The emergency meeting of the Council of People's Commissars felt less like a government and more like a firing squad, and everyone was holding a rifle.
The air in the grand Smolny meeting room was thick with cigar smoke and a barely suppressed, collective fury. Lenin sat at the head of the long table, his face a mask of cold, controlled rage. Trotsky, next to him, was pale, his hands trembling with a mixture of fear and humiliation. Across the table, Dzerzhinsky was a statue of icy, righteous anger.
The loudest thing in the room was the empty chair. Koba's chair. A physical symbol of his open, contemptuous defiance.
Trotsky broke the tense silence. He slammed his fist on the table, the sound cracking like a gunshot in the cavernous room.
"This is open rebellion!" he roared, his voice shaking. "An armed insurrection against the authority of the Soviet state! He used the Kronstadt sailors—my sailors, by law of this Council—to launch a military attack on the Cheka. He must be arrested. Tried as a traitor. Executed!"
Dzerzhinsky spoke next, his voice not loud, but carrying a chilling weight that silenced all argument. "My men were killed," he said, his words like chips of ice. "Murdered. By order of a sitting member of this Council. There can be only one response for such a crime."
The room erupted into a cacophony of shouting. The other commissars were shocked, afraid, and dangerously divided. Some echoed Trotsky's call for blood, others looked terrified at the prospect of an open conflict. The new government, not even a few weeks old, was tearing itself apart.
A hand went up. It was Mikhail Lashevich, a veteran Bolshevik and a Commissar with deep ties to the Petrograd garrison. He was a practical man, a soldier, not an intellectual.
"Arrest Koba?" Lashevich said, his voice heavy with a brutal dose of reality. "How? Who, exactly, would you send to do it?"
Trotsky glared at him. "The Petrograd garrison, of course! They are sworn to obey the Council!"
Lashevich gave a short, harsh laugh that held no humor. "The Petrograd garrison? Leon, half the men in those barracks fought alongside the 'Golden Demon' just last month. They tell stories about him in the mess halls. They sing songs about the man who broke the Cossacks with a bag of gold. You send them to arrest him, and you risk the entire garrison mutinying."
He leaned forward, his gaze sweeping across the stunned faces around the table. "And that's before we even consider Kronstadt. If we move against their commander, the man they see as their personal hero, the entire Baltic Fleet will rise up. They will sail their battleships up the Neva and shell this building into rubble before breakfast. Is that a risk you are willing to take?"
The brutal, unthinkable reality sank into the room like a shroud. They couldn't arrest him.
He was untouchable.
His populist power, the very cult of personality they had celebrated when it was aimed at the Provisional Government, had now made him immune to their own state's authority. In the span of a single bloody night, he had ceased to be their subordinate. He had become a second, rival government.
Lenin listened to the arguments, to the rage, to the fear. He watched as the foundations of his new state trembled, about to collapse into a civil war fought not against the Whites, but amongst themselves. He had made a logical move, and it had backfired into the worst-case scenario imaginable.
He felt a profound, chilling sense of failure. He had lost control.
But a true leader does not admit defeat. He changes the game.
He realized with icy clarity that he could not crush Koba with force. The loyalty Koba commanded was personal, primal, something that Party discipline could not touch. So if he could not be broken, he must be absorbed. Or removed.
Lenin raised a hand. A simple gesture, but it carried such absolute authority that the chaotic room fell silent instantly.
"Arresting him would be a catastrophe," he declared, his voice cutting through the tense silence. "Comrade Lashevich is correct. We cannot afford a war with Kronstadt. Not now. Not when the White armies are gathering in the south."
Trotsky stared at him, aghast. "So we do nothing? We allow this treason to go unpunished?"
"I did not say that," Lenin replied, his eyes scanning the faces of his commissars. He was about to perform the most audacious political maneuver of his life.
"We will not punish him," Lenin announced. "We will promote him."
The collective shock in the room was a palpable thing. Trotsky looked as if Lenin had just slapped him across the face.
"What?" he stammered.
"Comrade Koba has proven he is a man of decisive, if unsanctioned, military action," Lenin continued, his voice smooth and logical, laying the foundation of his trap. "His talents are wasted here, in a ministry of paperwork. Therefore, I propose the creation of a new, vital position. A People's Commissar of Military Affairs for the Southern Front. He will be given command of the war against the White armies gathering on the Don. He will be sent to the city of Tsaritsyn."
The room was stunned into silence.
It was a promotion that was secretly an exile. He was offering to send his greatest rival a thousand miles away, into the heart of the bloodiest, most chaotic fighting of the nascent Russian Civil War. It was a chance for Koba to have all the glory and command he so clearly desired.
It was also an excellent chance for him to be killed by a White sniper's bullet. A perfect, politically deniable solution.
"He will be a hero of the state, or a martyr to the cause," Lenin said, his eyes as cold and hard as chips of flint. "Either way, he will no longer be in Petrograd."
He looked around the table, his gaze challenging anyone to defy his logic.
"I will put it to a vote."
He had just offered Koba a poisoned chalice, glittering with power and glory. Now, the entire revolution held its breath to see if he would be fool enough to drink it.