The wind on Red Square cut through bone.
It was thirty degrees below zero. The breath of the crowd rose in a massive, grey cloud, hovering over the cobblestones like a phantom.
Jake stood at the base of the wooden mausoleum. He wore no hat. The frost turned his hair white, aging him twenty years in twenty minutes.
He looked down at the coffin.
Vladimir Lenin looked small in death. His face was waxy, painted by the embalmers to look like he was merely sleeping.
"Where is Trotsky?" a voice whispered from the crowd.
"He is in the South," another muttered. "Duck hunting while the Father sleeps."
Jake heard the whispers. He didn't smile. He kept his face a mask of tragic, stoic grief.
He stepped up to the microphone. The feedback squealed, silencing the thousands gathered.
"Comrades," Jake's voice boomed across the frozen square. "We have lost the head. But the heart still beats."
He placed a hand on the coffin.
"Comrade Lenin left us a legacy," Jake said. "He left us a state of workers and peasants. He left us a commandment: To build socialism in one country."
He looked at the empty space where Trotsky should have stood.
"Some did not come today," Jake said, his voice dropping to a sorrowful growl. "Some found the journey too difficult. Some found the weather too cold."
He raised his fist.
"But we are here! We vow to thee, Comrade Lenin! We vow to strengthen the Union! We vow to build the factory and the dam! We vow to be as hard as the steel you named us for!"
"We vow!" Taranov shouted from the front row.
"WE VOW!" the crowd roared back.
It wasn't a funeral anymore. It was a coronation.
The Wedding.
Two days later, the Kremlin chapel was quiet.
There were no priests. No icons. Just a bust of Karl Marx and a red flag draped over a table.
Nadezhda Alliluyeva wore a white dress she had sewn herself. She looked radiant, a flower growing in a graveyard.
Jake wore his grey tunic. He looked tired.
"Do you take this woman?" the registrar asked, looking nervous.
"I do," Jake said.
He slipped a simple gold band onto Nadya's finger. Her hand was warm. His was ice.
She looked up at him with adoration. To her, he was the grieving hero who needed comfort. She saw the pain in his eyes and thought it was loneliness.
She didn't know it was the hollowness of a man who had sold his soul for a centrifuge.
"Kiss the bride," Taranov suggested from the corner. He was the only witness.
Jake leaned down. He kissed her forehead. It was chaste. Paternal.
"We have work to do, Nadya," Jake said softly.
"I know," she whispered, squeezing his hand. "I will help you. I will organize your files. I will make sure you eat."
Jake led her out of the room.
He needed her. Not for love. He needed her because the peasants were about to start dying in the millions, and he needed a picture in the newspaper that showed him smiling at a pretty girl.
He needed a human shield against history.
The Map Room.
The honeymoon lasted one hour.
Jake sat at the long table. The map of the Ukraine was spread out before him.
Menzhinsky stood by the door. The head of the Cheka looked ill.
"The requisition squads are meeting resistance," Menzhinsky reported. "The villages in the Kuban region have barricaded their barns. They are armed with pitchforks and old rifles."
"They are shooting at the collectors?" Jake asked.
"Yes. They call it theft. They say we are taking the seed grain for next year's planting."
"We are," Jake said.
He lit his pipe.
"If they plant it, we wait six months for the harvest," Jake explained calmly. "We don't have six months. The Finn needs gold now. To buy the machines from Germany."
He stood up and walked to the map.
"We are converting grain into turbines," Jake said. "It is simple alchemy."
He picked up a black marker. He drew a circle around the rebellious region.
"Issue a decree," Jake said. "The 'Blacklist' decree."
Menzhinsky swallowed hard. "What does it entail?"
"Total blockade," Jake said. "No manufactured goods enter that circle. No salt. No kerosene. No matches. No boots."
He turned to look at Menzhinsky.
"And no food. Confiscate everything. Every sack of flour. Every jar of pickles. Every cow."
"Comrade Stalin," Menzhinsky whispered. "That is a death sentence. It is winter. Without food or fuel..."
"They will learn," Jake said. "Starvation is a teacher."
He sat back down.
"Make sure the newspapers report it as a 'Kulak strike,'" Jake added. "Say the rich peasants are destroying food to hurt the workers in the city. Turn the anger of the factory against the farm."
Menzhinsky nodded slowly. He was terrified of the man in the grey suit.
"And the export shipments?"
"Send the grain to Hamburg," Jake ordered. "Sell it at any price. I want the German marks in my account by Friday. The Finn has a lead on a high-voltage generator."
The Construction Site.
The Dnieper River roared through the icy canyon.
Thousands of workers swarmed the banks. They looked like ants. They were digging the foundation for the dam with shovels and pickaxes. There were no bulldozers.
Jake stood on the bluff, wrapped in his greatcoat.
Next to him stood Cooper, an American engineer hired with the Tsar's gold. Cooper looked shocked.
"Mr. Stalin," Cooper said in broken Russian. "This is madness. You're pouring concrete in freezing temperatures. It won't set properly."
"Add salt to the mixture," Jake said.
"It will weaken the structure over time!"
"We don't need it to last a hundred years," Jake said. "We need it to generate power next year."
He pointed to the massive hole in the earth.
"I need electricity," Jake said. "Lots of it. Enough to power a city."
"For what?" Cooper asked. "You don't have a city here. Just mud huts."
"For the centrifuges," Jake murmured in English.
Cooper blinked. "Excuse me?"
"Aluminum," Jake corrected himself quickly in Russian. "We need to smelt aluminum for airplanes."
He turned to the NKVD commander overseeing the site.
"Double the shifts," Jake ordered. "Work them at night. Use floodlights."
"We don't have enough floodlights, Comrade."
"Then use bonfires," Jake snapped. "If a man collapses, drag him off the line and put a new one in. We have plenty of men. We have very little time."
He looked at the American.
"You said this dam would take five years," Jake said.
"Yes, that's a standard timeline."
"You have two," Jake said. "If the turbines aren't spinning by 1924, I will find an engineer who understands urgency."
Cooper looked at the grim faces of the armed guards. He realized this wasn't a construction job. It was a pharaoh building a pyramid.
"I... I will try," Cooper stammered.
"Don't try," Jake said. "Do. Or I will bury you in the concrete."
The Apartment.
Nadya was waiting for him.
The table was set. A simple meal. Soup and bread.
She looked happy when he entered. She ran to him and took his coat.
"You look frozen, Koba," she said, chafing his cold hands. "Did you eat today?"
"I ate," Jake lied. He hadn't.
He sat at the table. She poured him tea.
"I read the paper today," Nadya said brightly. "The editorial about the Kulaks. It is terrible what they are doing. Hoarding food while the children in Moscow are hungry."
Jake stopped with the spoon halfway to his mouth.
She believed it. She believed the lie he had written.
"Yes," Jake said quietly. "They are very selfish."
"My father says you are too kind," Nadya continued. "He says you should send the army to force them to share."
Jake looked at his young wife. Her eyes were clear and moral. She thought she was on the side of the angels.
She didn't know that he had just signed an order that would kill a million people to buy a generator.
"We must be firm," Jake said. "But fair."
He took a sip of soup. It tasted like ash.
"Nadya," Jake said.
"Yes?"
"Don't read the papers," Jake said. "They are... complicated. Politics gives you wrinkles."
She laughed. "I am a Bolshevik wife! I want to understand."
"Understand me," Jake said. He reached out and touched her hand. "That is enough."
He needed her ignorance. It was the only clean thing left in his world.
The Secret Laboratory.
Deep in the Urals, in a converted salt mine, the air was dry and still.
Jake walked through the tunnel. Taranov held a lantern.
They reached a steel door guarded by men in lead aprons.
Inside, it looked like a madman's workshop. Wires hung from the ceiling. Glass tubes bubbled with strange liquids.
And in the center of the room, sitting on a heavy workbench, was a metal cylinder.
It was crude. It was ugly. It was welded together from scraps.
But it was spinning.
A low, high-pitched whine filled the cavern. Zzzzzzzzzz.
The Finn stood next to it, looking exhausted. He held a stopwatch.
"It works?" Jake asked.
"It spins," the Finn corrected. "We stole the bearings from a German U-boat engine. The motor is American."
"And the separation?"
"Minimal," the Finn admitted. "We are getting micrograms. At this rate, it will take a thousand years to get enough U-235 for a bomb."
Jake touched the cold metal of the machine. It was vibrating.
"We don't need one machine," Jake said. "We need ten thousand."
"Ten thousand?" The Finn laughed bitterly. "Koba, the energy required... the gold... it will bankrupt the state."
"I am bankrupting the state," Jake said. "I am selling the Hermitage art. I am selling the grain. I am selling the church bells for scrap copper."
He looked at the spinning cylinder. It was the heart of his new god.
"Scale it up," Jake ordered. "Build a factory. A secret city. I want a cascade of these machines running day and night."
"We need workers who can handle precision tools," the Finn said. "Not peasants."
"I arrested the engineers," Jake said. "The Mensheviks. The Tsarists. I didn't shoot them. I sent them here."
He gestured to the dark tunnels.
"This is their prison," Jake said. "If they build the bomb, they earn their freedom. If they fail, they never see the sun again."
He watched the cylinder spin. It was mesmerizing.
The West thought he was a primitive dictator ruling over a nation of farmers. They thought he was busy killing Kulaks.
They didn't know he was building the apocalypse in a basement.
"Faster," Jake whispered to the machine. "Spin faster."
The whine grew louder, drowning out the silence of his conscience.