There were two choices on the board, and both were poison.
Lenin looked at the faces around the long table, each one a mirror of the crisis that was about to shatter his revolution. Trotsky's face was a mask of incandescent rage. Dzerzhinsky's was carved from cold, unforgiving stone. The other commissars were a sea of terrified confusion.
His infant government, his entire life's work, was ready to fracture and die on the altar of this single, impossible decision.
Koba's nomination of "Sister Anna" hung in the air, a perfect, inescapable trap.
Lenin's mind, a cold political machine that cared for nothing but victory, ran the brutal calculations.
Option A: Refuse. He would look weak, duplicitous. He would be forced to admit, in front of the entire Council, that the promotion he'd just engineered was a sham, a political hit. He would prove Koba was right to defy him, legitimizing his rebellion. Worse, it could be the final spark that ignited the Kronstadt mutiny they all feared.
Option B: Accept. He would look like a fool, publicly endorsing the very woman he had ordered arrested as a spy less than a day ago. He would be legitimizing his rival's power base, willingly planting a viper in the heart of his own government. It was a humiliation of historic proportions.
He made the only choice a true pragmatist could. He would swallow the poison that allowed him to live to fight another day. He would maintain the fragile illusion of Party unity, no matter the cost to his own pride.
Lenin raised his head, his face a completely unreadable mask. He looked directly at Koba, at the man who had so thoroughly outplayed him.
"A bold nomination," he said, his voice calm and steady. He forced the words out, and each one tasted like ash in his mouth. "But Comrade Anna's work during the revolution has indeed been exemplary."
He paused, letting his words sink in, establishing a new, false reality. "The request is… unorthodox. But, given Commissar Koba's urgent deployment to the front, it is a reasonable one."
He turned from Koba to the stunned, silent Council. "I will second the nomination," he declared. "All in favor of appointing Comrade Anna as acting deputy of the People's Commissariat of Nationalities?"
Hands went up around the table. They were hesitant at first, the commissars looking at each other in bewildered disbelief. But then, seeing Lenin's unwavering gaze, more hands joined, following his lead. The motion passed.
A strangled noise, a sound of pure, agonized disbelief, escaped Trotsky's lips. He stared at Lenin as if he were a stranger, a traitor. Without another word, he turned on his heel and stormed out of the Council room, slamming the massive oak doors behind him. The sound echoed like a cannon shot, a public declaration of the end of their alliance.
The meeting dissolved into a chaos of whispered conversations and shocked expressions. Jake gave a small, almost imperceptible nod to Lenin—a victor's salute. Then he, too, turned and left, his Kronstadt sailors falling into step behind him like loyal wolves.
Lenin was left alone in the wreckage of his own authority. He sat at the head of the empty table, the mask of calm finally dropping from his face. A cold, venomous fury filled him. He was not angry at Koba's audacity. He was furious at his own miscalculation. He had been utterly, completely outplayed.
He had lost the public battle. Now, the private war would begin.
He picked up the direct telephone line to the Lubyanka. Menzhinsky's quiet voice answered on the first ring.
"The nurse, Comrade Anna, is no longer a target," Lenin said, his own voice low and dangerous. "She is now a government official. You will therefore afford her every official courtesy."
He let that sink in. "You will also place her and her new office under the most intense, deep-cover surveillance this state can possibly muster. I want every clerk, every assistant, every cleaner who works for her to be one of your agents. I want every piece of paper that enters or leaves that office copied and on my desk within the hour. I want her watched day and night. She may have a title, but I will make her office a prison. Understood?"
"Understood, Comrade Lenin," came the dry, rustling reply.
Lenin hung up the phone. He had been made a fool of once. It would not happen again.
An aide, a young Party member with a pale, worried face, scurried into the now-empty room. He was holding a flimsy piece of paper as if it were a venomous snake. An urgent telegram from the south.
Lenin took the telegram. The paper trembled slightly in his hand, a harbinger of disaster from a thousand miles away.
He read the message. The words seemed to leap off the page, each one a fresh blow.
The White armies, under the command of General Denikin, had launched a massive, surprise offensive. They had broken the weak Red lines along the Don River. The vital city of Tsaritsyn—the gateway to the grain and oil of the Caucasus—was surrounded and on the verge of falling. The political commissars on the front were begging for a senior commander, someone who could restore order from the chaos and rally the terrified, retreating troops.
Lenin crushed the telegram in his fist, the paper crumpling with a dry, rattling sound.
The bitter, soul-crushing irony was almost too much to bear. His brilliant political move to exile Koba, to send him to a quiet, unimportant front, had, in the space of a single hour, become a desperate strategic necessity.
He had just handed command of his most critical military front, the key to the survival of the revolution, to the one man in Russia he now feared more than the enemy himself.