The vote was done. The trap was set. But the silence in the Council room was not the silence of victory; it was the silence of men waiting for a bomb to explode.
The emergency meeting was in recess, but Lenin and Trotsky remained behind. Trotsky paced the length of the long table, a caged lion, his face a mask of incandescent fury. He felt humiliated, outmaneuvered not by his rival, but by his own leader.
He stopped his pacing and glared at Lenin, who sat calmly sipping his tea as if nothing had happened. The polished wood of the table stretched between them like a barren, uncrossable no-man's-land.
"You have shown weakness!" Trotsky's voice was tight with suppressed rage. "You have rewarded open treason with a field command! You have legitimized his rebellion! The entire Party will see this for what it is—a capitulation!"
Lenin took a slow, deliberate sip of his tea before answering, his calmness a calculated counterpoint to Trotsky's fire. "The Party will see that I avoided a civil war that would have destroyed us before we were a month old. I have sent a problem a thousand miles away and placed him directly in the path of ten thousand White Army rifles."
He set his cup down with a soft click. "This is not weakness, Leon. It is pest control."
The fracture between them deepened into a chasm. Trotsky saw a humiliating political defeat, a stain on the Party's authority. Lenin saw a pragmatic, if messy, solution. They were no longer partners in revolution. They were competing strategists, and Lenin had just made it brutally clear that he considered Trotsky's opinion to be irrelevant.
Before Trotsky could offer another protest, the grand doors to the Council room swung open.
Every head in the room—the few commissars who had lingered, the clerks, the guards—turned as one.
Koba stood in the doorway.
He had not been summoned. He had not been invited. He was simply there. He was flanked by two grim-faced Kronstadt sailors, their black greatcoats hanging on their broad frames like the robes of executioners. Their hands rested casually on the wooden butts of their holstered pistols. They were not his guards. They were his honor guard, a clear and silent statement of his personal power.
Lenin felt a jolt. This was an incredible, audacious power move. Koba was not coming as a supplicant to beg for his life. He was not coming as a defendant to face judgment. He was coming as an equal. A king visiting another king's court.
The empty chair that had loomed over their meeting was no longer a symbol of his defiance. It was a throne he had come to claim.
Jake walked into the room with a steady, unhurried pace, the two sailors following a few steps behind. He completely ignored Trotsky, his eyes fixed on one man and one man only. He walked to his chair, pulled it out, and sat down.
He looked directly at Lenin, his face a perfect mask of solemn, revolutionary duty.
"Comrade Lenin. I have heard the Council's decision," he said, his voice calm and respectful. "It is a great honor."
He then stood, turning to address the entire room, his voice ringing with a sincerity that was utterly false and completely believable. "I will not shirk my duty. If the revolution needs me on the Southern Front, then that is where I will go. I will serve the people and the Party, and I will crush the White snakes in their nests or die trying."
It was a masterful performance. He had seized the narrative completely. In the space of thirty seconds, he had transformed himself from a rebellious traitor into a selfless patriot, accepting a dangerous but necessary mission for the good of the state. Trotsky was left standing speechless, his earlier accusations now looking like nothing more than petty, personal jealousy.
Jake sat back down. "However," he said, his tone shifting, becoming crisp and business-like. "I cannot abandon my duties as the People's Commissar of Nationalities. The work is too vital, especially with the German negotiations beginning."
Lenin's eyes narrowed. He felt the first, faint tremor of a trap he hadn't seen. "A reasonable request," he said cautiously. "Who do you have in mind to act as your deputy?"
"I have given it considerable thought," Jake said smoothly. "I require a proven administrator. A comrade who has already shown great initiative in a time of crisis. Someone with experience dealing with foreign nationals, who can be trusted to handle delicate matters with discretion."
He let the statement hang in the air for a beat, ensuring every single person in the room was listening.
"I believe her work, praised by this very Council, speaks for itself." He looked directly at Lenin, a glint of pure, unadulterated challenge in his eyes.
"I nominate Comrade Anna, formerly of the German Red Cross."
The name dropped into the silent room like a grenade with the pin pulled.
Lenin froze. He was trapped. Utterly, completely, and publicly trapped. In front of the entire Council, in front of Trotsky, in front of the clerks who would spread the story throughout the Smolny by morning, he was faced with an impossible, ruinous choice.
To refuse this seemingly reasonable request would be to admit the entire promotion was a sham, a political hit. It would expose his motives and make him look weak, duplicitous, and fearful.
But to accept…
To accept was to grant official, state-sanctioned power to the very woman he had tried to have arrested and killed less than twenty-four hours ago. It was to willingly place his enemy's most dangerous asset—his queen—right in the heart of his own castle.
The entire Council turned to stare at him, every man holding his breath, waiting for his answer. Trotsky's face was a mask of pure, horrified disbelief.
Lenin was the master of political chess. And Koba had just forced him, in front of the entire world, to choose between two moves, both of which were checkmate.