a pupil. "'Sister Anna.' She is a sentimental weakness of our dear Commissar Koba. We have reason to believe she is a German agent. Your job is to prove it."
Menzhinsky's gaze was flat, betraying nothing. "What level of evidence is required, Comrade Commissar?"
"Create it if you must," Trotsky said, waving his hand again as if swatting a fly. "Plant a coded letter. Bribe a witness to testify they heard her speaking with a German accent that was too perfect. The outcome is what matters. She must be exposed as a spy. Publicly. Humiliatingly. Understood?"
"Understood, Comrade Commissar," Menzhinsky replied, his voice a dry rustle of paper.
Just as Trotsky was turning to leave, pleased with the neatness of his own plan, Menzhinsky spoke again. His voice was unchanged, but the information was new.
"One of my informants in the city's black market filed a report this morning. Something unusual. The nurse has been seen in the company of a known smuggler. A shadowy figure they call 'the Finn'."
The information landed like a spark on dry tinder. Trotsky's lips curled into a triumphant smirk. It was perfect. The nail in her coffin. A charitable nurse meeting with criminals in the dead of night? She was practically screaming her guilt.
He didn't see a wider pattern. He didn't ask why or what they might be smuggling. He saw only what he wanted to see: a simple, clean piece of evidence that confirmed his own brilliant deduction.
"Excellent, Menzhinsky," Trotsky said. "Use that. It is all the justification you need to begin. Follow the smuggler. See who else he meets. I want the entire network. I want this woman's life turned inside out."
"It will be done," the quiet man said.
Trotsky left the Lubyanka filled with a sense of deep, intellectual satisfaction. The plan was elegant. Flawless. They would expose the spy, which would politically cripple Koba. He would be seen not as a threat, but as a fool who was easily duped by a foreign agent. They would solve the Koba problem without firing a single shot, without making him a martyr. Lenin's hammer was a crude tool for a crude man. His own approach was surgical.
As his car drove through the dark, frozen streets of Petrograd, he glanced at a stack of documents his adjutant had given him. On top was a copy of Koba's absurd decree about preserving the culture of Ural minorities.
He scoffed and tossed the entire stack onto the empty seat beside him, unread.
He was a genius conducting a symphony, and he refused to be distracted by the sound of a distant, banging drum. He could not conceive that the real threat wasn't the German nurse he was hunting with such precision, but the bureaucratic weapon he had just dismissed as meaningless noise.
He was utterly blind to the real war, and Koba's first move had already been made.