My brothers keeper, an OC/SI as the twin of Stalin

[Xodarap]

Opsec is really hurting British planning if they've already generalized Mikheils forces as purely Revolutionary Guard did the good admiral make mistakes in the telegraph messages or was the abbreviated nature of telegraph responsible for the misunderstanding

 

[Alenco98]

An excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the Czechoslovak revolt in Siberia:

By early 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion — once a coherent, if weary, fighting force — had become scattered across the immensity of Russia. Roughly 40,000 men remained under arms, but divided into four major concentrations:

10,000 within Ukraine around Kiev.

15,000 along the Penza–kazan-Samara region

10,000 in the Novosibirsk region, and

5,000 stationed near Vladivostok.

The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, and the subsequent signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in December 1917 left the Legion in limbo. Their original mission — to fight Germany and Austria-Hungary for Allied recognition of Czechoslovakia — was now impossible without transit out of Russia.

It was into this void that Mikheil Jugashvili, the Georgian warlord and commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps came into play. Having marched into Ukraine with 5000 of his men. He offered to lead the Ukrainian contingent to Murmansk, all while sending messengers east promising the other Czechoslovaks to stand by as he would get them home as well. His infamous Caravan of Vice — a rolling mixture of alcohol, prostitutes, opium, brutality, and hard marching — deposited some ten thousand Legionnaires and 5 thousand revolutionary guardsmen in Murmansk on may 1st.

Initially Mikheil attempted to negotiate with the British, requesting they begin immediate evacuation of the legion. However, admiral Kemp, not having enough ships and having no authorization from London denied his request, informing Jugashvili that he would have to wait for a reply from London.

Not being one to be denied and with his patience running short, Jugashvili rallied the Revolutionary guardsmen and the Czechoslovaks. They subsequently seized the British fleet, scuttled its ships, and fortified the port that same night.

Jugashvili's mixture of ruthless charisma and opportunism attracted many Legionnaires. He promised them not only survival but wealth, glory, and women — and unlike Allied promises of distant evacuation, his words were backed by immediate plunder and authority.

By mid-May 1918, news of the "Murmansk Incident" had rippled across Russia like shockwaves through shattered glass. To Bolshevik sympathizers, Jugashvili's audacious seizure of the northern port was proof that revolutionary willpower could overcome the hesitancy of Allied imperialists. To the Allies themselves, it was nothing short of mutiny, an act of piracy dressed in the trappings of revolution. For the Czechoslovak Legion, the incident was the breaking point.

From that moment on, the once-unified Legion fractured into two bitterly opposed camps.

The Pro-Mikheil Faction. Bound together by Jugashvili's charisma, were drawn in equal measure by his promise of loot, survival, and revolutionary glory. Unlike the cautious Allied officers, Mikheil spoke in certainties: food today, women tomorrow, and plunder the day after. His words resonated with many Legionnaires of working-class origin and with younger junior officers who had grown tired of vague promises of evacuation to France. Among this camp, genuine communist sympathizers rose quickly in influence, reshaping Jugashvili's cult of personality into a revolutionary crusade. By late May, Mikheil's adherents were openly coordinating with Bolshevik forces under Trotsky in the Volga basin, particularly around the Samara–Kazan axis.

The pro allied pole meanwhile rallied around the idea of legitimacy. For these men — often senior officers, professionals, and those more tightly bound to Masaryk's vision of a Czechoslovak state — survival meant Allied recognition, not revolution. They sought nothing more than to escape Russia, regroup in France, and continue the fight against the Central Powers. In exchange for loyalty, they received supplies, ammunition, and arms from British, French, and Japanese missions in Siberia, with American matériel soon to follow. They aligned themselves closely with White forces, tying their fate to the anti-Bolshevik struggle.

The fragile balance between these camps collapsed on 27 May 1918 in Samara, when Jugashvili's adherents attempted to seize food and ammunition depots guarded by Pro-Allied Czechoslovaks. The clash was short but bloody: rifles cracked through the streets, bayonets were fixed, and in less than an hour fifty-seven men lay dead — the first Czechs to fall not against Germans or Austrians, but against their own countrymen.

The "Samara Bloodletting," as it was later called, set the precedent. From that day forward, every rumor, every whispered order, carried the risk of escalation into fratricide.

The Trans-Siberian Railway became the fault line of the Legion's internal conflict. Word of the Samara clashes spread faster than couriers could ride, magnified by rumor and distortion. In Penza, Legion detachments split over whether Mikheil was a savior or a bandit. In Novosibirsk, commanders argued openly in railway stations, pistols drawn, before men deserted to whichever side promised food and pay.

Entire units began switching allegiance at the drop of a rumor. A commander who one week swore loyalty to the Allies might, after hearing tales of Mikheil's victories in the north, defect the next. Others, more cynical, sold themselves to the highest bidder, looting towns and trading spoils with Bolsheviks or Whites as convenience dictated.

In some cities, the Czechs became petty warlords of railway yards, arsenals, or city blocks — men who had once envisioned themselves as liberators of Prague now ruled over stretches of Siberian mud and timber, their banners no longer a symbol of unity but of faction.

For the Bolsheviks, the split was an unexpected boon. Trotsky, wary yet pragmatic, saw the Czechoslovaks as dangerous but useful allies. With tens of thousands of disaffected Legionnaires adding steel to the Red effort on the Volga front.

For the Allies, the mutiny was a disaster. Instead of a disciplined, unified expeditionary asset, they now faced a divided Legion — one half cooperating with Whites, the other half fortifying Bolshevik strongholds. Japanese officers in Vladivostok fumed that their carefully laid plans to secure Siberia were being upended by "that Georgian bandit," while French officers in Irkutsk despaired that Czechs were killing Czechs before they had even set foot back in Europe.

By June 1918, the Legion's fate was sealed. The question was no longer whether they would fight for Czechoslovakia, but which Czechoslovakia they would fight for; one forged in the crucible of Allied legitimacy and Western recognition, or one born in fire and vice, under the banner of Jugashvili and the Bolshevik revolution.

The next battles — at Kazan, Ufa, and along the frozen stretches of the Siberian railway — would determine not only the survival of the Legion, but whether their homeland would be represented abroad as democratic allies of France and Britain, or as revolutionary comrades of Lenin and Jugashvili.

In Samara, Jugashvili's adherents formally threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks. Bolshevik detachments reinforced them, and together they began a series of lightning raids against White and pro-Allied Czechoslovak positions. Supply depots, rail stations, and even hospitals became targets.

The Whites and their Czechoslovak allies retaliated with their own brand of brutality, executing any Legionnaires suspected of being "red sympathizers." Executions were carried out in public squares to terrify the wavering. But rather than intimidating Mikheil's faction, the bloodletting only radicalized them.

The city became a deadly pendulum of control — swinging one day to the Whites, the next to the Reds. Civilians cowered in cellars, the streets stank of unburied corpses, and the Trans-Siberian line through Samara slowed to a crawl under the weight of barricades and patrols.

By 3 July, the Bolsheviks, supported heavily by Jugashvili aligned Czechoslovaks, seized the upper hand. The last pro-Allied Czech garrisons in the city were surrounded. Jugashvili's men offered them a choice: pledge allegiance or die.

In a grotesque echo of Jugashvili's earlier brutality in Moscow and on the Pukilovo Heights, those who defected were forced to execute their comrades who refused. Entire units dissolved in a haze of tears, drunkenness, and blood. The symbolism was deliberate — Jugashvili's new order demanded not just obedience, but complicity.

Flushed with their victory, the Czechoslovaks advanced south and seized Kazan on July 29th. There, in the chaos of conquest, they captured the Russian gold reserves — the single most valuable prize in Russia. The windfall provoked a bitter quarrel between the Czechoslovaks and Trotsky, who argued the gold belonged solely to the Soviet state.

After tense negotiations, a compromise was struck on August 15. The Czechoslovaks, backed by the sheer fact of physical possession, as well as by the political backing of Joseph Stalin, forced the Bolsheviks to concede. The gold was divided: one-third for the Bolshevik aligned Czechoslovaks in Samara and Jugashvili's northern contingent that was fighting in Finland, and two-thirds for the Bolshevik government. The split was grudging, but decisive. The Bolsheviks gained a financial lifeline that would sustain their revolution, while Czechoslovaks secured the loot that Jugashvili promised them.

Far to the east, in Novosibirsk, the schism played out differently. There, rival Czechoslovak commanders each declared themselves the rightful representatives of the national cause, forming dueling "committees."

Skirmishes on the outskirts escalated into pitched battles. By June, the fighting had drawn in Russian civilians and partisans, swelling into a localized civil war. Artillery duels turned entire neighborhoods into smoldering ruins. Railway cars filled with the dead were sent eastward, silent testimony to the ferocity of the fighting.

In the end, the Whites proved stronger. With substantial Allied support and better supply lines, they gradually ground down the Mikheil-aligned Czechoslovaks. By July's end, the Red-sympathizing Czechs had been surrounded, captured, and executed en masse. Their corpses were displayed publicly, a warning against Bolshevik agitation in Siberia. The pro-Allied faction declared Novosibirsk the "legitimate heart" of the Czechoslovak struggle — though the ruins around them spoke more of fratricide than liberation.

In Vladivostok, the balance was never in question. The Allied faction remained intact and unchallenged. Reinforced by Japanese divisions and with Allied warships in the harbor, Vladivostok became a fortress of pro-Allied order.

Pro-Mikheil agitators, sent eastward to stir dissent, were quickly uncovered and crushed. Those who attempted to rally troops were executed or shipped back west in chains. A rare moment of unity occurred when Japanese and Czechoslovak forces jointly suppressed Mikheil's supporters with ruthless efficiency. Vladivostok thus remained a bastion of Allied legitimacy, a gateway through which supplies, weapons, and political recognition flowed.

By the beginning of September, the map of the Czechoslovak Legion reflected its fracture. Samara–Kazan laid firmly in Jugashvili's hands, aligned with Bolsheviks and enriched by the gold reserves.

Novosibirsk and Vladivostok were purged of Mikheil's adherents, under White and Allied control. With Vladivostok in particular having become a stronghold of the Allied faction, which was heavily bolstered by Japanese power.

The Legion, once imagined as a unified army of national liberation, was now irreparably divided. Two banners flew under the same name: one red, revolutionary, and drenched in vice; the other white, legitimist, and chained to Allied interests.

And in between lay thousands of miles of railway, towns, and villages — the battleground of a civil war within a civil war.

The Legion Civil War remains a footnote in the broader Russian Civil War, yet it had lasting consequences. For the Allies, it shattered faith in the reliability of émigré forces. For the Bolsheviks, it proved both a boon — weakening White control, the securing of the Russian gold reserves — and a danger, as the Czechs were only loyal to loot, not to ideology.

Most poignantly, for the Czechoslovaks themselves, it was a tragedy. Men who had left their homes to fight for independence found themselves killing their own countrymen on distant Russian soil, their sacrifice entangled in the ambitions of foreign empires and the madness of revolutionary war.

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from the Wikipedia page on the German Spring offensive:

By the winter of 1917, Russia had been knocked out of the war. The treaty of Brest Litvosk, signed on December 10, 1917 was a major coup for German diplomacy. It knocked Russia out of war and allowed Germany to achieve some of its strategic objectives in the east. More importantly, it freed vast numbers of German and Austro-Hungarian troops for deployment elsewhere. The German High Command (Oberste Heeresleitung, or OHL), under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, immediately began plans to shift divisions west.

The December signing gave the Germans nearly three extra months of freedom of action. In January and February 1918, troop trains rumbled westward, ferrying men, horses, and artillery. By the end of February, nearly half a million soldiers had been transferred, along with the bulk of the cavalry formations once used for sweeping maneuvers across the Russian plains. These divisions would become the cutting edge of the Kaiserschlacht, the "Kaiser's Battle," designed to win the war in the west before the United States could intervene in strength.

The winter of 1917–18 was eerily quiet on the Western Front. The Germans, conserving their strength, limited themselves to probing attacks, trench raids, and artillery harassment. Allied intelligence noted unusual rail activity behind German lines but failed to predict its scale. British commanders suspected an offensive was coming but believed it would be delayed until late spring.

Behind the lines, Ludendorff reorganized the German Army for one last decisive effort. The stormtrooper units—specially trained infiltration troops—were expanded and equipped with light machine guns and grenades on top of their usual arsenal. Cavalry divisions, redeployed from the East, were refitted for exploitation roles. The goal was not to break through with brute force, but to bypass strongpoints, infiltrate weak sectors, and sow confusion deep in enemy rear areas.

Meanwhile, in Britain and France, morale was fragile. The French Army was still recovering from the 1917 mutinies. Though discipline had been restored, confidence was brittle. The British, having borne the brunt of Passchendaele, were stretched thin. Both nations awaited American reinforcements, but as of early 1918, the U.S. presence was modest—fewer than 200,000 combat-ready troops.

On the morning of March 3, 1918, the largest German offensive of the war began. At 4:40 a.m., more than 6,000 guns opened fire along a 50-mile front. A hurricane bombardment—mixing high explosive, poison gas, and smoke—fell on the British Fifth Army and parts of the French front. Communications were shredded, and forward trenches obliterated.

By mid-morning, stormtroopers advanced under the cover of moke. Instead of attacking strongpoints head-on, they filtered between them, cutting off defenders and pushing into rear areas. The British Fifth Army collapsed. Thousands surrendered, thousands more streamed westward in chaotic retreat. Within three days, the Germans had advanced farther than in any offensive since 1914.

The three month lull in combat had allowed Ludendorff and the OHL to draft a coherent battle plan. The result showed itself in those first few weeks. The German army concentrated relentlessly on the Amiens axis. Cavalry divisions pushed forward, probing for weak spots, seizing crossings, and cutting telegraph lines. British and French commanders, stunned by the pace of events, struggled to form coherent defensive lines.

By April 1, less than a month after the offensive began, German troops seized Amiens. The city, a critical rail junction, was the linchpin connecting British and French armies. Its loss severed north-south coordination and created the real possibility that the Allies might be defeated in detail.

The fall of Amiens sent shockwaves through Allied capitals. In London, the Cabinet debated whether Britain could continue the war if France collapsed. Lord Lansdowne and other moderates argued for exploring peace terms. Winston Churchill, then Minister of Munitions, urged defiance, but admitted privately that the situation was "the gravest since 1914."

In Paris, panic gripped the Chamber of Deputies. On April 2, a vote of no confidence was brought against Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. He survived only after delivering a thunderous speech:

"I would rather throw myself and my children in front of a firing squad than to even think about surrender!"

The chamber roared its approval, and Clemenceau's reputation as the "Tiger" of France was secured. Yet behind the rhetoric lay genuine fear: the Germans were closer to Paris than at any point in four years.

By mid-April, the German advance pressed into the Oise valley. On April 15, skirmishes erupted around Chantilly, home to the French General Headquarters (Grand Quartier Général). Though not fully captured, the area became a contested zone. French staff officers fled toward Paris, disrupting command and control.

The symbolic impact was enormous. Chantilly had been the nerve center of the French war effort since 1914. Its loss suggested that even the high command was no longer safe. Rumors swept Paris that the Germans would soon storm the capital. The government quietly prepared evacuation plans to Bordeaux, echoing the desperate days of the Franco-Prussian War.

In London, panic deepened. Some cabinet ministers urged opening peace talks, fearing that continued fighting would leave Britain isolated. Only the intervention of Lloyd George and the quiet support of King George V held the government together.

The crisis forced the issue of American participation. General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), had long insisted on fighting as an independent U.S. army. President Woodrow Wilson supported him, fearing that subordinating American troops to European command would diminish U.S. influence at the peace table.

But Clemenceau, Foch, and Lloyd George argued that without immediate American reinforcements under French command, the war could be lost within weeks. The capture of Amiens and the German threat to Chantilly gave their pleas urgency.

For weeks Wilson resisted, torn between national pride and strategic necessity. Pershing lobbied hard against subordination. Yet the crisis worsened. On May 7, Chantilly fell and the Germans began to advance towards Paris. Wilson's hand was forced. American divisions were placed under Foch's command. The decision transformed the Allied war effort.

The Amiens–Chantilly offensive represented the high-water mark of German arms. But even as the Germans celebrated, cracks appeared. The very success of the advance strained logistics beyond endurance. Supply columns struggled over cratered terrain. Horses starved for lack of fodder. Ammunition dumps lagged miles behind the front.

Most critically, the elite stormtrooper units, used as shock troops in every assault, suffered irreplaceable casualties. By May, the cutting edge of the German Army was blunted. Replacement troops were less well-trained and less motivated. Food shortages at home, exacerbated by the British blockade, sapped morale.

Meanwhile, the Allies regained their footing. French reserves stabilized the front before Paris. British divisions regrouped behind the Somme. And with American manpower now committed, the balance began to shift.

By June 1918, over 600,000 Americans were in France. Though many were still untested, their sheer numbers freed up French veterans for counterattacks. At the Battle of the Aisne in mid-June, German thrusts toward Paris were halted by combined Franco-American forces. For the first time, American divisions played a decisive role, boosting Allied morale.

Through July, Foch prepared a grand counteroffensive. The German spearheads around Amiens were deeply salient, their flanks exposed. On July 14, Bastille Day, French and American troops launched surprise attacks east of Paris. The Germans, exhausted and undersupplied, fell back. Chantilly was recaptured on July 22, and the tide finally began to turn.

By August, the Entente, now enjoying numerical superiority, launched coordinated offensives along the entire front. The Canadians and Australians spearheaded the recapture of Amiens on August 6, in what would later be hailed as the "black day of the German Army." Thousands of German prisoners were taken, and morale collapsed.

The loss of Amiens shattered the last illusions of German victory. Ludendorff, once confident, now admitted privately that the war was lost. Desertions mounted. At home, strikes and protests spread in Berlin and Munich. The blockade had reduced civilian rations to near-starvation levels.

In September, further Allied offensives drove the Germans back toward their 1914 positions. American forces, now over a million strong, proved decisive in weight if not yet in skill.

By late September, German leaders faced the unthinkable. With Austria-Hungary on the brink and Bulgaria seeking peace, Germany stood alone. On September 28, Ludendorff suffered a nervous breakdown, declaring the situation hopeless.

On October 7, 1918, less than seven months after the spring offensive began, Germany requested an armistice. The Kaiser's government, terrified of revolution, sued for peace.

 

[Alenco98]

May 15, 1918
Murmansk
Russia

I stood on the edge of the ruined harbor, the smell of burnt wood and saltwater clinging to the morning air like a cheap cologne you can't wash off. The sea was calm now, though it still reeked faintly of oil from the ships we'd scuttled. In the distance, the wreck of the British flagship jutted up through the water at an angle — half-submerged, half-defiant — like a knife forgotten in the belly of a corpse.

"It's funny, don't you think, Aleksandra?" I asked the empty space beside me, dragging on the last cigarette of the pack until it seared my fingers. I flicked the butt into the sea, watched it hiss out. "I offered — to bring the Czechoslovaks to Murmansk, to get them and the British out of Russia. Simple. And instead, I probably just started a war."

I laughed. Not loud. Just enough to remind myself I still could.

Funny thing was, it didn't hurt anymore. The grief. The constant sobbing into my sleeve at night, the choking on my own tears until sleep finally smothered me — all of that was gone now. In its place was a neat, clean void. A hole in my chest where she had once lived. A hole that no drink, no opium, no woman could fill. I didn't try to fill it either, there was no need. It didn't ache. It didn't burn. It was just there. A vacancy.

Then again, spending weeks shepherding ten thousand armed, drunken Czechoslovaks across Russia on a rolling carnival of drugs, alcohol and prostitutes was a surprisingly effective distraction. Turns out, logistics can be therapeutic when the cargo is half lunatics and half whores. Even now, with the train parked and the Legion dug into defenses around Murmansk, with nothing pressing to do but smoke, fuck hookers and stare at the sea, the absence barely registered.

It helped that I still pretended to talk to Aleksandra. I spoke aloud, usually late at night, when I was alone, always half in half jest. Asked her what she thought of the men, of the bear cub gnawing on boots, of the British prisoners eating their rations in silence. The Guards and Czechoslovaks found it unnerving — their commander whispering to a dead woman as though she were still at his side. I didn't care. They'd follow me anyway. Their fear of me, my willingness to fight at the front, prostitutes, alcohol, opium and ciggarettes are stronger than sanity.

I glanced down at my hands — scarred, cigarette-stained, faintly bloodied still as far as I could tell from April. "Competence is all they require from me Aleksandra," I said. "Competence, and the occasional payment in vodka, women, cigarettes or all 3. Keep the trains running, keep the rifles oiled, keep the corpses out of sight. That's enough to hold an empire together right my love?" I chuckled, then sighed.

"Man, life is just boring without you, you know. It would have been your birthday today, we'd be having a picnic right now. In front of the artic ocean. Funny."

The sea lapped at the wreckage, the gulls screamed overhead. I nodded faintly into the cold air.

"But it's fine, Aleksandra," I murmured to the nothing beside me. "Me, keke, Aleksandra, Joe, and the children will be fine. As long as I win this war. Then it'll be smooth sailing for me and the family."

Me and the family, I'd be 40 this year. 40 years in this body. 40 years away from my old life. I'd accepted it a long time ago, my mom, stepdad, the rest of my family. I'd never see them again, I'd made peace with it. I'd even grown to love my new family, Keke, Aleksandra, the kids, Joe, yes, even Joe. Yet I was different, Stalin never had a twin, I was never meant to be. Though they accepted me, and I accepted me. Deep down inside, I knew I was wrong, I didn't belong.

Sometimes I wonder if I should have told Aleksandra. "No." I shook my head. "You'd think I'm even crazier than I already am."

The silence after my little statement was broken when I heard boots crunching over the gravel. I didn't bother turning. The only man who walked that heavily was Voroshilov. Loyal, dutiful, unimaginative. Exactly the kind of man you want at your side when reality itself is wobbling.

"Comrade Jugashvili," he said, his voice cautious. "A train has arrived from Petrograd. Several hundred men. They claim to be from the KGB. Their leader requests to see you."

I smiled faintly at the wreckage bobbing in the water, then tilted my head toward the empty air beside me.

"You hear that, Aleksandra? They've sent the secret police. They want to have a chat. Or maybe I'll get shot and we can reunite."

I chuckled and turned at last, meeting Voroshilov's uneasy eyes. He looked at me like a man watching a wolf talk to a gravestone.

"Let's go see them then," I said, brushing ash from my coat. "Let's not keep our new friends waiting."

Voroshilov shifted uncomfortably, clearly disturbed by the one-sided conversation. His lips pressed together, as if he wanted to say something but thought better of it. The silence stretched.

I patted him on the shoulder as I passed. "Don't worry, Klim. Talking to the dead keeps me sane. Talking to the living, well… that's what makes me dangerous."

As we walked toward the station, I murmured. "Don't worry, Aleksandra. If they think they can control me, they're in for a surprise. You can't control a man with no fear of death."

Voroshilov stiffened at that. He heard me, though he pretended he hadn't. He always pretended. That was why I kept him close. Just like Tukachevsky.

The station loomed ahead, KGB men already forming ranks on the platform — blue coats, stiff posture, rifles at their shoulders. At their center stood a sharp-eyed man in a leather trench coat, waiting.

I walked up to the platform and gave the men a crisp salute. They didn't return it. Neither did the man in charge.

"Comrade," I said anyway, holding the gesture longer than etiquette required, just to see if it would make them twitch. "Mikheil Jugashvili reporting. The British have been routed. We're holding them as prisoners. Murmansk is being fortified against further landings. Their fleet is scuttled, the harbor burnt. Unless they're eager to waste hundreds of lives, they won't dare try again. I've also dispatched a thousand men under Tukachevsky to secure Archangel."

The officer didn't answer. He only nodded, lips curling into something halfway between amusement and contempt.

"You're shorter than I expected," he said at last.

I laughed, a dry rasp that hung in the air. "That's what everyone says. Funny thing, though — it never stopped me from killing beside my men."

"Let's skip the pleasantries," he said, stepping forward. "Vsevolod Balitsky. KGB. I've been sent here by the Central Committee. I'll be blunt — they're very upset with what you've done."

"I see." I returned the nod, calm, almost bored. "So you and your men are here to arrest me? Shoot me? Or just put me on a leash?"

"The latter," he replied without hesitation. From his coat he produced a folded letter and held it out to me. "Better if you read this."

I took it, glanced at the seal, then smirked. "I'm disappointed. Honestly, I thought you'd pull out a pistol and shoot me on the spot."

Balitsky gave me a look then — sharp, clinical, like a doctor realizing the patient isn't just sick, but terminal. The kind of look that said: this man is completely insane, and somehow the revolution has decided to trust him with an army.

I broke the seal and unfolded the letter slowly, letting the silence hang between us. Balitsky's men stood at attention behind him, rifles held too neatly, eyes too fixed. Theatrical, the whole thing. A stage play with only one audience member.

The paper crackled in my hands. My eyes moved across the words. Each line felt heavier than the last.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps was no more. As of today, it was officially merged into the Red Army under Trotsky's command. My title, my creation, gone with a stroke of the pen. In exchange, they had given me something colder, heavier: General of the Northern Front. No seat at the table, no voice in the Central Committee. Just a uniform and orders.

I read further. I was to report to Leningrad for an official reprimand. Official reprimand — the phrase was underlined, as though to drive the knife in. Afterward, I was to secure Finland. Once the Finns were broken, I was to return to Leningrad and command the city's defenses for the rest of the war. A soldier's leash, tight and short.

My seat on the Central Committee — revoked. Replaced by that sniveling little shit Adolf Joffe, now Commissar of Religious Affairs. Religious Affairs. They hadn't just taken my place, they'd humiliated me with the replacement.

And then the line that made my pulse slow to a crawl: my Guards, the men who watched over my family, over the Committee itself — dismissed to barracks, to be sent to Finland with me. Their posts had been handed to the KGB. Balitsky's men. My family wasn't guarded anymore. They were held.

I lowered the letter, staring at the ink as if willing it to change. The air felt thin, the harbor distant. For the first time in months, I didn't laugh, didn't sneer, didn't talk to the ghost beside me.

I was in the shitter now. No doubt about it. They'd taken everything but my command of soldiers and the war itself — and even that was a leash, coiled tight around my throat.

Behind me, the sea slapped against the wreckage. A gull shrieked.

I folded the letter carefully, too carefully, and slipped it back into its envelope. My fingers lingered on the seal. Then I looked up at Balitsky. His eyes were steady, expectant.

For once, I had no joke to give him. Only silence.

I stared at the letter a moment longer, then let out a sharp bark of laughter. Not hysterical, not mocking — just enough to snap the tension like a rotten board. Balitsky flinched slightly, the first crack in his mask.

I straightened my coat, folded the letter neatly, and tucked it away. When I spoke, my voice was smooth, almost deferential. "Of course, Comrade Balitsky. If this is the will of the Central Committee, then I'll carry it out to the best of my abilities. Finland will fall, Murmansk and Archangel will hold. You'll have no complaints from me."

I tilted my head, polite as a bureaucrat at a tea party. I just sighed. I wanted to ask whose idea this was. But no, too much suspicious would be aroused. I'd ask Joe when I got back to the capital. Once I had the names. I would strike, though not yet.

On the surface, calm compliance. Inside, I was already planning to murder people. The gall of these people, taking my Guards, taking my family, daring to put them in the hands of the secret police. They thought this was a leash. They'd discover it was a fuse. Let the war end, let the Finns freeze in their trenches, let Murmansk hold. Then I would come for them. Patiently, methodically. And when the time came once the war ended, they would all die screaming.

But none of that reached my face. I only smiled, as if amused by the Committee's wisdom.

"I will need reinforcements, however," I continued, as though discussing a shipment of boots. "Murmansk and Archangel are not easy posts to hold, and the Czechoslovaks are… not exactly communists. They fight well enough, but they expect to be paid. Women, loot, alcohol, cigarettes, opium — you know, the usual currencies of loyalty."

Balitsky's mouth twitched at that, some mixture of disgust and reluctant acknowledgement. He said nothing, merely gestured for me to follow.

I fell in step beside him, hands folded politely behind my back, voice even and compliant. But inside, the fire burned steady and cold. Felix had made a mistake. A very grave mistake. And once the war was done, I would correct it.

Balitsky led me a few paces down the platform, his men shadowing us like tin soldiers. His voice was clipped, professional, the kind of tone a man uses when he wants to remind you that he represents not himself, but the state.

"More units will arrive shortly," he said. "The Red Army will reinforce both Murmansk and Archangel. You will not lack men."

"Good," I said smoothly. "The more the merrier." I glanced sideways at him, letting just a hint of steel creep into my voice. "And you may monitor me, Comrade. Monitor me, my officers, my Guards, hell — follow me into the latrine if it pleases you. But the Czechoslovaks are off limits."

His eyes narrowed slightly.

"Not because I care for them," I continued, almost conversationally, "but because I don't care to have a mutiny on my hands. These men aren't Bolsheviks, Balitsky. They're mercenaries with rifles and hangovers. They expect to loot, smoke, drink, and fuck to their heart's content. If you or your men interfere with that, you'll learn the hard way that the pistol on your belt can be used for more than intimidation."

Balitsky's jaw flexed, but he said nothing. He only gave the faintest nod, the kind a man gives when he wants you to know he heard the threat and will file it away for later.

I smiled, polite again, almost warm. "Good. Then we understand each other."

Inside, though, the fury still seethed. They thought I was leashed. They thought the KGB could strip me of my Guards, turn my family into hostages, and I would simply salute and smile. Let them. I would play the dutiful general for now. But when the war was done, when the northern front was quiet, I would break their leash. And then they would learn what happens when you touch what is mine.

I immediately called for an officer meeting, revolutionary guard only. The meeting was subsequently held in a drafty warehouse near the rail yard around 30 minutes later, a map of northern Russia including Finland spread across a table lit by a single lantern. The faces around me were hard and watchful — Voroshilov, a handful of Guards officers, commissars too frightened to speak. Tukachevsky was already gone, leading his thousand toward Archangel. Balitsky sat near the wall, silent, his KGB men standing like shadows behind him.

I placed the folded letter on the table, tapped it once with my finger, and let the silence stretch.

"This," I said flatly, "is the will of the Central Committee. As of this morning, the Revolutionary Guard Corps no longer exists. Our men are absorbed into the Red Army. I am now officially General of the Northern Front. I am ordered to secure Murmansk, hold Archangel, march on Finland, and afterward return to Leningrad to oversee the city's defense."

A murmur rippled through the room. I raised my hand, and the sound died at once.

"My seat on the Committee is gone. Adolf Joffe has replaced me. The Guards assigned to protect my family and our comrades in Moscow have been removed from their posts. They are now under the care of the KGB." My eyes flicked briefly toward Balitsky. "This is the reality. None of us will pretend otherwise."

The officers shifted uneasily, some glaring at the letter as though it might catch fire. I leaned forward, both palms pressed flat on the map.

"You will comply," I said, voice low but sharp as glass. "All of you. Because if one of you falters, if one of you 'forgets' his duty, the Central Committee will not just cut off my head — they will cut off my family's head and all of yours as well. And I will save them the trouble. If any man here fails in his orders, I will put a bullet in him myself."

The room went still. No one moved, no one breathed too loudly. Even Balitsky's eyes flickered toward me, weighing whether the threat included him.

I straightened and smoothed my coat, tone softening slightly. "The war will give us opportunities. Victories breed influence, and influence brings back what we've lost. So we obey. We hold the ports. We bleed the Finns. We keep the north secure."

I let my gaze sweep the table, pinning each man in turn. "But hear me clearly once again: one mistake, one botched defense, one drunken collapse of discipline — and I will personally execute the offender. Do you understand?"

A chorus of muttered Da, comrade general filled the air, voices uneven but obedient.

I leaned back at last, the faintest of smiles tugging at my mouth. "Good. Then we fight, we win, and we wait. That is how we survive this."

The lantern hissed in the silence that followed. Somewhere outside, the Czechoslovaks were already singing drunkenly, a woman's laugh rising above their voices. Balitsky sat rigid, his expression carefully neutral. He had his leash. For now.

Shortly after the meeting was done I called for a general meeting. The men were gathered in the square by the rail yard — Czechoslovaks smoking and laughing, Guards standing rigid in formation, commissars trying not to look disgusted at the whole spectacle. A chill wind rolled in off the water, carrying with it the smell of salt, smoke, and stale vodka.

I stepped up onto a crate, coat flapping, hands clasped behind my back. Over 10 thousand eyes turned toward me. I let the silence hang for just a moment, long enough for the cold to bite.

"Comrades!" I called out, voice carrying over the crowd. "As of today, the Central Committee has recognized our achievements. The Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Czechoslovak Legion, and all of you — the defenders of Murmansk!" I spread my arms wide. "The British have been crushed, their fleet sunk, their pride burned on our shore. And now, Moscow has given me a new title: I am your General, commander of the Northern Front!"

A ragged cheer rose — some earnest, some drunken, some sarcastic. I grinned through it. I didn't bother with the politics, let them think was on a winning streak instead of on the shitter. Like I heard in this one movie in my past life; always claim victory, even if defeated. I continued and took a deep breath.

"And with this command comes our next task. We are ordered south, to secure Finland!" I jabbed a finger at the horizon. "Do you know what that means? More loot! More women! More glory! A land rich with spoils, just waiting for the bravest to take it!"

That set them roaring — boots stomping, rifles waving, drunken voices shouting oaths and slurs. Even the Guards smirked, though they hid it behind their discipline.

"And once the Finns are broken, once the north is ours, we march back to Petrograd!" I raised my arms higher, voice booming. "And I assure you — the women there are far better looking, and the opium's better too!"

The laughter came like a wave, bawdy and vicious. Some of the Czechoslovaks shouted crude promises about Petrograd women, others broke into song. The Guards just stood, but the gleam in their eyes was enough.

I let the noise settle, then lowered my voice. "We move when reinforcements arrive. Not before. Until then, hold your posts, keep your rifles ready, and enjoy the spoils of victory."

I turned my head slightly, looking down at Balitsky where he stood at the edge of the crowd, stiff-backed, his face carved from stone.

"When will they arrive, Comrade Balitsky?" I asked, tone smooth, but loud enough for the men to hear.

All eyes shifted toward him. A ripple of amusement passed through the Czechoslovaks — the sight of a KGB man being put on the spot pleased them greatly.

Balitsky adjusted his coat, his voice carrying just enough. "Within the week. Several battalions are en route from Petrograd."

I nodded sharply, then spread my arms to the men again. "You hear that? A week! So drink, fuck, loot, and sing while you can. Because after that, comrades, we march to Finland!"

The cheer that followed shook the air like a storm. Balitsky's jaw tightened, but he held his silence.

 

[iceknight90]

Inside, though, the fury still seethed. They thought I was leashed. They thought the KGB could strip me of my Guards, turn my family into hostages, and I would simply salute and smile. Let them. I would play the dutiful general for now. But when the war was done, when the northern front was quiet, I would break their leash. And then they would learn what happens when you touch what is mine.

Click to shrink...

No Comrade Makarov, you were the Stalinist purges all along!

(Gasp) WHAT A TWIST!

Haha but seriously though, the upcoming reprisals are going to be messy as fuck.

 

[Xodarap]

Oh I called the mess trying to pursue party discipline for the Czech's and Balitsky is going to be cursing who's bright idea it was to piss off a army backed up with at most 2500 men hated for being commisars.

Heck they are taking Mikheil back to Lenningrad for however long it takes to go back and forth from Murmansk which could take up to a month due to conditions not to mention the additional months required for preparing a offensive with more men then was planned to take Finland by the time they arrive it will be autumn or mid summer.

All the while the Czech's have their original leadership ready to march on their own without Mikheil there to lay out the path if Balitsky tries to order them around.

 

[George Mathew]

The purge will be most glorious and the Czechs I suspect will have a large role to play as the distraction. I think the Revolutionary Guard is going to clean house with the traitors and the KGB.

 

[death734]

Thanks for the chapter, wordsmith.

 

[Deep_Blue]

Purge! Purge! Purge! Slaughter and be slaughtered!

 

[Alenco98]

July 3, 1918
Finland Station
Petrograd, Russian SFSR

The trip back from Murmansk was—against all odds—easier than expected. Which is saying something, considering I was marching ten thousand half-starved, increasingly paranoid Czechoslovaks south, with only five hundred of my own revolutionary guards and a mere three hundred KGB men to keep them in line. That, and the traveling brothel that attached itself to the column like a fungus—prostitutes of every conceivable shape and level of hygiene, following the legion like vultures trailing a wounded horse.

It helped that the weather shifted in our favor. Spring thaw had washed the stink off Murmansk, and summer stretched its sticky fingers as we rolled into Petrograd. Heat does wonders for morale. So does liquor. And opium. And women. For men with no country, those are better than patriotism.

Balitsky kept his promise—sort of. The legionnaires weren't forcibly indoctrinated. Instead, I identified a handful of "ideologically sympathetic" Czechoslovaks—read: ambitious drunks with malleable consciences—and promoted them into visible roles. Officially, hilariously, the legion was now a part of my army. In Siberia, word of Murmansk spread like syphilis in a barracks: Czechoslovaks were now killing each other over me. Mikheil-aligned versus Allied-aligned. Flattering, really. My name—Jugashvili—carved into their loyalties like initials into a cheap whore's thigh. Of course, it also meant there was a slightly larger target on my back.

Sometimes I wondered: what if I'd just gone to Vladivostok instead of wasting months in the Arctic Circle? Maybe the Siberian farce wouldn't have happened. Then again, my knowledge of this period was hazy, more like the blurry recollection of a hangover than a history lecture. I knew the Bolsheviks won. The Soviet Union existed. Lenin didn't get shot in the street like a dog, at least not yet. That was enough.

For now, priorities: the legion could rot in Finland Station. My men and the KGB already knew where to find the best prostitutes and opium dens in Petrograd. That would keep them quiet while I did damage control.

I stepped off the train and into the summer air, which smelled faintly of horse piss and revolution. Waiting for me were the few people I genuinely loved unconditionally: my mother Keke, my sons Iosif, Aleksander, Kato, and Besarion—who, I noticed, had started walking while I was gone. I missed that. Which stung. Not enough to make me cry, but enough to sour the taste of the air.

And then, the elephant—or rather, the absence—in the room: Aleksandra. Emphasis on the was. Six months in the ground, and though the grief had dulled, the space she left behind still felt like a broken tooth. You run your tongue over it, again and again, knowing it's gone, feeling the gap anyway.

The KGB men standing beside my family were less subtle reminders. Uniforms. Pistols. Blank stares. My blood boiled at the sight of them—those little bureaucratic executioners pretending to be guardians. But I played it cool. Always play it cool.

Balitsky, the eternal barnacle, leaned in. "Five minutes. Then we go to the Winter Palace."

I ignored him. Despite being angry that I was being treated like a criminal. I moved forward and embraced them—mother, then children. I allowed myself that brief moment of human weakness. Hugging, kissing, the whole sentimental theater. For a few seconds, I even felt something resembling joy. Then it ended. I saluted the KGB men. "Comrades."

Balitsky cleared his throat. I glanced at him. "Shall we?"

He nodded like a dog waiting for scraps.

I turned back to my family. "I need to meet the Central Committee. I'll be back. Dinner at Smolny."

The children swarmed me with questions, little vipers of curiosity.
"Papa, did you kill anyone?"
"Papa, how was the weather?"
"Papa, did you bring us books?"

I told them to wait until Smolny. Then, switching to Georgian, I whispered to my mother: "This is temporary. I promise."

Her reply, sharp as a dagger: "It better be."

We left in an armored car. I leaned back against the hard seat, watching the city pass in streaks of grey and red. My thoughts wandered, the way they always did when I wasn't actively murdering someone.

Punishment was inevitable. I knew that. I had broken rules, seized initiative, acted like a man rather than a cog. Losing my Central Committee seat? I could live with that. But taking my family hostage? Treating me like some bandit, some petty criminal? That was unforgivable.

I saved this revolution. Last July, then I broke Kornilov's coup. I stormed the Winter Palace. I held Pulkovo Heights. I helped to break the Kadet revolt. I slaughtered the SRs like cattle in Moscow and Petrograd. I even secured the damned royal family like an obedient hound. And for that—for that—my family was made into bargaining chips?

That would not stand. I would find out whose idea it was, who proposed to use my family like that. Then I would kill them. I would erase them so thoroughly that even the archives would forget their existence. A lesson. A demonstration. A warning. Cross Mikheil Jugashvili and you invite annihilation.

But patience was key. First, the war had to end. Then stability. Then Iosif—my dear, darling brother—would ascend. And only then: the purge.

I looked at Balitsky. We despised each other in silence, though I'd learned things about him. He had a wife. Children. A family man, like me. He grew defensive if I pressed too much, like a dog snapping at a probing stick. Understandable. His job was to monitor me, not bond with me. He'd probably write to Dzerzhinsky: "Subject attempted small talk. Possibly fishing for information."

Fine. He'd live. He was only doing his job, and I respect professionalism—even if I hated him.

I asked, "Do you have a cigarette?"

He shook his head. "I don't."

"Damn shame," I muttered, staring out the window at the city I had bled for, the city that would eventually drown in blood again—this time, mine or theirs.

Either way, Petrograd was about to learn what happens when you treat Mikheil Jugashvili like a criminal.


July 3, 1918
Winter Palace
Petrograd, Russian SFSR

The Committee chamber felt like a mausoleum that had been converted into a courtroom. Lenin sat at the center, staring at me as though trying to decide if I was a fellow revolutionary or a tumor that required surgical removal.

He opened first. "Comrade Jugashvili, your actions in Murmansk were reckless and unilateral."

His tone was sharp, flat, clinical—as if he were dissecting me on a table.

Zinoviev immediately jumped in, incapable of letting Lenin have the spotlight. "Unilateral? It was insubordination bordering on treason! You charged with the Czechoslovaks and your men as though they were your private army!"

He had the nasal whine of a eunuch lecturing on virility. Every syllable made me want to throttle him with his own cravat.

Kamenev nodded along, eager to ride Zinoviev's shadow. "Yes, yes. These actions cannot be tolerated. Discipline is the backbone of the Revolution."

He sounded like a schoolteacher warning children not to run in the hallways.

Joe, bless his heart, tried to soften it. "But comrades, Mikheil did stabilize Murmansk in the short term. Without him, the British could have used it as a stronghold." His voice was brief but final.

Dzerzhinsky, finally, leaned forward. He didn't shout. He didn't even raise his voice. His words came measured, precise, cutting like piano wire. "You are not a tsar, Jugashvili. You cannot crown yourself with an army." He let the words hang in the air. His eyes fixed on me like a taxidermist considering how best to mount a specimen.

I bowed my head in mock penitence, the perfect obedient soldier. "Yes, comrades. I accept full responsibility. My actions were rash. I submit to your judgment."

A silence followed, as though they were all hoping I'd break into defiance so they could pounce. I denied them the pleasure.

Lenin tapped his pen against the table. "Very well. You will redeem yourself. Per the orders we sent you, you are to go to Finland. End the civil war there. Failure is not an option."

"I will do as asked." My voice was calm, solemn, loyal. Then I added, almost sheepishly: "I have one request, comrades."

Lenin squinted. He didn't like requests. "Yes?"

"I would like to bring my children with me to the front."

The room froze. Zinoviev's jaw dropped open. Kamenev looked like someone had just slapped him with a dead fish. Bukharin's eyes went wide with shock, then darted nervously around the room.

I pressed on, tone soft, almost fatherly. "I have missed them deeply. They are young. Impressionable. I want them close, to see what we fight for. To learn the Revolution at my side, not from stories after the fact. A father shouldn't be far from them, especially when they're growing up."

Zinoviev was the first to explode. "Outrageous! This is not a family outing, it is war! What are we now, a circus caravan?" His voice cracked halfway through, like an opera singer straining for a note beyond his range.

Kamenev nodded furiously, terrified of being left behind. "Yes! Yes, the front is no place for children! It is irresponsible!"

Dzerzhinsky's gaze never wavered from me. He didn't blink. He was weighing, dissecting, already calculating the possibility that my "sentiment" was camouflage. "No, they stay, it's oddly suspicious. You're trying to take our leverage away."

Lenin, finally, raised his hand for silence. He rubbed his forehead as if suddenly aware that he was surrounded by idiots and lunatics. "It is suspicious," he admitted, clipped as ever. "The children stay."

The others said nothing, some muttering under their breath. Zinoviev looked smug in that self satisfied way, like he wanted to leap across the table and taunt me in my face, but he lacked the spine. Kamenev stared at the ceiling, trying to vanish. Stalin said nothing. And Dzerzhinsky—he just kept staring, the faintest curl of contempt on his lips. Another mark on his lips, he is plotting something.

I bowed low, concealing the rage tugging at my mouth. Outwardly: obedient, grateful, humbled. Inwardly: pissed. My family would be here, as hostages, not as potential escapees like I hoped. My insurance policy. My exit strategy. I really was in the shitter, I couldn't fail.

"Thank you, comrades," I said, voice smooth as velvet. "I will not fail."

And as I straightened, staring into that semicircle of pale, exhausted faces, I thought: You think you're sending me to Finland to serve the Revolution. In truth, I'm going there to sharpen the knife. And when I come back, it won't be with excuses. It'll be with blood. I was going to help Joe, we would kill them all.

Dinner later that night had been the usual charade: overcooked potatoes, grey meat that might have been beef or might have been horse, Khachapuri, and polite revolutionary conversation about the war. My children sat beside me, buzzing with questions, their little hands reaching for bread like sparrows fighting over crumbs. My mother scowled at the KGB guards posted in the corners.

Afterward, I excused myself. My children kissed my hands, my mother muttered a prayer under her breath, and I went to see my brother who had finished dinner early.

Iosif was waiting in his quarters, fire crackling in the hearth, chessboard already set like I asked.

We sat. Black pieces were his, white mine, i'd never beat him anyways, at best I would occasionally draw him. The firelight threw long shadows across the room, turning his pockmarked face into something carved from old wood. We played in silence for several moves. He advanced a pawn. I countered with a knight. He lit his pipe. The smoke curled in the dim light like a ghost unwilling to leave.

And then I did it. Quietly. Casually. As if it were nothing.

I took a scrap of paper from my pocket, tore it neatly down the middle, and in my careful Georgian script wrote the words: "Who proposed making my family hostages?"

I slid it across the board, beneath the looming bishops and rooks, as though it were just another move in the game.

Iosif didn't flinch. Didn't look up. Didn't betray a thing. He just stared at the note for a long moment, then tapped ash from his pipe into the tray. Finally, he picked up the paper, read it, and tucked it beneath the board as though hiding a captured piece.

He moved his rook. "Check," he said in Georgian, his voice flat.

I stared at the board, feigning irritation at his move. Inside, my blood was boiling. This was the only man alive I could even attempt to ask. Everyone else would report me before I finished the sentence.

Iosif leaned back, exhaling smoke. His eyes met mine across the chessboard. For a second—just a second—I thought I saw something flicker there. Guilt? Anger? Agreement?

But he said nothing. He kept up the Georgian, quietly: "Careful, Misha."

It was the closest I would get to an answer tonight.

I nodded, as if agreeing, but inside my thoughts spiraled: Was it him? Did he suggest it? Or was he simply parroting Lenin, covering tracks? My brother, my blood—was he my shield, or the knife at my back?

I moved my queen to block his check, smiled faintly, and said, "Your move."

I glanced at the spot where Stalin hid the paper one more time. "You owe me that much after I saved your life twice Joe." I said in Georgian.

Iosif took the paper and read it again, eyes scanning the words with that cold, half-lidded stare of his. He pulled a pen from his coat pocket, turned the paper over, and scratched out a single word.

He pushed it back.

I lifted the note, glanced down, and there it was:

Dzerzhinsky.

I let out the faintest laugh—quiet, sharp, humorless. The sound of a knife drawn in the dark.

Of course it was him. I should have been able to figure it out. Iron Felix, patron saint of paranoia, whose idea of mercy was shooting you once instead of twice. It made perfect sense. He wouldn't have seen it as cruelty, but efficiency. A way to guarantee my obedience: put my children in the same ledger as rifles and factory quotas.

I looked back at Iosif. He hadn't moved a muscle. Just puffed on his pipe, eyes fixed on the board as if he hadn't just condemned the head of the Cheka with one word.

He finally muttered in Georgian, low and flat: "Don't."

That was it. No advice, no reassurance. Just that.

I moved my knight, pretending to think about the game. Inside, I was already planning: how, when, where. Dzerzhinsky would pay. Not yet. Not while the war still burned. Not while the Revolution needed his blood-soaked hands. But eventually. And when that day came, I wouldn't just kill him. I'd dismantle him. Piece by piece, like taking apart a watch to see how it ticks. I'd make his family watch before I killed him, I had too much respect for him to kill his family, he was one of us after all. But he would still die.

I slid a pawn forward, smiled faintly, then switched back to Russian. "Your move, brother."

I picked up the note again. I turned it over to a clean space, and in careful Georgian script I wrote:

"Once the war ends, he's a dead man."

I slid it across, tucked beneath the queen as though she herself were delivering the message.

Iosif's eyes flicked down, scanning the words without a twitch of his face. No shock, no disapproval. Just the same unreadable mask, as if I'd written down what time the train was arriving instead of a death sentence for the head of the KGB.

He didn't reply. He didn't even sigh. Instead, he folded the scrap, held it over the fire, and let the flames swallow it. No words, no acknowledgment. Just smoke, curling up the chimney, carrying my threat into the night.

Then he moved his rook and said, "Check."

I frowned, leaned back, and tried to untangle the board. A few more moves and the inevitable happened: his queen slid into place, decisive, merciless.

"Checkmate."

I sighed, theatrically, like a man wronged by fate rather than his own incompetence. "You always win."

Iosif tamped his pipe, exhaled smoke, and gave the faintest of shrugs. "That's because you can't see the big picture. You focus on one part of the board—one piece, one scheme—and the rest blindsides you. Like what you did in Murmansk."

I stared at the board. He wasn't wrong. My eyes always narrowed in on a single piece I wanted dead—like Dzerzhinsky—and the rest became background noise.

"I like to think of it as efficiency," I muttered.

Iosif smirked—barely, but enough to register. "Efficiency is good for killing. Not for surviving."

The fire popped. The pieces gleamed in the orange light.

We reset the board in silence, but the lesson sat there between us, heavier than the wood and stone: I was already playing a long game against Dzerzhinsky. And Iosif, damn him, was already reminding me he knew how it ended.

Finland Station
Petrograd
July 9, 1918

A week later, the station was once again a theatre of departures. Steam hissed, whistles shrieked, and the air smelled of coal smoke, piss, and sweat—Russia's perfume. Soldiers lounged on crates, KGB men stood stiff with their rifles, and a few prostitutes loitered in the shadows like moths that couldn't decide which flame to burn themselves on.

The trains that would take me and the men to Finland sat waiting, engines churning like a caged animal. The wagons were packed with rifles, vodka, and enough ammunition to make the Finns regret ever inventing independence.

Iosif came to see me off. He stood there, pipe in hand, hat low, face as unreadable as ever. Next to him was Aleksander, my brother-in-law, earnest as a priest and twice as nervous. Both men looked like they were attending a funeral instead of a departure.

I straightened my coat, adjusted my belt, and forced a smile. "Don't look so grim. I'll win this war quickly. Finland will be ours before you finish your next game of chess."

Iosif puffed his pipe, smoke curling around his head like a halo made of ash. "Wars are never quick, Misha. Not the ones worth fighting."

Aleksander shifted uncomfortably, glancing at the KGB nearby. He leaned in and muttered, "Dont get yourself killed."

I laughed, too loud, too sharp. "Don't get myself killed? Please, I intend to do the killing. The Finns don't know what's about to hit them. Loot, women, glory—what more could a soldier want?"

Iosif's eyes narrowed at me. He didn't bother answering. He just tapped his pipe out on the station railing, letting the ashes scatter in the wind like a prophecy.

The whistle shrieked again. The guards began shouting, herding men toward the train. I embraced Aleksander, clapping his back hard enough to make him stumble. Then I turned to my brother.

Iosif didn't move to hug me. He never did. Instead, he simply said, low enough for only me to hear: "See the whole board this time, Misha."

I nodded, though inside I was already sharpening my focus to a single point: Finland, victory, and after that, Dzerzhinsky.

I climbed onto the train, the metal steps clanging beneath my boots. As the doors slammed shut and the wheels lurched forward, I leaned out the window for one last look at the two of them standing on the platform—Iosif, a statue carved from smoke and stone, and Aleksander, wringing his hands like a man already mourning me.

I waved once, theatrically. "Don't wait too long—I'll be back before winter!"

The train groaned, the station slid away, and with it, Petrograd. Ahead lay Finland. A civil war to crush, a reputation to salvage, and eventually—a debt to collect in blood. Dzerzhinsky you are so fucked.

 

[iceknight90]

Mikhail: Felix? This was your doing?

YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE MY FRIEND!


View: https://youtube.com/shorts/wIy2gNNIpik?si=iCunWTtDWLZbCEX9

 

[Angry_Crustacean]

I love how Joe is becoming more trusting to his brother. Dynamic duo they are

 

[death734]

Thanks for the chapter, wordsmith.

 

[wetwipefatass]

love how Joe is becoming more trusting to his brother

Click to shrink...

Stalin's trust is inversely proportional to his perception of the protagonists competence. up until now, he saw him as both a friend and a threat, incapable of understanding how deep the bond s of family run for him. however after he has miss stepped and got reprimanded, aka fucked up for the first time in the story, Stalin can finally see the faults beneath the veneer of competence. in seeing that his brother is fallible, the threat level he represents has been considerably lowered. thus rendering him open to being friendly with only a marginal increase in risk.

either that or joe is a tsun bro.

 

[George Mathew]

Realest take on Stalin, dude just needs leverage. If he has that and then he can help him out.

 

[KANIPINK]

I don't think its worth to continue fighting. Imagine going to U.S living peaceful life with his family.
Its like watching a gambling addict keep saying "when i win, it will be worth it".

 

[Deathsea22]

I don't think its worth to continue fighting. Imagine going to U.S living peaceful life with his family.
Its like watching a gambling addict keep saying "when i win, it will be worth it".

Click to shrink...

See the problem with that is that it would be boring as all hell to read. I want drama, I want violence, I want revolution comrade and I want it in abundance.

 

[Alenco98]

July 24, 1918
Helsinki
Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic

Kullervo Manner's office looked less like a seat of government and more like a provincial clerk's waiting room that had accidentally declared itself a republic. Peeling wallpaper. A desk with one leg shorter than the others. The map of Finland spread across it looked like someone had spilled soup on Karelia.

Manner himself sat across from me: pale, tired, his eyes twitching like a man permanently on the verge of either collapse or enlightenment. He looked like the kind of man who'd faint at the sight of blood, which made him an odd choice for the figurehead of a civil war. Beside me, of course, sat Balitsky—my minder, my shadow, my personal hemorrhoid in human form. Always there, always throbbing at the worst times.

We studied the map together, though "studied" was generous. The situation was a mess. No, worse than a mess—a Picasso of incompetence. Salvageable, but only if someone like me had the appetite for bloodletting.

The Whites had already taken Tampere, which wasn't just a city—it was the railway spine of Finland. With it gone, the entire southwest up to a few miles north of Turku was basically White territory. What we Reds still held was the south: Turku, Helsinki, the stretch along the border back to Petrograd. A sliver. A lifeline.

I'd left my Revolutionary Guard Corps in Viipuri to guard that lifeline, because I'm not suicidal. With me here I had ten thousand Czechoslovaks—experienced, heavily armed, lightly disciplined, and horny beyond comprehension. Plus a thousand KGB men, because Dzerzhinsky insisted on one rat for every ten soldiers. I hadn't argued. You don't argue with the man who invented paranoia as a political system. I just insisted the KGB fight beside my men. Even Felix couldn't object to shared body bags.

The Czechs, so far, were tolerable. They didn't speak Russian, which was probably a mercy. They relied on translators who conveniently relayed only the words I wanted heard, which meant most of the time the legionnaires sounded about as dangerous as a choir practice. Meanwhile I'd begun learning Czech myself. Basics only: hello, goodbye, kill them, charge, hold, flank left, flank right. Enough to run a battlefield, not enough to order a beer. Which was fine—I wasn't here for beer.

Still, the south gave me one advantage: population. Most of Finland's people were crammed here, which meant Red support was thickest here too. And, to my surprise, they cheered when I arrived. Apparently my reputation preceded me—stormer of Winter Palaces, butcher of SRs, savior of Petrograd. They smiled at me like I was Jesus returning for the sequel. It was sweet. Sweet didn't win wars, though. Wars required teeth.

So I'd laid down three decrees the night before, scrawled hastily and shoved into Manner's trembling hands.

First: end the anticlerical nonsense. Set up a Finnish Commissariat of Religious Affairs. Let the priests preach, just make sure they were on payroll. A bullet in the head was less effective than a tax bill.

Second: automatic amnesty for any White officers or soldiers who defected during the next two months. Let them crawl back, lay down their rifles, pretend they'd always been loyal. The amnesty announcement came with an added note of my previous atrocities and my arrival—and of the Czechs. Fear is a better recruiter than pamphlets.

Third: economic reform. Land redistributed, three acres and a shovel per man. Small businesses allowed to operate. Bread on the table, vodka in the glass, profit in the pocket. Call it Socialism with Finnish characteristics.

It was practical. It was sane. It might even save them.

And yet, Manner was staring at me like I had just unbuttoned his mother's blouse at a funeral. His lips pressed thin, his hands trembling slightly over the map.

"This…" he began, his voice quivering, "is… not… Marxism."

I smiled, wolfish, and leaned in close enough he could smell the tobacco on my breath. "No, comrade. It's survival. Pick whichever you prefer."

He said nothing. He couldn't. He knew as well as I did he was a puppet dancing on strings. And right now, I was holding the scissors.

As for Balitsky—well, he kept his face carefully neutral. But I saw the flicker in his eyes. He knew my orders: secure Finland at all costs. If I said ending anticlericalism and giving peasants three acres was "at all costs," then he couldn't argue. He might report it, sure, but in the meantime, he'd have to watch me play statesman while he sat like a sour-faced nanny.

I leaned back, laced my fingers behind my head, and grinned. "So, gentlemen, shall we win a civil war?"

They both answered. And then the arguing began.

It went in circles, like a drunk stumbling home—back and forth, bumping into the same lampposts.

Manner, pale and sweating, jabbed a trembling finger at my decrees. "This—this is revisionism! Marx spoke of abolishing religion. He spoke of smashing the old order, not—"

I cut him off with a laugh sharp enough to draw blood. "Where? Show me. Where did Marx ever say 'close churches and shoot priests'? Go on, find me the page, chapter and verse. If you can, I'll personally cut the throat of the Archbishop of Helsinki with my own knife while his family watches."

The silence that followed was delicious. Manner's lips flapped soundlessly, like a fish gasping for water. He'd never expected anyone to call his bluff with a dose of practical savagery.

I leaned over the map, jabbing at Tampere with my finger. "Look around you, Kullervo. This is not a seminar, this is war. The Whites are at your throat. You're not Karl Marx, you're a provincial lawyer presiding over a collapsing republic. And I and my men—" I stabbed the map again, "—am the only thing standing between you and absolute defeat."

Manner wilted further into his chair, muttering something about "principles."

That was when Balitsky, ever the parasite, finally opened his mouth. "Comrade Jugashvili," he said, tone oily but firm, "Comrade Manner is correct. These reforms are unorthodox. Dangerous. You may be undermining the Revolution by coddling priests and petit bourgeois alike."

I turned on him, smiling wide enough to show teeth. "Balitsky. Tell me—what were my orders from the Central Committee?"

He hesitated. "To secure Finland. At all costs."

"Exactly." I spread my arms, magnanimous, mocking. "At. All. Costs. And right now, 'all costs' includes letting peasants keep three acres and a shovel, and not crucifying priests for the crime of breathing. You think Dzerzhinsky will send you here to wring your hands about Marx? No. He sent you here to make sure I win. And that I don't attempt a coup or another Murmansk. And right now should I remind you, these policies are what we're doing in Russia at the moment."

Balitsky's jaw tightened, but he said nothing. His silence was as good as a confession.

Manner looked between us like a rabbit caught between two wolves. He wanted to argue again, I could see it in his watery eyes. But he also knew the truth: I was his only lifeline. Without me and my ten thousand Czech lunatics, the Whites would be in Helsinki by autumn, stringing him up from a lamppost with piano wire.

I leaned back, folded my arms, and let the silence choke the room. "So. Do we spend the next hour arguing about scripture," I said with a smirk, "or do we win a civil war? I'd rather do the latter, I have plenty of bullets to spare."

Manner slumped back in his chair, shoulders sagging like a man who'd just signed his own death warrant. His hands shook as he adjusted his glasses, but his voice had gone hollow, resigned.

"Very well… Comrade Jugashvili. We will try it your way."

Victory. Not the battlefield kind—this was better. Bureaucratic victory. Watching a man fold in front of me without firing a shot. It made me giddy. Like cheating at cards and pocketing the pot while your opponent insisted the rules weren't clear enough.

I clapped my hands together. "Excellent. Now, just one more thing."

Manner's head snapped up, eyes wide. He looked like a dog beaten too often—every extra word was another kick.

I leaned over the map again, tapping with my finger for emphasis. "The Red Guard is finished. Dissolved. From this day forward, there will be no militias, no gangs of half-trained workers in mismatched boots pretending to be soldiers. The new Finland is getting a real army."

Manner opened his mouth to object, but I cut him off before he could squeak.

"Officer schools will reopen immediately. We'll recruit former Tsarist officers—they know how to fight, and right now you don't have the luxury of ideological purity. Their families, of course, will be taken hostage. Insurance. If an officer bolts or betrays us, the wife and children pay. Discipline enforced not with speeches but with firing squads. Standard uniforms, clear ranks, proper drills. The death penalty for desertion. In short—an army. Not a mob."

Balitsky sat straighter at that. For once, approval flickered across his pinched face. He nodded. "I agree. This is sound. Dzerzhinsky will approve of proper discipline."

I smiled, wolfish. "Good. You'll handle the details. Hostages, family oversight, commissar assignments. I want it done properly—no sloppiness. You have experience with lists. Make lists."

He raised an eyebrow, the faintest trace of suspicion in his eyes. "I will handle it. But understand, comrade—I want oversight of this new army. Commissars in every regiment. I'll be reporting this directly to Dzerzhinsky."

"Perfect," I said without missing a beat. "We'll need commissars anyway. As many as we can get, recruit as many Finnish as you can. I want every regiment watched twice over—once by the officers and once by your men. Soldiers need two things: rifles and fear. You'll provide the fear. I'll provide the rifles."

Balitsky exhaled, satisfied. He had what he wanted—his leash firmly fastened to my neck.

Manner looked horrified, but wisely stayed silent. He understood the arithmetic: without me, he had nothing. With me, he had a chance—even if it came drenched in blood.

I leaned back in my chair, grinning like a man who'd just bought a condemned building for half price. "Good. Now we can win this war."

July 24, 1918
Evening
Helsinki – Senate Square

The decrees were announced at sunset. A makeshift podium had been dragged into Senate Square, framed by red banners and guarded by my Czechoslovaks, who looked like they'd wandered in from another planet. Behind me stood Manner, pale and stiff, the image of a man who wanted to die quietly in bed but had instead found himself presiding over a funeral for ideology. To my left, Balitsky and his KGB men, notebooks in hand, eyes sweeping the crowd like butchers selecting livestock.

I stepped forward.

"Comrades!" My voice carried over the square. "I bring you progress—not speeches, not promises, not slogans, but rules. Laws. Survival."

A murmur swept through the crowd. Workers, soldiers, women with children clutching at their skirts. Faces lean from hunger, eyes wide with desperation. Perfect audience.

I raised the first decree. "From today, the harassment of priests ends. Churches will reopen. Religion will be overseen by the Commissariat of Religious Affairs. You may pray, so long as your priest registers like every other servant of the state. No more secret worship, no more bullet in the head just for wearing a cassock. God is not dead."

The crowd buzzed. Some cheered. Others muttered. I caught sight of a few priests blinking back tears. Manner shifted uneasily behind me, but said nothing.

Second decree. "For the next 2 months, any White soldier or officer who defects will be granted amnesty. Lay down your arms and live. Refuse, and well, I'm sure my reputation precedes me. When you meet me, you'll wish you had taken my offer."

This drew louder cheers. Men in the crowd glanced at each other, calculating—wondering if their sons or brothers in White ranks might yet return alive.

Third decree. "Land reform. Every peasant shall receive three acres and a shovel. Small businesses may operate freely—so long as they respect labor laws and taxes. We are not here to strangle the peasant or the shopkeeper. We are here to strangle the bourgeois who refuse to work."

A roar went up at that. Hungry men love promises of land and bread. Manner looked like he was about to faint.

I raised the final decree slowly, savoring the silence. "And now—discipline. The Red Guard is hereby dissolved. In its place, the Finnish People's Army will be formed. A real army. Officer schools reopened. Former Tsarist officers recalled to service with their family under guard to protect them from reprisals from the reactionaries." (Hostages).

Gasps. Murmurs. I pressed on, cutting through it.

"Every soldier will wear a uniform. Every regiment will march in order. Desertion will be punished by death. Treason will be punished by death. Cowardice will be punished by death. This is not a militia. This is not a mob. This is an army. And with an army—we will win."

The crowd fell silent, then slowly began to clap. Uneven, uncertain at first, but swelling into thunder. Not love—fear, desperation, resignation. Which, frankly, was better than love. Love fades. Fear lingers.

I raised my arms. "You want freedom? You want bread? You want to live? Then you will fight with discipline, and you will win—or you will die trying. Those are the only options history ever gives."

The square erupted—cheers, chants, fists raised. Some faces were pale with dread. Others lit with fanaticism. It didn't matter. They were mine now.

Behind me, Manner looked like he'd swallowed poison. Balitsky, on the other hand, was actually smiling—thin, predatory. He saw his commissar network already taking root in this new army, a thousand strings pulling tight.

And me? I felt alive. I'd just traded chaos for order, mobs for soldiers, mutiny for fear. Finland was now on a war footing—and it was my war to win.

 

[TrahKartolo]

He is coping his wife death by inflicting more death. Poetic, sad. Future history class will love this guy for sure.

 

[BuilderOne]

He is coping his wife death by inflicting more death. Poetic, sad. Future history class will love this guy for sure.

Click to shrink...

In his defense, that's what the OTL!Stalin did.

And based on snippets given by the OP? Future would remember him as the only sane (or capable) man among the sea of chaos.

 

[Diallos]

MC seems to have very much drunk the warmonger koolaid

 

[Alenco98]

September 19, 1918
Officer School Parade Ground
Helsinki, Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic

I stood before the first batch of graduates from our little officers' school, lined up on the parade ground like tin soldiers waiting for someone to wind the key in their backs. Roughly two hundred of them—though I didn't bother to count; I've never been good at math unless it involves bullets or corpses. Some were so young I swore I could still smell the milk on their breath, while others looked like they'd already buried half their friends and were waiting for the favor to be returned. A few faces were so wrinkled they resembled dried fruit, raisins stuffed into uniforms two sizes too small.

Uniforms, yes—we had those now. Brown shirts, red armbands, red caps. Almost impressive, if you squinted hard enough. At least they all matched, which was a step up from the rags and mismatched boots they'd shuffled around in two months ago. They looked like men trying very hard to pretend at soldiering, and I found it unbearably cute. Like children playing war with sticks, only here the sticks had bayonets.

Beside me, Mikhail Svechnikov delivered his oration with all the grim determination of a man trying to breathe life into stone. He was one of the Finnish Reds' more prominent leaders, and I had given him the unenviable job of turning our rabble into something resembling an army. He had whipped, drilled, and indoctrinated them until they stopped looking like a mob and started looking like…well, a disciplined mob. He dissolved the old Red Guards, restructured them, even shot a handful of particularly insubordinate ones just to prove he was serious. The Finns, to their credit, learned quickly when lead started flying in their direction.

Svechnikov was speaking now about duty, sacrifice, the revolution, and all that. His voice carried over the square like a sermon, the recruits stiff as statues under his gaze. Everyone around me—Commissars, aides, some locals dragged here for the spectacle—wore masks of grim reverence, as though this was history in the making. And perhaps it was. But God, it was dull.

I shifted my weight, fought back a yawn, and wished someone would put a bullet in me to end the ceremony. Not even a fatal one—just something in the leg so I could limp away and find a drink. Instead, I stood there, nodding when expected, pretending to be invested. On the inside, I was screaming.

This was Svechnikov's triumph: his parade, his neat little rows of recruits. My triumphs were dirtier, bloodier. While he barked orders and polished his precious toy army, I played fireman across the country—rushing from one blaze to the next, holding off White attacks, raiding towns, looting estates, feeding prisoners to Lenin the bear. The fronts had stabilized somewhat; three weeks ago we'd even pushed north, taking Hämeenlinna after a bloody fight and shooting a wee bit of chlorine shells I imported from Petrograd. Now we were closer to Tampere. That was real work, satisfying work. Killing, burning, stealing—it kept the blood flowing, kept the grief at bay.

Grief. Aleksandra's name still echoed at odd moments, like a stone dropped down a well. I no longer felt the sharp stab of it, just a dull ache, a kind of phantom limb where she had once been. I missed her, but the world hadn't stopped turning, and neither had the war. Numbness is easier than pain, and war is good at making men comfortably numb.

Svechnikov droned on. My mind wandered. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine myself anywhere else. A café, perhaps, with something sweet in hand. Bubble tea, the only thing that mattered. Tapioca—chewy little balls in syrup, delicious. Imagine dropping those into sweetened milk tea, sitting back and sipping while the world burned. Yes, I thought, I'll "invent" it after the war. Assuming I'm still alive. Assuming Dzerzhinsky doesn't have me shot.

Sooner or later—though it felt like several lifetimes—Svechnikov's sermon sputtered to an end. The recruits, to their credit, didn't even attempt a rousing cheer. Instead, they clapped. Polite, wooden, mechanical clapping, the kind you hear in a theater when the actor forgets his lines but everyone feels obliged to pretend it was part of the show. It echoed thinly across the parade ground, hollow as a coffin.

They began filing away, boots crunching on the gravel, heading back to their barracks to polish rifles, chant slogans, or whatever it is proper soldiers are supposed to do when they aren't being shot at. I left too, more than happy to abandon the theater of discipline for the theater of war. My guards, grim and dutiful, shadowed me as I slid into my car—one of ten armored beasts that made up my convoy. Ten steel-plated chariots, because apparently one Mikheil Jugashvili requires the protection normally afforded to a Tsar.

We rumbled out of the officer school and onto the road north. Hämeenlinna awaited, and with it my Czechoslovaks—those wonderful lunatics currently resting, drinking, refitting, and likely violating every law of God and man before our push on Tampere. They were my blunt instrument, my pack of wolves, and I loved them for it.

The Finns? They were now an army, or at least a reasonable facsimile of one. Not elite, not even competent, but they didn't need to be. Their job was not to shine but simply not to shatter. They would be the wall, the shaft of the spear. My Czechoslovaks and the Revolutionary Guard Corps—excuse me, the Soviet Army now, since some people in the central committee didn't like my antics in Murmansk—would be the tip. It was a crude spear, unwieldy and splintered, but sharp enough to pierce a White belly.

Of course, sharpness requires maintenance. My Czechoslovaks were mercenaries at heart, and mercenaries need feeding. I fed them well. White estates had become buffets: jewelry boxes cracked open like walnuts, livestock marched away in drunken parades, pianos and chairs tossed onto wagons, whole wine cellars drunk dry before the dust had settled. Opium when available, prostitutes when willing. They looted like Vikings, and I let them, because loot was their pay, their leash, their opiate. A satisfied mercenary doesn't stab his employer in the back. Not immediately, anyway.

And while the Czechs gorged themselves, I set about my real work: tearing Finland up by the roots and replanting it in red soil. Ending anti clericalism was easy, just station a few guards outside churches, commissars in every mass to ensure no bullshit about counterrevolution was spewed and killing a few more anti clerical red guards and that was that.

Same with businesses, patrols, tax collection, just like Petrograd all over again except on a nationwide basis. Simple.

Land redistribution, easy, and done with all the subtlety of a man swinging a sledgehammer at a glass chandelier. Three acres and a shovel for every peasant, a bullet and a shallow grave for every noble who thought he could say "no." The ones who bent the knee got to live and were promptly shipped to Helsinki to toil in factories until their backs broke. Brutal, yes. Messy, always. Effective, beyond question.

The result was something that might even pass for stability. In our slice of Finland, peasants now liked us. They didn't cheer because they loved Marx, or the Internationale, or even the revolution itself. They cheered because we gave them dirt and blood. Land to till, enemies to hate, corpses to gloat over. It didn't matter which came first. The order of operations was irrelevant. The formula worked.

As the convoy rattled north, I leaned back against the cold steel and thought about how fragile it all was. An army built on plunder, a nation rebuilt at bayonet-point, peasants bought with land that had been stolen and stained. It would all crumble someday. But not today. Today, at least, the spear was still pointed forward.

 

[iceknight90]

As the convoy rattled north, I leaned back against the cold steel and thought about how fragile it all was. An army built on plunder, a nation rebuilt at bayonet-point, peasants bought with land that had been stolen and stained. It would all crumble someday. But not today. Today, at least, the spear was still pointed forward.

Click to shrink...

Sooner or later the entire Soviet Union will be held together by awe and fear of Comrade Makarov as a Soviet Bonaparte.

Or perhaps a Nader Shah, Ivan the Terrible, Tamerlane, or Genghis Khan might be more appropriate given his leadership style.

 

[BuilderOne]

But not today. Today, at least, the spear was still pointed forward.

Click to shrink...

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid

 

[Alenco98]

September 27, 1918
Outskirts of Toijala
Contested Finnish Territory

Nikolai Yezhov stood rigid at attention with the rest of the men, boots sinking into the damp earth, rifle heavy in his hands. His eyes, however, were fixed on one figure alone: General Mikheil Jugashvili.

Terrifying—that was the only word he could summon. Terrifying in the way of a thunderstorm, or a wolf staring you down from the treeline. You could not help but admire the force, even as every instinct screamed to flee.

Yezhov had joined the Red Army last year after the revolution, a nameless cog swallowed by the machine of war. He had expected chaos, slogans, and bullets. Instead, he found himself under the command of Jugashvili—a name whispered in barracks, alleyways and taverns, part commander, part monster, part legend. Yezhov had seen enough already to understand the paradox: men feared him as much as they cheered him. They obeyed him with the trembling eagerness of children desperate for approval, or convicts desperate for mercy.

Mikheil stepped forward now, boots grinding gravel, eyes darting over the line of soldiers like a butcher evaluating livestock. He spoke without preamble, his tone almost casual, though every word carried like a hammer striking iron.

"I won't mince words here, comrades." He began pacing down the line, his coat brushing against rifles as he moved. "Some of you will die today. I might die today." He stopped suddenly, shrugged with exaggerated indifference, as if death were a mild inconvenience rather than a certainty.

"But it doesn't matter." His voice sharpened, slicing through the morning fog. "Our cause is righteous. For too long the upper classes—the bourgeoisie, the parasites, the fattened pigs—have pressed their knees upon our necks and choked the very life out of us. Many of you have seen your mothers scrubbing floors until their bones ached, your brothers and sisters buried before their time, your wives and children starving, while the rich wine and dine themselves into a decadent stupor."

He turned sharply, his dark eyes sweeping the ranks. Yezhov felt them brush over him and, for a fleeting instant, it was as if the general saw straight into his marrow.

"Today," Mikheil continued, his lips curling into a grin that was equal parts mirth and menace, "we show them what happens when they sit back and eat cake. Today—" he paused, letting the silence stretch, letting the men lean into the moment "—we eat the rich."

The soldiers chuckled nervously, some smirked, others swallowed hard. Yezhov could feel his heart hammering in his chest. The words weren't just rhetoric. They were a promise.

Mikheil's expression shifted, the grin hardening into something colder, more focused. "So take heart. Today is another step in our journey to carve out a new world. By the time this war ends, comrades, we will have drowned ourselves in vengeance, drunk and staggering from it like men after too much vodka." His voice rose, thundering now. "And by the time this battle ends—you will have your fill! Women! Glory! Loot!"

The line erupted in cheers, rifles raised, voices ragged with adrenaline and fear. Yezhov joined in, throat hoarse, though his eyes never left Mikheil.

The priests came next, their cassocks flapping in the wind like crows' wings, and behind them the men from logistics pushing a wheelbarrow stacked high with cigarettes and ration tins. It was always the same ritual before a fight. You could have last rites, cigarettes, or both if you were greedy enough. Most took the cigarettes. Smoke to steel the nerves, tobacco to keep the hands from shaking. A few of the younger ones, and even some of the veterans with weathered faces and glassy eyes, bowed their heads for the blessing too, murmuring their "Amens" with ash already on their lips. He took a cigarette.

The priests muttered their prayers quickly, like men already halfway to the grave themselves. The commissars from the KGB looked on with their habitual contempt, scribbling notes into their little black books as if each prayer were a future death sentence waiting to be carried out. Yezhov thought they looked more like accountants than revolutionaries—keeping ledgers not of money, but of lives to be snuffed out later.

Then the column formed, boots crunching against the frozen earth. But they didn't march west, toward Toijala where the real battle raged. Instead, they were ordered south, into the woods and low ground. Yezhov glanced back once as they left their base in Tyrisevä. Behind them, the Czechoslovaks and Finnish Reds were surging toward Toijala proper, banners snapping, drums pounding faintly. His own detachment, however, slipped away quietly, guided not by music but by silence and fear.

The order was strict: no talking above a whisper. Even laughter was forbidden. General Jugashvili had promised death to any man who disobeyed, and Yezhov, like the rest, believed him. They all knew the stories. But belief hardened into horror within the hour.

It happened suddenly. A young soldier, laughed too loudly. Not a shout, not even a proper word—just a laugh carried on the wind louder than it should have been. Mikheil reacted instantly. His guards closed in on the poor bastard before Yezhov could even process what had happened. The man was gagged, wrestled to the ground, thrashing like a rabbit in a snare.

Then Jugashvili himself stepped forward. He didn't hesitate, didn't speak, didn't even look angry. Calm as if correcting a child's arithmetic, he pulled the bayonet from his rifle and drove it down. Once, twice, again and again, until the thrashing stopped. Blood pooled on the soil, steam rising from it in the cold air. The body was dragged off the path and dumped without ceremony. Then the column moved forward as if nothing at all had happened.

Yezhov wanted to laugh—he sometimes laughed when nervous—but the impulse died in his throat. His chest felt tight, his stomach churned, and the only thing he managed was to keep his feet moving. The general had made his point: silence or death. Yezhov swallowed hard. He had feared Jugashvili before. Now, he understood fear on a deeper level. The man was not simply dangerous. He was inevitable.

They marched on. Somewhere in the distance, gunfire crackled like kindling catching flame, followed by the heavy, rolling booms of artillery. Screams carried on the wind, high-pitched and fleeting. The battle for Toijala had begun in earnest. Only then did Jugashvili give the order to turn west. The trap made sense now. They weren't retreating or lost—they were circling. A flanking maneuver, sharp and cruel as a knife.

The column was a strange assortment. Infantry trudged along with blank eyes, rifles slung, packs heavy. Cavalry followed close behind, led by a broad-shouldered, mustached figure the men called Budyonny. Yezhov watched with fascination as the horsemen trotted past: not a uniform regiment but a patchwork carnival of killers. Dragoons rode mules harnessed to open wagons, Maxim guns clattering in their frames. Others pulled horse-drawn artillery, cannons jostling as wheels splashed through mud. Wagons brimmed with shells and crates painted yellow with a skull and crossbones. Gas shells.

An odd bunch, Yezhov thought. A motley army stitched together from peasants, drunks, mercenaries, and zealots. And yet under Jugashvili, they moved like one body—silent, purposeful, terrifying.

They halted where the forest thinned and the land spilled out into open fields. The order came down in a hissed whisper: encamp here, wait until nightfall. And so they sat, crouched low in the grass and mud, forbidden from making a sound above a murmur. The stillness gnawed at Yezhov. The waiting always did.

The battle roared on in the distance. Screams drifted like smoke, mingling with the crackle of rifle fire and the dull, thudding percussion of artillery. Every so often, Yezhov's eyes betrayed him, flicking toward the town. Smoke billowed upward, at first the familiar grey, then streaks of sickly yellow twisting through it. Everyone knew what that meant. Gas.

Yezhov's stomach clenched. He had seen it at Hämeenlinna—the greasy haze that clung to skin, the guttural coughing of Finns clawing at their throats, their eyes wide with a horror too raw to look human. Some had drowned standing up, lungs filling while they still held their rifles. Jugashvili had made it his signature: a short, sharp barrage of poison, just long enough to disorient, just long enough to choke and blind. Then his chosen men—those lucky bastards with masks—would surge in. And as the gas thinned and Milkheils chosen cleared the remaining Finns out, the rest of them would sweep through the ruins like carrion birds with their own improvised masks, made from cotton soaked in piss.

He looked at the carriages parked nearby, where yellow crates sat stacked like obscene harvest. Each was stenciled with a black skull and crossbones. Yezhov felt pity flicker in his chest, hot and useless. The poor bastards in that town… But pity had no place here. He clamped his jaw shut, because even a whispered word of sympathy might earn him a black mark in a commissar's notebook.

Instead, he pulled a cigarette from his pocket, lit it with trembling fingers, and smoked. The taste was bitter, acrid. He hated smoking. But he hated looking weak even more. The smoke blurred his vision, drifted up into the dusk as the battlefield thundered on.

Afternoon sagged into twilight. Twilight into night. At last, the order came, passed down the line in furtive whispers: "We're going."

Yezhov's chest tightened. His fingers fumbled with his rifle as he rose with the others. He tried to stand tall, but next to these broad-shouldered peasants and swaggering veterans, he felt small, insignificant—like a child wearing his father's uniform.

The horse artillery wheeled into place. Crews wrestled the canisters into their tubes. The gas-men—Jugashvili's favored shock troops—stepped forward, strapping on their masks, adjusting the blackened goggles, their breaths rasping through rubber filters like the hiss of serpents. They checked their weapons with methodical calm, while Yezhov's hands still shook against the wood of his rifle.

Then Jugashvili appeared, flanked by his guards, coat flaring, boots glistening with mud. He carried a stopwatch in one hand as though this were not war, but a schoolboy's science experiment.

The order was given. The first gas shell thundered from the artillery, hissing through the air before bursting somewhere inside the town. More followed in rapid succession. Yellow plumes began to rise, curling upward in the moonlight.

Jugashvili watched with the dispassionate interest of a man checking his pocket watch at a train station. A minute passed, each second ticked by on his stopwatch. He raised his hand. At once the gunners shifted. The last of the canisters shrieked into the night. The barrage switched over to high explosive. Shells screamed, detonations flared. The earth trembled.

Yezhov dared a glance at the general. Mikheil's hand still hovered in the air, fingers splayed, his smile visible in the glow of fire. When he dropped it, the masked troops surged forward, black silhouettes rushing into a poisoned night.

Another minute passed. The world ahead erupted—screams, ragged and desperate, overlapping with the pounding of rifles and the guttural thunder of artillery. Closer now. Too close. Then the whispered order reached them: it was their turn.

Yezhov's hands fumbled as he pulled the mask from his kit—a foul, piss-soaked rag meant to keep death from clawing its way down his throat. The stench made his eyes water, but he pressed it over his face all the same, tying the strings with trembling fingers. It was disgusting, but necessary. He had seen what happened to men who thought themselves braver than the gas. At Hämeenlinna, Pyotr—his comrade, his friend—had inhaled one choking breath too many and collapsed clawing at the earth, his face purple, spittle bubbling from his lips. Yezhov had forced a mask onto him, held it there while Pyotr convulsed. The boy survived, carried off to Helsinki to convalesce. Yezhov often wondered if Pyotr was the lucky one.

For himself, he doubted such fortune. If he faltered, no one would save him. He was too small, too forgettable, too brittle for anyone to bother with.

He glanced around. Even the horses wore masks, yellow-stained rags tied around their long faces. The absurdity of it almost made him laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. Laughter could get a man killed here, and he had already seen enough of Jugashvili's discipline for one lifetime.

Mikheil walked down the line then, boots squelching in the mud, eyes glinting even through the haze. He paused, studying them one by one. Then, with deliberate care, he pulled on his own mask. Not the mask he'd issued to his shock troops, but the same reeking, piss-soaked rag they all wore. A gesture of solidarity, almost noble. Part of Yezhov respected it. He is one of us, the thought whispered. But then the chill came, icy fingers down his spine, as memory surged: the way Jugashvili had bayoneted two of their comrades to death earlier that very day. Not enemies, not Whites, but Reds—his own men. All for disobedience, a laugh too loud. Yezhov couldn't remember their faces anymore, but he remembered the sound: thrashing boots, muffled screams, the wet, repetitive thunk of steel into flesh. And then silence, as if nothing had happened.

He wanted to shiver, but he held himself rigid. To tremble was to be noticed, and to be noticed was to risk being marked.

Jugashvili affixed his bayonet with a calm, practiced motion, as if preparing for a dinner carving. Nearby, Budyonny produced a bugle from somewhere inside his cloak. He lifted it to his lips, and its shrill call split the night.

"Charge!" Mikheil roared, his voice carrying above the bugle's cry, above the artillery, above everything. It wasn't a word—it was a command written into their bones. He surged forward, cloak flying behind him, boots churning the mud.

And like a tide, the rest followed.

Yezhov's legs moved before his mind did, carrying his slight frame after the charging mass. Terror flooded him, yet it mingled with something else—awe. Jugashvili was the most brutal man he had ever seen, but also the most fearless, the most present, the most alive. He was terrible, yes, but terrible in a way that made men follow. Even small, brittle Yezhov. Even him.

October 1, 1918
Toijala
Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic

Jorn Magnusson was dragged into the town square with what remained of his company. His wrists were bound with coarse rope, his boots slick with mud and blood. Around him stumbled the shattered remnants of his men—faces gray, eyes hollow, uniforms torn to ribbons. The battle for Toijala had ended the day before, a nightmare of gas-choked streets and hand-to-hand slaughter in alleyways.

He tried to recall how many his men had killed before it all collapsed—ten? twenty? a hundred? The memories blurred into a haze of gunfire and screams, cut short when they were captured in the early hours of morning, huddled like hunted animals as they tried to slip north under cover of darkness.

The square was already crowded. Hundreds of prisoners had been herded together, a mass of bloodied, exhausted men. Some spat red froth onto the cobblestones, lungs burned raw from the gas. Others simply stared ahead, vacant and resigned. Magnusson coughed, a trickle of blood rising in his throat at the memory of that noxious yellow fog. The gas. Always the gas. It haunted his lungs, his dreams, his waking hours.

A rough shove in his back forced him forward. He staggered and fell into line with the others, waiting.

And then he appeared.

Mikheil Jugashvili. The butcher of Hämeenlinna, of Petrograd, of Moscow. The man who had humiliated the British at Murmansk. His reputation had preceded him like thunder before a storm, and now he stood before them in the flesh. Broad-shouldered, eyes burning with some manic fire, he seemed less a man than an executioner chosen by history itself. Magnusson braced himself. He knew what was coming. Death. That was certain. But not the kind of death a soldier chooses on the battlefield—quick, chaotic, perhaps noble in its anonymity. This would be slower, deliberate. A spectacle.

Jugashvili raised his voice, and a translator—one of their own Finns, turned traitor, turned Red—echoed his words in their native tongue. His voice was steady, almost courteous, which made it worse.

"Comrades," he said, "you fought bravely. Commendable. But bravery means nothing when it serves the wrong master. You all know my reputation by now, what I do to those who refuse surrender after my initial offer. You have a choice. Those who wish to live—step to the right, take your stones, and kill your former comrades. Those who wish to die with your principles intact—choose last rites, cigarettes, or both. That is all."

The words fell like an axe, splitting the men apart before a single step was taken.

Then the chaos began.

Weeping, curses, desperate prayers. Some spat at the ground in defiance, others dropped to their knees in trembling sobs. Roughly a third broke away, shuffling to the right. Magnusson's heart twisted as he recognized familiar faces among them—men who had once fought shoulder to shoulder with him in trenches and frozen forests. Men who now stood ready to kill their brothers for the promise of survival.

For a moment, anger surged in him—traitors! Cowards! Yet another part of him, a smaller, quieter voice, understood. Many of them had families. Wives. Children. Parents too old to fend for themselves. To die here meant abandoning them to hunger, to the Whites, to the Reds—it scarcely mattered. To live meant, perhaps, some chance of protecting them. He hated them, but he could not wholly condemn them.

Then the priests arrived, flanked by carts laden with cigarettes. The ritual began. One by one, men were offered a blessing, a smoke, or both. Some kissed the priests' hands with trembling lips. Others lit their last cigarette with an oddly steady calm, smoke curling skyward like a final prayer. Many chose both—the sacred and the profane together.

Magnusson, when the choice reached him, bowed his head to the priest alone. His mother—God rest her soul—had despised smoking. He could not dishonor her memory now, not even at the threshold of death.

And so it ended. The condemned were separated, lined up in rows beneath the fading autumn sun. Those who had chosen life stood apart, clutching their stones, faces pale and grim. Those who had chosen death, Magnusson among them, stood ready, shoulders squared, waiting for the inevitable.

Jugashvili walked slowly down the line, his boots clicking against the cobblestones. His eyes moved over them one by one, cold and appraising, as if they were cuts of meat in a marketplace and he were deciding which piece to buy. He paused here and there, squinting, then moved on, silent. The weight of his gaze pressed down harder than the ropes biting into their wrists.

At last, he stopped and spoke a few words in Russian. His translator relayed them.

"This is your last chance. Anyone who wants to live, step across the line."

The silence was unbearable. Jorn Magnusson looked around, searching the faces of his comrades. Then he saw them: a few of the youngest boys, no older than his brother back home, trembling as they wept. Their lips moved with apologies—"forgive me, forgive me"—before they stumbled forward, crossing the invisible threshold.

No one cursed them. No one spat. How could they? Magnusson felt the same pull, the same temptation gnawing at his gut. His heart screamed to join them, to survive. But something deeper—pride, stubbornness, principle, perhaps just his mother's voice in his ear—rooted him in place. He sighed, the sound ragged in his throat.

"Just get it over with," he said. His voice carried enough for those near him to hear.

Jugashvili's head turned sharply. His translator, startled, glanced at Magnusson as well. The general spoke again, curt and amused, and the Finn translated faithfully.

"You're a brave man," the voice carried. "I respect that. Normally, at this stage, I choose one or two witnesses. Men to scurry off and tell Mannerheim's army what they saw here today."

Jugashvili whistled, a sharp, piercing note. Two guards stepped forward immediately, seizing Magnusson by the arms and dragging him out of the line.

Relief? Shame? Rage? He could not tell. The emotions clashed inside him like swords in the dark. All he knew was that he would live—while his comrades, his brothers-in-arms, would die. He caught the eyes of a few from his squad. The looks they gave him were a mix of despair, betrayal, and bitter envy. Some of them began to scream then, begging Jugashvili for the same mercy.

The general indulged them. Two more were chosen and dragged over to where Magnusson stood. Marin and Nieminen. They looked as dazed as he felt.

Jugashvili joined them, standing beside the three spared men as if they were props in a performance. Then he gave another sharp whistle. His voice cut through the night like an executioner's axe.

"Start!" he barked in a mangled Finnish accent.

The line of condemned men froze. For a heartbeat, no one moved. Then a few bent down, picked up the stones that had been scattered at their feet. Their steps were hesitant, faltering.

Jugashvili's expression hardened. He drew his pistol with a casual flick of the wrist and, without warning, shot one of the hesitant men through the head, not a man, when he looked closer he realized the one he shot was a boy, probably no older than 16. The crack of the gun echoed in the square, silencing even the sobs. Blood pooled on the stones, steaming faintly in the cold night air.

He spoke again, softly this time. The translator's voice trembled.

"I said, start."

The dam broke. What followed was no execution but a frenzy. Stones rose and fell, bones cracked, teeth shattered, men screamed until their throats bled. Some tried to run but were clubbed down. Others begged for mercy only to be silenced by rocks crashing against their skulls. It was slaughter disguised as ritual.

Magnusson tried to look away, tried to shut his eyes, but Jugashvili would not allow it. Guards seized him, Marin, and Nieminen, gripping their heads, forcing their eyelids open with rough fingers. Jugashvili's voice rang out again, and the translator obeyed.

"Take a good look. This is what happens when you do not surrender. You will walk back to Taipale and tell Mannerheim's men what you saw. Tell them: if they surrender, they will live. They will be sent to Helsinki or to our towns to work. But if they fight—" Jugashvili gestured to the carnage still unfolding before them, "—their salvation will come only through the corpses of their comrades. Or through death."

By the time it ended, the square was slick with blood and silence. The screams had dwindled into gurgles, then into nothing. The surviving executioners—those who had saved themselves by becoming murderers—stood pale, shaking, and soiled, their eyes wide and empty.

Magnusson and the other two were dragged away, through the outskirts of town and onto the road north toward Taipale. There, Jugashvili himself untied their bonds. He pressed rough canvas bags into their hands.

"Enough supplies for a few days," the translator relayed. "Go. Tell them. Tell them everything you saw. Tell them my warning."

Then Jugashvili turned his back on them and headed back into town with his men, coat swaying, pistol still in hand.

Magnusson stood rooted for a moment, the bag heavy in his palm. He could not cry. He wanted to—for the dead, for the damned, for himself. But the tears would not come. His eyes remained dry, his heart a stone.

He wanted to weep. God help him, he wanted to.

 

[Alenco98]

October 8, 1918
Lappi
Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic

The night was thick and restless. Beyond the black silhouettes of the pines, Tampere burned. Gunfire cracked in sharp bursts, explosions rolled like distant thunder, and the screams—always the screams—rose and fell like the cries of animals caught in traps. Yezhov sat on a log at the center of camp, cleaning his rifle with trembling fingers, the metallic scrape of the rag and oil a steady rhythm to distract himself from the orchestra of death echoing in the distance.

Around him, the camp shifted uneasily. Men coughed into rags. Some muttered prayers. Others simply sat with vacant stares, waiting. Fear was not only of the Whites, but of something invisible, something creeping from the south and the west. Influenza. The Spanish plague, they called it. He had heard the stories—whole villages struck down in days, soldiers coughing black blood until they drowned in their own lungs. It was coming for them too.

But Mikheil had already acted. Of course he had. He was not a man who tolerated weakness, nor one who left anything to chance.

Masks were now mandatory, even while sleeping. The men were ordered to clean everything, every surface, with what little they had. There was no soap, no disinfectant—so they used vodka. Barrels of it, poured out like water, rubbed into hands, onto rifles, across tables and carts. The whole camp stank of it, a reek of cheap spirits and fear. Men coughed into their elbows. They washed before eating, dunking their hands into bowls of vodka as if it were holy water.

And if anyone failed? If someone forgot? Mikheil did not bayonet them this time. No, he made a show of it. He would drag the offender in front of the entire camp, strip him to the waist, and whip him until his back was raw. Yezhov had seen it just yesterday: a recruit weeping, writhing under the lash as Mikheil barked in his hoarse Georgian growl.

"The next time you fuck up," Mikheil had roared, veins bulging in his neck, "you'll be storming Tampere with nothing but a bayonet in your hands!"

The men had laughed then—terrified laughter, desperate laughter—but laughter nonetheless. Mikheil always knew how to blend cruelty with closeness. He punished, yes, but afterward he would clap a man on the shoulder, pass him a cigarette, even share a joke in that dark, biting humor of his. It made the lash sting less and the loyalty burn hotter. Yezhov found it terrifying. Terrifying, and effective.

But this was no camping trip, no ordinary punishment drill. The crackling of artillery and the wails from Tampere reminded them of the truth. Death was just over the hill. Yezhov tried to comfort himself with the thought that he was not cannon fodder like the Finns, nor a lunatic shock-trooper like the Czechoslovaks. He was inside now. He mattered.

He remembered Toijala. The house, the chaos, the choking dust. He remembered the White Finn lunging at Mikheil's back, bayonet raised, just as the general was busy stabbing another man to death. Yezhov hadn't thought—he had acted. Fired his rifle. The White dropped in a heap. For that moment, he had saved Mikheil Jugashvili's life. And Mikheil remembered it. He remembered him. Nikolai Yezhov was no longer nameless.

That was everything. That was survival.

All he had to do was endure—endure this civil war, the gas, the influenza, the endless killing. Then he would cash in the debt. Mikheil was not just a general. He was the brother of Stalin himself, commissar for foreign affairs, a man on the Central Committee. His brother-in-law handled the funds and supplies. These were not nobodies. They were the future. Mikheil was the future.

Yes, he was a monster—Yezhov did not deny it. He was cruel, sadistic, terrifying. But he was also a man of honor, of his own warped kind. If he made a promise, he kept it. If he owed a debt, he paid it. And someday, Yezhov thought, he would not merely be a name on Mikheil's lips—he would be a man Mikheil Jugashvili relied upon.

The thought steadied him. His hands stopped trembling. He looked down at the rifle in his lap, clean and gleaming in the flickering firelight. The night was cold. The screams from Tampere echoed. But somewhere in the darkness, Mikheil was moving among the men, laughing, cursing, promising them glory and loot when the town fell. His voice carried like a whip-crack through the gloom, both dreadful and magnetic.

Yezhov then heard footsteps behind him, heavy and deliberate, then felt the startlingly gentle ruffle of fingers through his thinning hair.

"Yezhov," came the voice. Low, rough, familiar. He turned and found himself staring up into the shadowed face of General Mikheil Jugashvili. Even in the gloom, the man seemed larger than life—broad shoulders outlined against the firelight, eyes glinting like dark steel.

"Come on," Mikheil said. "The priests and cigarettes are here. We'll be starting once that's done."

Yezhov scrambled to his feet, clutching his rifle to steady his shaking hands. He glanced around the camp. Soldiers were gathering now, restless shadows in the night. The Czechoslovaks and Finns had already begun their push on Tampere by the main road, masks strapped tight across their faces. Most wore the usual piss-soaked rags and makeshift goggles; a lucky few carried proper gas masks scavenged from fallen Whites or purchased with plunder. They looked like grotesque caricatures, stumbling specters in the moonlight.

Yezhov joined the assembly at the center of camp, standing among several hundred men marked for Jugashvili's "special" assault. Like at Toijala, the ritual unfolded in grim order. Priests shuffled forward, their cassocks flapping in the night wind. Behind them came boys with crates of cigarettes, their thin arms straining under the weight.

One by one, men stepped forward. Some bowed their heads for a blessing, others snatched up cigarettes with shaking fingers. A few took both, kissing the priest's hand before lighting up. Yezhov took only a cigarette, as he always did. Not because he lacked piety—though he admitted faith had withered inside him long ago—but because he knew the commissars from the KGB were watching. They scribbled in their little black books during these rituals, their eyes sharp as knives. To ask openly for last rites was to risk suspicion, and suspicion was as deadly as any bullet.

Yet when Yezhov dared to glance at Mikheil, he was struck with confusion. The general accepted both: a cigarette pressed into his lips, and the priest's blessing upon his bowed head. It baffled Yezhov. Here was a man who could gut an enemy with a bayonet while laughing, who could whip his own soldiers bloody for coughing without covering their mouths, yet he allowed the priests not only to march with them, but to say mass.

Cruel? Without question. Vicious? Always. But devoid of mercy? No. Jugashvili was a riddle—a monster who demanded prayers. The contradiction made Yezhov's stomach knot.

The priest finished his round, offering a final chance for anyone who had changed their mind. A few shuffled forward, desperate for comfort, and the blessings were murmured again. Then the ritual was done. The men dispersed to prepare.

Not for the main assault. That task was for the Finns and the Czechs, who marched into the fire of Tampere's streets. Jugashvili's chosen men had a different path. Yezhov followed as they wound down to the dark shoreline of Lake Näsijärvi. Several dozen boats bobbed in the water, their outlines pale against the shifting black.

Mikheil's voice cut through the cold night. "Let's get this shit over with," he muttered, and barked for the men to check their weapons and gear.

Yezhov obeyed with frantic care. He double-checked, then triple-checked, fingers working feverishly over every buckle, every cartridge. His rifle was polished, his bayonet fixed, his mask tied snug. Everything had to be perfect. He could not fail—not now, not in front of Jugashvili.

Minutes later, the boats were filled, creaking as men crammed shoulder to shoulder. The water lapped softly at their sides.

Then came the rules. The general stood tall at the shore, his bayonet glinting in the faint moonlight. "No talking once we're on the water," he screamed. "Not a word. You talk—you die. I will kill you myself."

The threat needed no emphasis. Everyone knew it was true. The memories of Toijala came back again.

The oars dipped into the water. The boats glided forward, quiet as ghosts. The night was overcast, only a waxing moon breaking through the clouds. Darkness cloaked them, hiding their movements. From the city across the water came fire and chaos—the dull red glow of burning houses, the shrieks of the wounded, the crackle of rifles. The battle for Tampere had finally begun in earnest, and its noise masked the steady splash of their oars.

Yezhov sat hunched in the boat, knees pulled close, heart pounding. Around him, men breathed quietly through their masks, the stench of piss-soaked cloth thick in his nose. Ahead of him, Mikheil's figure loomed at the prow, as steady as a statue, hand resting lightly on the stock of his rifle.

No one dared speak. Jugashvili's warning still lingered in every man's mind: a whisper, he tolerated; a voice, he punished. The silence in the boats was not discipline—it was terror. Yezhov sat hunched in the middle of his craft, knees drawn tight, clutching his rifle to his chest. His ears picked up everything: the rasping breaths of the men beside him, the rhythm of oars slicing water, the cries of the dying carried on the night wind.

The nearer they drew, the louder it became. Each shell seemed to burst closer, each scream sharper. Yezhov counted in his head to steady his nerves. One. Two. Three. Four. Anything to keep his mind from unraveling. By the time he reached three hundred and forty-five, a sudden thud jolted the boat. They had reached the shore.

Orders were hissed down the line, sharp and low. Disembark.

The men splashed into the shallows, dragging rifles, packs, and machine guns ashore. The landing was clumsy but quick, desperation lending speed to trembling hands. Yezhov scrambled after them, boots slipping on wet stones. The air was thick with smoke and powder, the acrid tang clinging to his tongue.

Then came the shout in Finnish—an alarm cry from the dark treeline. They had been spotted.

"Fire!" Mikheil roared.

His voice was not a whisper this time—it was a bellow that cut through the night, raw and commanding. The men raised their weapons as one, muzzle flashes blooming in the darkness. The first Finns dropped where they stood, their cries cut short. Yezhov fired blindly into the chaos. He thought he hit someone—he hoped he did—but his hands were shaking so badly he could not be sure.

"Dig in! Take cover!" Jugashvili barked.

They scrambled for protection along the shoreline, diving behind logs, rocks, and patches of undergrowth. Yezhov threw himself into the dirt, his heart hammering so loudly he thought it might give him away. More boats came ashore behind them, disgorging reinforcements, while others turned back into the lake to fetch more men. Gunfire stitched across the water; some boats splintered and sank, dragging screaming men down with them. Most, though, slipped away, shadows melting into the black waves.

The machine guns were dragged into position, their tripods sinking into the mud. When they opened fire, it was like thunder made flesh. Tracer rounds licked across the treeline, cutting down shapes in the darkness. Men cheered, half-mad, as bodies fell.

Then Jugashvili stood, his bayonet glinting in the pale moonlight.

"Move up!" he bellowed, his accent mangling the Finnish words but leaving no room for misunderstanding.

And they did.

They surged forward, stumbling over roots and rocks, advancing into Tampere's outskirts under the shadow of smoke and fire. Yezhov ran with them, legs pumping, lungs burning, fear clawing at his ribs. He could not stop, could not falter—not with Jugashvili at the front, charging like a wolf leading the pack.

The advance was slow—painfully, agonizingly slow. Each step forward was bought with blood. They moved like snails under fire, crouching, crawling, laying down bursts of covering fire while the boldest among them dared to creep ahead. Every advance meant another body left behind in the mud.

Yezhov felt the attrition in his bones. Many of the men who had rowed across the black water with him were already gone, sprawled on the lakeshore or swallowed by the night. He tried not to look at them as he reloaded. He tried not to imagine himself joining them.

But the boats kept coming. More shadows glided across the water, spilling fresh troops onto the shore. Machine guns were set up, more rifles cracked in the darkness, and slowly, the tide shifted. The White Finns thinned out.

From the distance came the sound of heavier fighting—the Czech and Finnish Reds hammering at Tampere from the front, forcing the defenders to split their attention. This landing wasn't unique either. Yezhov had heard combat noises coming from the southern lake, Pyhäjärvi. Even with his feeble grasp of strategy, he understood: a three-pronged assault, impossible to hold against for long.

As more of their men landed, they pressed forward. The line crawled toward the city. Yezhov lost track of how many people he fired at, or whether he even killed anyone. He only remembered flashes: the recoil of his rifle, the clatter of spent shells, the faint smell of blood mixed with smoke and gas. He remembered bullets cracking past his head, each one close enough to remind him he should already be dead.

By dawn, their forces converged with the southern detachment from Pyhäjärvi. Together, they began slipping into Tampere from the rear. But dawn brought no relief. Machine guns raked them from upper floors. Mortars pounded the streets. And always there was the dread of their own gas shells rolling back with the wind, turning allies into choking corpses.

Yezhov's hand instinctively brushed his mask, the piss-soaked rag pressed against his mouth and nose. For a fleeting moment, he regretted refusing the priest. Maybe a blessing would have been wiser than a cigarette.

He crouched behind a stone fence, chest heaving, just a few yards from a three-story building spitting lead. Bullets snapped past his head, one close enough to sting his ear. He ducked lower, trembling. Then he felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder.

"Yezhov?"

That voice—familiar, gravelly, terrifying. He turned and found Jugashvili looming over him, eyes gleaming with a strange mixture of curiosity and amusement.

"Man, you're still alive," Mikheil said. His tone was almost surprised. "Incredible." A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. "You're a lucky man, Yezhov. And luck… luck is something you're born with."

Before Yezhov could answer, one of their machine guns roared to life, peppering the building that pinned them down. The sound was deafening, but Jugashvili sat down beside him on the fence as if it were a park bench. He pulled in a deep breath through the same wretched mask as Yezhov, then exhaled slowly.

"Surreal, isn't it?"

"Sir?" Yezhov's voice cracked.

"All this." Mikheil gestured with his bayonet toward the corpses scattered in front of the fence, the wounded crawling through the grass, the Reds firing and shouting around them. "Every one of them had hopes. Dreams. A woman, maybe. Children. Friends. Now—nothing. They'll never laugh again. Never wake in a warm bed. Never see the ones they cared for. Those loved ones? They'll grieve. They'll weep. And then, as time passes, the grief will dull. The pain will fade into something blunt. Like morning dew burning off in the sun."

He reached down, ran a hand across the damp grass, and held it up to Yezhov. "See? Wet now. Soon enough, dry. Gone."

Yezhov stared, mute, his heart hammering. Was this a test? What answer did Jugashvili expect? Was silence safer? Would he be shot for saying the wrong thing? His mouth worked, but no words came.

"Don't think about it," Mikheil said suddenly, almost dismissively. "Just the ramblings of a broken man."

Then, with the same casual ease, he picked up his rifle. He fixed his helmet onto the tip of his bayonet and raised it slowly over the fence. A bullet cracked into the metal with a sharp clang. Mikheil lowered it again, chuckling.

"Well, shit," he muttered. "Looks like we'll be here for a while."

Then, louder: "Suppressing fire! Watch the muzzle flashes! Track them!"

The men obeyed instantly, pouring bullets into the building. Yezhov's hands shook as he fired, the stock rattling against his bony shoulder. He stole a glance at Mikheil, who barked orders with a grin on his face, as though this madness were just another day's work. He was brutal, yes. Terrifying. Yet he sat with his men, shared their danger, laughed in their faces as death sang overhead.

Then more men pushed up to the stone fence, rifles and machine guns hammering against the stubborn defenders. Bullets sparked against walls, tore through windows, shattered the dead silence of dawn. Jugashvili rose to his full height, bayonet glinting, and bellowed above the storm.

"Drown them in bullets!"

The men obeyed instantly. Reds poured fire into the three-story building, splinters flying from its wooden facade, glass raining down in jagged shards. The roar of gunfire rolled like thunder across the block. Yezhov flinched with each shot, his thin shoulders trembling, but he fired too—squeezing the trigger again and again, hoping to God his bullets found someone and weren't just wasted into the smoke.

Then came the order.

"Charge!" Mikheil roared, his voice like a whipcrack.

The men surged forward. Yezhov stumbled after them, heart pounding, rifle clutched to his chest. He glanced sideways and saw Jugashvili sprinting beside him, cloak flapping, rifle ready, face set in a wolfish grin. For a moment, Yezhov's brittle fear cracked. If he could do it, then so could Yezhov. He had to.

They reached the door. Jugashvili took point without hesitation. He pulled a grenade from his coat, cracked the door open a sliver, and tossed it inside.

The explosion ripped through the building, rattling the very walls. Shouts, screams, then silence.

"Breach and clear!" Mikheil barked.

They stormed inside. The assault was chaos: grenades thrown into rooms, rifles and bayonets thrust in after the blasts. Men screamed in Finnish and Russian, curses blending with cries of pain. Blood slicked the stairs. Yezhov fought like a cornered animal, stabbing, shooting, swinging his rifle butt. He lost count of how many times he almost died—a bayonet that missed his ribs by inches, a bullet that tore the sleeve of his coat, a knife that nicked his arm.

When it was over, when the last enemy in that building fell silent, only seventeen of them were left standing out of the thirty who had gone in. Yezhov was one of them. Somehow.

He stumbled into a third-floor bedroom and collapsed onto a small bed, gasping for breath. The room was unnervingly intact, as if war had paused at its threshold. Dolls lay scattered across the floor, little dresses half-torn. A picture of a smiling girl still hung crooked on the wall. Yezhov stared at it as his chest heaved, his hands filthy with soot and blood. Only then did he notice the sharp sting in his right arm. He looked down. A bayonet slash had opened him. Blood streaked down to his wrist.

"Yezhov?"

The voice froze him. He turned. In the doorway stood Jugashvili.

"Sir," Yezhov stammered, forcing himself upright. He raised his hand in salute.

"Do not salute!" Mikheil snapped, his voice cutting like a blade. "Sit down!"

Yezhov's stomach dropped. Had he offended him? Was this the end? His vision blurred with panic as he sat back down, shoulders hunched, trembling. He tried to swallow the rising lump in his throat, but tears threatened anyway.

Jugashvili moved past him, ignoring the panic he'd caused. He went to the window, drew the curtains tight, darkening the room. "Urban combat," he said softly, almost gently. "Riflemen will be watching for an officer's salute. Don't give them a target. For your safety and mine."

"I'm sorry, sir," Yezhov muttered, his voice small, ashamed, like a boy caught stealing apples.

"Relax." Mikheil's tone shifted again—gentler, almost amused. He sat beside him on the bed and nodded toward his arm. "Show me your wound. Looks like you got injured too."

"Too?" Yezhov asked nervously.

Mikheil tapped his head, where a crude bandage was wrapped around his brow. "Clubbed. Bastard nearly had me. Too bad for him one of my boys was nearby." He chuckled, as if recalling a prank rather than a brush with death.

He pulled a flask from his coat, uncorked it, and poured vodka directly into Yezhov's wound. Pain seared his nerves; Yezhov bit his lip until it bled to stop himself from screaming. Mikheil soaked a rag, scrubbed the wound with brisk, uncaring efficiency, then bound it tight with linen.

"Change it every day," he said. "Or if it gets wet. Infection kills faster than bullets."

Yezhov nodded mutely, still trembling.

Then Mikheil did something that unsettled him even more than the pain. He ruffled Yezhov's hair, the same way he had before the priests' ritual, like a father indulging a nervous child.

"Stay alive, Yezhov. You have potential. Wouldn't want it to go to waste."

"Y-yes, sir."

Jugashvili stood, rifle in hand, and left without another word, his boots echoing down the stairs.

Yezhov sat frozen on the bed. Around him were the dolls and toys of a little girl who would never return to this room. Blood stained the sheets where he sat. He felt sick. He felt terrified. And yet, deep in his brittle chest, he felt something else too: awe.

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from a YouTube video by channel name (MrRobot), uploaded October 2, 2021:

Interviewee: "Jugashvili, was a great man. He wouldn't have shot your grandfather without a reason."

Interviewer: "So… you're saying he probably deserved it?"

Interviewee: Nods silently.

Cue Dior's Polozhenie (Remix) over archival footage: Field Marshall Mikheil Jugashvili alongside General Tukachevsky reviewing troops from the Revolutionary guard corps in Spain, 1937. The camera lingers on his sharp profile, the crowd of officers behind him. The footage then cuts to Jugashvili raising his pistol at a Spanish anarchist. The clip halts just before the shot.

Across the screen in stark white text once the music starts:

Sigma Tip #2848383993: Your grandpa deserved it.

-----------------------

October 15, 1918
Tampere
Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic

I smoked a cigarette while the last batch of Finnish prisoners were herded into the town square. Rows of them, ragged uniforms hanging loose, mud and blood caked on their faces. They looked like laundry someone had forgotten in the rain for a week. The fighting here had been brutal—grenades down stairwells, bayonets in the dark, buildings collapsing like badly stacked Jenga towers. I'd nearly died three times in the span of a morning the day before, and yet, here I was. Still alive. Much to my disappointment. At least the battle was over as of today. Now it was mopping up.

The priests were doing their usual bit—muttering last rites over the condemned, mumbling in a way that made me wonder if even they were tired of the routine. The prisoners cried, begged, screamed. The whole melodrama. It was less "brave last stand" and more "bad opera."

Do I feel bad? Of course I do. I'm not a robot. I've got grief, guilt, and a whole therapy session's worth of unresolved trauma rattling around in my skull. But here's the thing: sympathy doesn't win wars. Fear does. Reputation does. Every time some poor bastard whispers, "Jugashvili will make you kill your friends if you resist," that's one more town, one more unit that surrenders without me having to waste bullets. The more feared my name becomes, the quicker this war ends. And the quicker my standing with the Central Committee gets patched up. Call it efficiency through atrocity.

Yezhov stood at my right. Little Nicky. Charming lad, if your idea of charming is a dwarf with dark circles under his eyes and the personality of damp cardboard. Barely five feet tall, but sharp, eager, and useful. In a strange way, he reminded me of my brother Gerry back in my other life—same dark brown hair, same permanent expression of "ohh god what the fuck is going on." But most importantly I owed him. He'd saved my life at Toijala. Not that I wanted to live, but debts are debts.

And as I've heard in my old life: a Lannister always pays his debts. I may not be a Lannister, but I sure as hell play the part to an extent—less opulence, more casual war crimes.

To my left stood Matti, my ever-patient Finnish translator. Poor bastard looked hollow, eyes vacant, like a man who's seen one too many gamer moments. And by gamer moments, I mean the atrocities I inflicted. Same thing, really.

"It's time," I told him. "Announce the usual: anyone with second thoughts about dying can shuffle over to the other side. Otherwise, let the killing begin."

Matti nodded, his delivery as solemn as a priest announcing communion. The prisoners listened. Some wept, muttering what I assumed was "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" in Finnish. They crossed over to the "survivor" line, knowing full well they'd be ordered to beat their old comrades to death with whatever tools I'd laid out for them. Loyalty is optional; survival is compulsory.

Once the lines were drawn, I stepped forward. "Begin!" I barked in clumsy Finnish.

Silence. The men picked up the rocks, clubs, kitchen knives, but their arms hesitated. They stared at their former comrades, trembling. Pathetic.

So I picked the nearest one, raised my pistol, and shot him in the chest. He dropped like a sack of flour. "I said begin," I growled, smoke curling from the barrel.

And then it began. Like clockwork. Like rats clawing at each other in a flooded cellar. Men turned on their brothers, smashing skulls with rocks, stabbing with knives, sobbing and screaming as they did it. Betrayal, hysteria, desperation—it was the Eclipse from Berserk, only without the demons, the tentacles, or the sexual assault subplot. Just pure, uncut human tragedy.

Minutes passed, though it felt like hours. By the time it ended, the condemned lay broken and silent on the cobblestones. The survivors stood gasping, blood splattered across their faces, knuckles raw and trembling.

"Bury them yourselves," I ordered. "Then you'll be shipped off to Helsinki. Factories need bodies, and corpses don't make boots."

Matti relayed my words. The men shuffled into motion, shovels scraping as they began digging their comrades' graves. I flicked my cigarette to the ground, grinding it under my boot.

I glanced at Yezhov. He just stood there, small and stiff, watching. His face was unreadable: disgust, awe, terror, maybe all three. Did it matter? Not really. What mattered was that he survived, that he stayed loyal. That was enough.

"Come on, Yezhov," I said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Lunch is probably ready. And this civil war isn't going to wait for us."

I walked off, leaving behind the priests, the corpses, the weeping men, and the graves they were digging. Another day, another atrocity. All in a day's work.

We trudged back to the camp we'd set up in the center of town. Fires burned low in the ruins, smoke curling into the night sky, but inside the square there was a strange calm. Time to eat. Everyone sat together—officers, grunts, Czechs, Finns, even the half-feral dragoons who smelled like horse shit and cheap vodka. Unprofessional? Sure. But I wasn't leading the US Marines, let alone Space Marines. These were the Revolutionary Guard Corps—well, technically the Red Army now that central committee had done its bureaucratic paperwork after my gamer moment in Murmask. But they were still mine, and cohesion was worth more than a shiny officer's mess.

We sat around one of the kettles the cooks had cobbled together out of looted cauldrons. Bowls and spoons were piled in a crate nearby. The ritual was simple: pick up a bowl, swill it out with vodka, wipe it with your sleeve, pretend it was clean. Better than letting Spanish flu sneak in and wipe out my whole army. Spanish flu wasn't COVID; no Zoom calls, no ventilators, no "two weeks to flatten the curve." Here it was "two days to bury half the battalion."

Masks were mandatory even while sleeping, except when you were eating. So here they were, bowls in hand, masks dangling from their necks, faces lit by firelight, chewing like starved wolves. The men who weren't eating kept their masks on, because the flu didn't give a damn about your appetite.

When my turn came, I held out my empty bowl. The cook looked up, startled, eyes going wide like he'd just been visited by Christ himself. "Holy shit, it's him" written all over his face. I motioned with my hand. Pour the soup. He obeyed quickly—borscht, if you could call it that. Red broth, floating chunks of "mystery meat," which might've been pig, cow, horse, or whatever was left lying around after the battle. I'd seen dead dogs in the street earlier. Who knew?

He ladled me two servings, same as everyone else, and shoved a hunk of stale bread on top. No officer's portion, no gold-trimmed china. Just the same as the men. Yezhov shuffled up behind me and got the same. We sat together on the cobblestones.

Another display. The general eats what you eat. The general wears the same piss-soaked mask. How can you complain about following orders? Optics. Always optics.

Of course, it was a double-edged sword. The men loved me, yes—but if I caught a bullet in the skull tomorrow, the whole circus might collapse. Lenin and the Central Committee would sigh, mark me down as "tragically killed in battle," and move on. Joe—Stalin, my own twin brother—would probably keep my kids safe out of some warped family loyalty. I trusted him in that way. Trusted Stalin. God help me.

But right now none of that mattered. What mattered was the stew in my hands. I dug in, spoon scraping metal, red broth dripping down my chin. The taste? Mid at best. The bread was hard enough to qualify as body armor. The meat was chewy, indistinguishable—chicken, beef, lamb, or maybe one of those dead animals rotting in the street. Who knew. Who cared.

What I wouldn't give for McDonald's. A Big Mac, chicken McNuggets, fries drowned in salt. A Coke with actual ice cubes. Now that was a meal fit for a king. Here, the best I could do was "borscht with possible horse meat." I just needed to survive this war, let Joe seize power, and then use my leverage to stop the whole Soviet project from turning into a flaming garbage heap.

Joe. Stalin. My twin. Christ, when I realized who he really was, I nearly had a heart attack. At first, I'd thought the revolution would be my cash-out opportunity. Sell some guns, use Joe's connections in the party, make bank while Russia collapsed, then vanish to America with a fat wallet. But no. Once I realized I was Stalin's brother, I knew there was no escape. If the White émigrés found out, they'd kill me. If Joe found out I was plotting to leave, he'd send assassin's to kill me. Options: zero. So I decided to make my cage as comfortable as possible. If I had to be a prisoner of history, then it would be a golden cage.

As I ate, my thoughts drifted to Kato, my daughter. She looked so much like Joe's first wife—same sharp eyes, same soft features. I could see it every time he glanced at her: confusion, sadness, maybe even a flicker of happiness. If she married Yakov, I joked to Joe, it would tie our families together. Half a joke, half a survival plan. I made it clear to Kato early on—no boys, ever, except brothers, uncles, or Yakov. I even had them sleep in the same bed once she turned five. Amoral? Absolutely. But better Yakov's wife than everyone in my family, including her, rotting in the Gulag. At least they were close in age: she was eight, he was eleven. Three years. Manageable. I had limits. I wasn't going to throw her at some drunk Party secretary twenty years her senior. I wasn't that far gone.

I spooned another mouthful of "borscht" into my mouth, chewed, swallowed, and washed it down with vodka. It burned my throat, but at least it killed germs.

I kept eating, spoon clinking against the metal bowl, pretending to savor the flood of flavor that wasn't there. The broth was tepid, thin, the kind of borscht that made you wonder if a cabbage had even been invited to the pot or if the cook had simply whispered the word "vegetable" over boiling water. Still, I forced it down and, like an idiot, found myself thinking about Aleksandra.

Aleksandra's hot borscht. Aleksandra's khachapuri, warm cheese spilling onto bread like sunlight through a window. The way her hair smelled in the morning. The way her skin glowed when I returned from patrol back when I was a cop in Petrograd. And yes—the warmth between her legs when we made love, a warmth now replaced by this drafty hellscape where the only thing between my legs was frostbite and regret.

For a moment—just a flicker—the empty cavity where my heart used to be fluttered. That was all it could manage. Nothing more. I didn't cry anymore. Thank God. Crying distracted you, and in war distraction was a bullet to the head. Or worse—a cough that turned into a fever that turned into a shallow grave by the roadside.

I chewed the last of the mystery meat, swallowed, and wiped my mouth on my sleeve. That's when I heard boots crunching against the cobblestones. Footsteps. Too many to be casual. I turned, bowl still in my lap.

Balitsky. Him and his commissars, strutting towards me with that mix of pride and suspicion commissars all seem to cultivate, like they've just caught you with contraband pornography and can't wait to write the report. His men trailed behind him, looking dour, as if standing near me might infect them with moral corruption. Which, to be fair, it probably would.

"Commissar," I said, forcing my voice into something polite as I tipped the bowl to drain the last of the broth. "Glad to see you survived the battle." A bald-faced lie, but better than antagonizing him. Balitsky and I didn't like each other. Never had. But we understood one another. He knew I fought, slept, and ate with the men. He knew I didn't hide behind Party slogans while sending kids to die. And I knew he was here to make sure nobody deserted, nobody broke ranks, nobody got any funny ideas about politics. Professional respect, as they say.

Besides, he wasn't just a desk-bound bastard. I'd seen him pick up a rifle and fire into the chaos, hat askew, eyes wide. Desperation, yes. But also commitment. And that bought him a sliver of my respect. Just a sliver.

"General," he said, voice clipped.

"Commissar," I echoed, bracing myself.

"News has arrived."

The way he said it made my stomach tighten. Not battlefield news. Something bigger.

"What sort?" I asked, wiping my mouth and pulling my mask back up. Always the mask. Spanish flu didn't give a damn about good timing.

"The war is over."

I blinked. "What, Mannerheim surrendered? Vaasa's ours?"

Balitsky shook his head, frustration etched on his face like someone had stolen his last cigarette. "Not here. The war. The Great War. Europe. It ended eight days ago. Germany lost."

I stood slowly, my joints popping, the gears in my head beginning to turn. Germany lost. I let the words roll around in my skull like dice. "Germany lost." I repeated it out loud, savoring it the way one savors bad news you've been expecting. Then it hit me, and I sighed.

"Shit."

Balitsky cocked an eyebrow.

"It means the British are next," I muttered. "Payback for Murmansk, for scuttling their ships, for stealing their guns. They'll come for me. For us."

Balitsky nodded, and I swear I caught the faintest curl of a self-satisfied smile tugging at the corner of his lips. Commissars always loved it when bad news favored their arguments. The worse the world got, the more necessary they seemed.

"Get my staff together," I said, my voice hardening. "Mayor's office. Now. We need to plan the rest of the campaign."

Balitsky saluted with all the stiffness of a man signing your death warrant. His men followed him out.

I turned back to my empty bowl. Germany had fallen. The world had shifted. And me? I was about to be the next course on Britain's dinner plate.

I left Yezhov behind to finish his soup, the little goblin hunching over his bowl like it contained the secrets of the universe. Poor bastard had no idea that if the flu didn't kill him, the Whites probably would. Or me, if he annoyed me enough.

I made my way to the mayor's office, boots crunching against the damp cobblestones, only to find myself intercepted at the door by someone I was too close with.

"Comrade," she said in mangled Russian.

Helena Aalto. Twenty years old. A Finnish Red Guard from Turku who had the unfortunate combination of stubborn lungs and bad luck. I'd first stumbled across her in Hämeenlinna, half-dead, riddled with shrapnel, surrounded by the butchered remains of her women's detachment. They'd been mowed down by a White machine-gun nest, their bodies chewed apart like meat in a grinder.

Naturally, I ordered the survivors dragged off for treatment. Even I wasn't heartless enough to let girls bleed out in the mud. I even helped lift her into the carriage myself—me, a general of the Red Army, war criminal extraordinaire, loading broken bodies like a glorified ambulance driver. And wouldn't you know it, she was awake enough to remember.

So now, months later, here I was: a 39-year-old general / widower / full-time war criminal saddled with a fan-girl who looked at me like I was some tragic hero instead of the bastard who made prisoners kill each other with rocks.

And to my eternal shame, I'd slept with her. It started after the September push north, once the Finnish People's Army spat out its first batch of graduates. The men were already passing around prostitutes like they were sharing vodka glasses, and the Czechoslovaks weren't exactly picky either. I wasn't about to roll the dice on catching an STD that would kill me slower than a bullet, so when Helena started hanging around camp, all doe eyes and gratitude, well… you can guess the rest.

She was cute, I'll give her that. Good cheekbones. Brunette hair. Lovely pair of tits. The kind of girl you'd swipe right on Tinder without thinking twice. And lying naked next to her in a tent after a battle, blood still drying on my hands, actually made me feel… whole again. I could close my eyes and pretend Aleksandra hadn't been gunned down. Pretend I still had a wife, a life. Sometimes I even whispered Aleksandra's name when I finished inside Helena. Romantic, right? Nicholas Sparks eat your heart out.

But afterward? Afterward I hated myself. Every time. As if I was betraying Aleksandra's memory, which, let's face it, I was. But grief makes strange bedfellows. Sometimes literally.

Helena knew about Aleksandra—about her assassination, about my spiral into brutality, blood, and reckless offensives. She tried to soothe me in her way. Made me borscht, rubbed my back, patched up my wounds. And damned if it didn't work. I found myself thinking about her more often than brooding. Which was its own kind of betrayal.

So there she was, standing in the doorway, blocking my way to the mayor's office, trying to look official.

"Comrade," I greeted her back in Finnish, the words clumsy on my tongue. On paper she was my Finnish tutor and my adjutant. In practice, the whole army probably guessed the truth. Not that anyone dared whisper it aloud. Amazing what a little gun-brandishing can do for rumor control.

"Same time tonight," I told her in broken Finnish. "Have meeting now. Important. Sorry."

"See you then," she answered in Russian, smiling faintly before wandering back into camp.

I watched her go, the sway of her hips catching my eye. And despite myself, I thought: damn, what a nice ass.

Inside the mayor's office was my high command. My "inner circle," though most of them I trusted about as much as a one-eyed surgeon. Gathered around a battered table were the usual suspects:

Tukachevsky, recently dismissed from Archangel by Trotsky's men and eager to prove he wasn't just another officer.

Budyonny, the cavalry man, whose mustache was frankly more disciplined than his horsemen.

Voroshilov, heading the infantry, useful in a brawl but about as subtle as a train wreck.

Ordzhonikidze, the quartermaster of misery, always buried in supply reports.

Yagoda, who coordinated payments and loot distribution for the Czechoslovaks, essentially our Minister of Organized Theft.

Aaltonen, commanding the northern Finnish front, a man who never stopped reminding me he was Finnish, as if that excused incompetence.

Stanislav Čeček, head of the Czechoslovak Legion, polite enough to my face but probably dreaming of strangling me with his own mustache hair for leading his men astray at Murmansk.

And, of course, Balitsky, our political officer—my own personal hemorrhoid, sent from Moscow to keep me "disciplined."

We stood around a map of Finland spread across the table like a patient awaiting dissection.

"Gentlemen," I began, my voice carrying that theatrical weight commanders use when they want to sound confident and not utterly terrified. "As Balitsky has probably told you already, the war in Europe is over. Germany has lost."

The room tensed. Faces hardened, except for Balitsky, whose smirk practically screamed finally, the bastard's screwed.

"This means one thing," I continued. "The British are coming."

There it was—the silence that drops when everyone realizes they've just been handed a death sentence.

"We'll need to move up the timetable." I jabbed a finger at the map, tracing the coastline north of Turku. "Pori, Vaasa, Oulu. The Whites still hold them. If we take these cities fast—burn the docks, wreck the infrastructure—we can preempt British intervention. Maybe even make it too costly for them to bother."

"Wouldn't Sweden intervene if we get too close to their border? And what about Åland?" Aaltonen asked, predictably.

"Good point," I nodded, as if I hadn't been expecting it. "We send envoys to Stockholm. Assure them we won't spread the revolution beyond Finland's borders—that this is an internal matter."

Out of the corner of my eye I caught Balitsky's glance, that 'so much for world revolution, eh, comrade?' look.

"Don't give me that expression, Commissar," I sighed. "You and I both know we can't afford more enemies. Draft a letter to the Central Committee asking for approval."

Balitsky nodded, saying nothing, the smug bastard.

Aaltonen wasn't finished. "Even if Sweden accepts that, Åland is still an issue. The people there are mostly Swedish. They've been petitioning Stockholm for annexation. If we impose the same 'discipline' you've imposed here in Finland, Sweden will intervene without hesitation."

I leaned over the map, hands gripping the table. He wasn't wrong. We had no naval strength, no resources to stage an amphibious landing. The whole civil war still lay unresolved inland. "Fine. Tell the Central Committee they should consider ceding Åland to Sweden."

That got everyone's attention. Heads snapped up. Even Tukachevsky, who usually nodded at whatever I said, looked shocked.

"You would give territory away?" he asked.

I barked a laugh. "We gave away half of Ukraine to Germany in December. And now Germany is gone. Soon Trotsky will be marching west to sweep up the scraps. What's a few islands compared to all of Finland?"

"This is unilateral," Balitsky warned. "Exactly the kind of behavior I was sent here to prevent."

I raised both hands like an innocent schoolboy caught with vodka in his canteen. "I'm not doing anything. I'm merely suggesting the Central Committee consider giving Åland away. I'm going through channels, Comrade. Proper channels. Paperwork and all."

Balitsky narrowed his eyes but relented. "I'll relay the message."

"Good." I clapped my hands. "Now then, Vaasa. With Tampere gone, the road to the White capital is open. If we capture Vaasa, the war ends."

"And Pori?" Budyonny asked, trying to sound relevant.

"We besiege it, then storm it. A Finnish operation, mostly. I can spare one, maybe two thousand men at best. Everyone else marches on Vaasa. Tukachevsky." I turned toward him. "Care to prove you're worth the boots you stand in?"

"Sir?" he blinked.

"Don't sir me. Are you in, or not?"

"Yes, I'll do it," he said quickly, like a schoolboy eager to please the teacher.

"Good." I jabbed the map again. "Aaltonen, you'll take a couple thousand Finns. Tukachevsky will bring two thousand of mine. Together, you march on Pori."

"Yes, General," Aaltonen replied.

Budyonny and Voroshilov looked miffed, like children denied sweets. Before they could protest, I pressed on.

"Budyonny, you're with me for the advance on Vaasa. I need your cavalry scouting ahead, raiding, keeping the Whites off balance. Winter is coming, and you're the only man I trust with horses right now. Make sure you've got Finnish guides. I don't want you galloping into a swamp."

He nodded reluctantly.

"Voroshilov," I said, "prepare the infantry. You'll be co-leading the assault with me. No screw-ups."

Both men saluted. At least they had the decency to look disciplined when it mattered.

As I looked around the table, I realized something: here I was, a modern man stuck in 1918, deciding the fate of Finland with a bunch of half-mad generals, commissars, and opportunists. And yet somehow, I was the sanest one in the room.

God we were so fucked.

------------

By the time I stumbled back into my tent, I was running on fumes. We'd spent the entire afternoon locked in the mayor's office, planning, arguing, bickering, nearly strangling each other over rail schedules and cavalry routes. The grand war council of Bolshevik Finland—what a circus. Somehow, through sheer stubbornness (and a few death threats), we managed to hammer out a plan.

My plan, naturally. Tukachevsky would march on Pori with a mixed bag of Finns and the handful of soldiers I could spare him. I would lead the boys on Vaasa, the prize. Meanwhile, the Red Finns would launch a general offensive into Karelia to keep the Whites busy. Three prongs of chaos. Fun. All we were missing was a laugh track.

As I ducked into the tent, Helena was waiting, a smile plastered on her face.

"I missed you," she said in broken Russian.

"I know." I didn't bother with words once I said that. My little head took over the diplomatic portfolio, and frankly, he was better at negotiations. I kissed her, she kissed me back, and within moments we were fucking like animals—messy, desperate, the kind of passion only war and trauma can produce. I closed my eyes. In my mind, it wasn't Helena at all. It was Aleksandra. My Aleksandra.

I didn't say her name—God, no. Helena deserved better than to be used as a ghost. But I didn't stop myself from pretending. In my head it was Aleksandra's lips, Aleksandra's warmth, Aleksandra's breath in my ear. I chased that illusion until the end, when I finally finished inside Helena, her body straddling mine, her kisses fierce and clumsy.

My eyes stayed shut as long as I could manage, clinging to the hallucination. Then I opened them. Not Aleksandra. Helena. 20. Alive. Staring back at me with those wide, unblinking eyes.

She rolled off me and I reached for a rag, cleaning myself, then her. The usual post-battlefield romance routine. Afterwards, she curled up against me, warm and small, her head on my shoulder. We didn't talk much. My Finnish was garbage. Her Russian was slightly better garbage. Between us, we made a full trash heap.

And then she spoke.

"Have something tell you," she said in her heavily accented Russian. It was almost cute—like a schoolgirl learning to read.

"What?" I muttered, expecting her to ask for a new dress, maybe another loaf of bread.

She rubbed her belly. Looked at me. "Baby."

I froze. Blinked. Surely she didn't mean—

I sighed, running a hand down my face. Was this really happening? She wanted my baby? Jesus. This was some yandere fangirl shit. A soldier's groupie decides she'd anchor herself to the general by popping out his spawn.

"You too young. Should wait you," I managed in butchered Finnish, sounding like a drunk caveman.

She shook her head, firm, rubbing her belly again. "Baby. Me having baby. Yours."

I stared. My brain short-circuited. "You're pregnant?" I asked in Russian, clinging to the hope I'd misunderstood.

"Yes," she nodded eagerly, smiling like she'd just announced we'd won the lottery. "Our baby."

I nodded automatically, leaning over and kissing her on the forehead. The sort of thing a responsible man does when handed life-changing news. Outwardly calm, the picture of Bolshevik fatherhood.

Inside, though? I was screaming. Cursing at myself for not pulling out.

Fuck.

 

[AAAustinYu]

That's a flag, another for the collection!

 

[Angry_Crustacean]

Sigma Tip #2848383993: Your grandpa deserved it.

Click to shrink...

Lol, he would be used in sigma edits and aura farming stuff wouldn't he.

Not Aleksandra. Helena. Nineteen

Click to shrink...

Wasn't she Twenty earlier? Also, is it wrong I kinda hope she bites it? I liked Aleksandra better. Feels wrong for him to get another girl pregnant not even a year after his wife died. Hope she died before she can carry to term

 

[Romafedu]

Wasn't she Twenty earlier? Also, is it wrong I kinda hope she bites it? I liked Aleksandra better. Feels wrong for him to get another girl pregnant not even a year after his wife died. Hope she died before she can carry to term

Click to shrink...

Well, I think it would be a happier ending if she had her baby in hiding and the MC maybe went to visit sparingly. It is kinda bad to wish the death of a young woman after all.