My brothers Keeper, an SI as the twin brother of Stalin (Reworked)

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from the wikipedia page of "I'm just here to See" (Film):

I'm Just Here to See, is a 1990 Soviet satirical black comedy directed by Yuri Mamin. The film is a work of political satire that follows the former Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, who inexplicably awakens in 1990 and attempts to make sense of, and interfere with, modern Soviet society.

Sypopsis

The film opens with Joseph Stalin on his deathbed, surrounded by his grieving family. He closes his eyes for the final time—only to awaken suddenly in the middle of Gorky Park in Moscow.

Disoriented but immediately alert, Stalin wanders the city, growing increasingly appalled at what he sees. The Soviet Union, in his eyes, has become soft, materialistic, and ideologically hollow. Tourists and passersby mistake him for a street performer or impersonator, saluting him jokingly, asking for photographs, and treating him with casual irreverence. Stalin is baffled by their behavior, unsure whether to be offended or impressed.

Eventually, he reaches Red Square, where he finds it filled with statues and posters of Lenin, Marx, himself, and even his son Yakov and his grandson. Entering the Mausoleum, Stalin discovers Lenin's preserved body lying beside his own, with his son's body nearby. This triggers a brief existential crisis, as he stares at his own embalmed corpse, then at his living hand, silently questioning whether he is truly Stalin—or merely a very convincing historical mistake.

Emerging from the Mausoleum, still treated as an impersonator, Stalin concludes that destiny must have spared him for a reason. He resolves to somehow "correct" Soviet society himself, though he has no clear plan beyond strong opinions and a remarkable tolerance for public confusion.

Meanwhile, at Mosfilm Studios, a struggling Georgian filmmaker from Gori, Iosif Sakashvili, is denied a promotion after his latest project is dismissed by his supervisor as overly experimental and avant-garde. Recently married, named after Stalin himself, and deeply dissatisfied with his stalled career, Sakashvili drowns his frustrations in alcohol.

After drinking too much, he stumbles through Moscow and passes out on a bench in Gorky Park—where he is awakened by Stalin. Startled, Sakashvili instinctively snaps to attention and salutes before realizing he is drunk, hungover, and possibly hallucinating. Embarrassed, he apologizes and offers Stalin a few rubles for the trouble.

Stalin sternly asks his name and why he was passed out in public, remarking that "in my time, you would have been sent to a labor camp for anti-Soviet behavior." Sakashvili laughs, assuming Stalin is merely a talented impersonator. Suddenly inspired, he declares that a film about Stalin—especially one like this—would be wildly successful.

Sakashvili proposes that they work together on a film: a roaming social critique of Soviet life. Stalin agrees, seeing it as an opportunity to learn what has happened to the USSR since his death—and possibly to lecture the population along the way. The two embark on a journey across the Soviet Union, filming Stalin as he interacts with ordinary citizens, reacts to modern customs, and delivers increasingly outdated but passionately confident commentary on contemporary issues.

After a month of filming, they submit the project to Mosfilm. The censorship panel is divided: younger members praise the film's originality and humor, while older, more conservative officials decide to "submit it to the Party for further review"—effectively shelving it without formally banning it.

Stalin is furious, but Sakashvili reassures him that there are other ways to distribute the film. He turns to his wife, Polina, who owns a video shop and quietly distributes samizdat materials. Within weeks, the film begins circulating underground across Moscow. When the son of a Central Committee member is caught watching it—and finds it amusing rather than subversive—he pressures the censorship board to approve it. Shortly afterward, the film is officially released and sells out across the USSR.

Celebrating their success, Stalin and Sakashvili go out for drinks, only to be attacked by hardline Komsomol youths who believe Stalin is a disrespectful impersonator mocking Soviet history. Both men are hospitalized, but news of the assault sparks public sympathy. Stalin and Sakashvili are soon invited onto Soviet prime-time television, where Stalin delivers the film's final line directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall: "My time may have passed—but with this, I will ensure the flame of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism will never perish from this Earth."

The film ends abruptly as the studio audience applauds, unsure whether they have just witnessed satire, propaganda, or a very elaborate prank.

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from the wikipedia page of "Kitchen confessions" (Book):
Kitchen Confessions is a novel written in 1981 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is a deeply ironic meditation on survival, guilt, class, and the lies men tell themselves in order to live. The novel centers on the reunion of two childhood friends from radically different social backgrounds, each burdened by a lifelong secret, each convinced that confession—finally spoken aloud—may grant a kind of absolution.

The story opens on a quiet spring afternoon, the day after May Day celebrations in 1980. Anatoly Iosifovich Rossevensky, an aging colonel recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, makes his way through Moscow to the apartment of his boyhood friend, General Pyotor Vladimirovich Ivanoff. Anatoly has been told he has little time left to live, and with death approaching, he feels compelled to confront what he calls "affairs from the distant past"—truths he has carried for decades, unspoken and unresolved.

When Anatoly arrives, he is struck immediately by the luxury of Ivanoff's apartment: the polished floors, the spacious rooms, the quiet presence of servants. It is a life far removed from the one Anatoly has known. Ivanoff greets him warmly, embracing him with genuine affection and remarking with amused nostalgia that even in their eighties, they still resemble one another closely, as though time had chosen to wear them down in parallel. He ushers Anatoly into the kitchen, insisting they talk there, as they once had as boys. A servant prepares a meal, and the two men sit across from one another at the small kitchen table, surrounded by the ordinary intimacy of food, steam, and clinking utensils.

Anatoly wastes little time. He explains his diagnosis and admits that he has come to confess a secret he has carried since youth. Ivanoff listens quietly, nodding, and then surprises Anatoly by admitting that he too has recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness—and that he, too, has something he has never told anyone. With a bitter smile, Ivanoff suggests they decide who goes first the way they used to as children: a game of rock, paper, scissors. Ivanoff wins.

The narrative then plunges backward to 1916. Anatoly and Pyotor have just turned eighteen. They are inseparable friends despite their sharply divided social origins. Anatoly is the youngest and only son of Iosif and Natassia Rossevensky, prosperous Cossack landowners. Pyotor, by contrast, is the son of Vladimir and Nadezhda Ivanoff, gentle and hardworking peasants employed on Rossevensky land.

As the First World War grinds on and the Russian Empire bleeds itself dry, the age of conscription is lowered. Anatoly receives his draft notice. For Iosif Rossevensky, the prospect is unbearable: his only son sent to the front, where death or mutilation could extinguish the family line. Desperate, Iosif offers Vladimir a large sum of money to send Pyotor in Anatoly's place.

Vladimir hesitates, torn between the love of his children and the crushing weight of poverty. Before he can decide, Pyotor volunteers. He claims he wants to help his family, to spare Anatoly, to do his duty. Vladimir breaks down in tears but accepts the money. Pyotor goes to war.

Against all expectation, Pyotor survives the First World War—not through bravery, but through a peculiar combination of blind luck and instinctive cowardice. During the Brusilov Offensive, he becomes an unwitting hero when he is discovered as the sole survivor of a forward trench, clutching the regimental flag and surrounded by enemy corpses. The official version celebrates his heroic last stand.

The truth is far less noble. Pyotor had stumbled into the trench by accident after a scouting party was annihilated. When the German assault came, he collapsed, sobbing, paralyzed by fear. Only under threat of execution by his own captain was he forced to fire his weapon. When the final assault arrived, Pyotor was not defending the flag—he was trying to surrender it. By chance alone, every witness to his cowardice died in the fighting. The lie survives; Pyotor does.

This moment defines the rest of his life. Over the next forty years, Pyotor Ivanoff is dragged into nearly every major Soviet conflict and internal crisis, always attempting to avoid danger, and always emerging with greater honors. His undeserved reputation ensures he is repeatedly assigned to the most perilous tasks. He survives Petrograd, Kronstadt, the Basmachi rebellion, Kiev, Lake Khasan, and countless unnamed battles. He meets Stalin, Jugashvili, Tukachevsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin; serves under legendary commanders, and collects decorations like a man trying to outrun his own shadow.

Ivanoff is brutally honest about his motivations. He admits he clung to his heroic identity not out of ideology, but fear: fear of execution for cowardice, fear of losing his rank, his privileges, his pension, his access to women, comfort, and power. By 1980, at the age of eighty-two, he is the most decorated man in the USSR—having received the Order of the Red Banner and the title Hero of the Soviet Union more than twenty times combined. He boasts, not without pride, that he has "beaten both Tukhachevsky and Zhukov in medals."

When the narrative returns to the kitchen, Anatoly laughs softly. He says he is not surprised. He confesses that, in his own way, he too has always been a coward.

Anatoly recounts his own past. Unlike Pyotor, he avoided the First World War—but not the Revolution. Drafted alongside his father into the White forces, he participates in Kornilov's Ice March and the brutal southern campaigns under Denikin. When the White offensive on Moscow collapses, Anatoly and his father recognize the cause is lost. They defect to the Bolsheviks and fight against the same forces they once served.

They survive the civil war only to return home and find devastation: their farm burned, the workers slaughtered. Among the dead are Pyotor's parents and siblings, as well as Anatoly's own sisters. Overcome with despair and guilt, Anatoly's father takes his own life—but not before revealing a final secret. He confesses that he once had an affair with Pyotor's mother, making Anatoly and Pyotor half-brothers.

Anatoly's life continues in quiet frustration. Barred from the party due to his Cossack origins, he devotes himself to the Red Army, becoming an officer and rising slowly through the cavalry. His progress is repeatedly stalled by suspicion and prejudice. When cavalry is phased out during the purges of the 1930s and replaced by mechanized warfare, Anatoly experiences the loss as personal annihilation. In one scene, he touches a tank in his base and weeps silently, realizing the world he was born into no longer exists.

He marries a young nurse, Yelena, and for a brief time lives peacefully—until the German invasion drags him back to war. Fighting as an infantryman on the Eastern Front, he learns that Ivanoff is alive and celebrated. He attempts to reconnect, only to find himself excluded by rank, reputation, and politics. Bitterly drunk, he laughs at the irony: "Now I'm the peasant, and he's the Cossack."

After the war, Anatoly is finally admitted to the Party. His career advances modestly but stalls permanently at the regional level. At home, however, he finds contentment. His children rise in the system, shielded from his stigma by their mother's peasant origins. He grows old surrounded by a caring family, gradually forgetting Ivanoff.

Until the diagnosis.

Back in the present, the two men finish their meal in silence. Anatoly reaches for a bottle of vodka, pours two glasses, and hands one to Pyotor.

"Now," he says quietly, "we're both Cossacks—like we pretended to be when we were children."

They drink.

 

[Alenco98]

In order to eradicate the criminal-fascist system responsible for mass murder, terror, and the enslavement of our people, and acting in the name of revolutionary justice and the security of the Soviet state, it is hereby ordered that current and former rank and file members of the Schutzstaffel (SS), including the Waffen-SS, concentration and death camp guards, regardless of rank, age, gender or function, from clerks and enlisted men to the highest leadership shall be arrested, have their affiliation with said organizations verified, then executed by shooting; no claims of ignorance, coercion, or obedience to orders shall be recognized, as membership itself constitutes criminal participation, with exceptions permitted for individuals possessing or claiming indispensable expertise in weapons development or scientific research, who shall remain under strict guard and subject to subsequent forced scientific labor and research and verification of their expertise.

Order number 66, proposed by Mikheil Jugashvili and signed off by Joseph Stalin

March 21, 1921
Fittinghoff house
Petrograd, Russian SFSR

Stalin stepped into his brother's room and stopped.

The smell struck first.

Human waste. Old blood. Sweat soaked deep into bedding that had not been changed often enough. The stench of a body lingering too long between life and death, of fever and rot doing their quiet work. It was the smell of collapse. Stalin did not react outwardly. His face remained carved from stone, though a flicker of disgust passed behind his eyes before being crushed into nothing.

Then he noticed the woman.

A Red Cross uniform. Swedish. Elsa—yes, Elsa Brandström. He recognized her at once. His brother had spoken of her more than once, always with that irritating tone Mika used when he believed himself morally correct.

One of the few genuinely decent human beings I've met, Mika had said once. Better than either of us.

Stalin had dismissed it at the time as sentimentality, perhaps even guilt masquerading as admiration. Yet here she was, seated beside the bed, sleeves rolled up, hands stained with antiseptic and blood. Her posture was rigid with exhaustion; her eyes were rimmed red, not from fear but from sleeplessness.

Why was she here?

That was the only question that mattered.

No one stayed near someone like Mikheil Jugashvili without a reason. Not unless they were bound by blood—or ambition. Information, influence, leverage. There was always something. Stalin cataloged the possibilities automatically, the way other men breathed.

He remembered Mika's voice, irritatingly calm, irritatingly confident.

You should be more trusting of people, Joe. Not everyone is out to get us.

That instinct—trust, laxness—had put a bullet into Maria. Had shattered his brother. Had destabilized Petrograd and forced terror where discipline might once have sufficed. Mika's failure, yes. But also his own, for not hammering the lesson into him sooner.

He stepped closer, boots quiet against the floor.

"What is happening?" Stalin asked.

His voice was flat, devoid of concern, deliberately so.

The woman turned. She did not flinch. Stalin noted that immediately. There was no fear in her expression—only resolve and fatigue. She looked like someone who had made peace with responsibility.

"Infection," she said simply. She gestured to Mikheil's left hand, wrapped in layers of darkened bandages. Brown blood had soaked through, tacky and dry at the edges. "A knife went through his hand during the assault on Kronstadt. I cleaned it as best I could, but—"

She carefully unwrapped the cloth.

The flesh beneath was blackened and swollen, dead tissue creeping past the palm, climbing the forearm. Gangrene. Advanced.

Stalin's jaw tightened.

"How long?" he asked.

"He developed a fever four days ago."

Four days.

That meant delirium had already taken hold.

"I have insisted on amputation," she continued, her voice controlled but urgent. "But no surgeon will act without authorization. They are terrified. I am a nurse—I could attempt it, but I am not trained for such an operation. I would likely kill him."

She met Stalin's eyes directly now.

"If we do not remove the hand—no, the forearm—within twenty-four hours, he will die."

Stalin shifted his gaze to the bed.

Mikheil Jugashvili—the Hero of Petrograd, the Red Tamerlane, the butcher and savior of the revolution—lay reduced to a trembling body. His lips moved faintly.

"Maria," he whispered, over and over.

For a moment—just a moment—something stirred in Stalin's chest.

A memory surfaced, unwanted and sharp: himself as a boy, burning with fever after smallpox, half-conscious, while their mother prayed aloud and Mika sat beside him, forcing water into his mouth, muttering jokes, refusing to let him drift away.

Stalin crushed the feeling instantly.

Sentiment was a luxury that killed men.

This was calculation.

If Mika died now, the consequences would be… manageable. Martyrdom. A symbol. A dead hero could be shaped, preserved, wielded. A living one remained volatile—reckless, haunted, unpredictable.

Yet another memory intruded, uninvited.

Joe, eat before you cry yourself into a puddle, Mika had said after Kato died, pushing a plate toward him. Nobody wants to mop up grief and snot before breakfast.

Or the gun—his gun—returned later that day, unloaded.

Kato would want you to live.

Stalin exhaled slowly through his nose.

He turned back to the woman.

"I will send men with you," he said. "You will carry a letter bearing my authority. You will find a surgeon. Do whatever is necessary. He will live."

He paused, eyes hardening.

"And if you fail," he added evenly, "there will be consequences for killing the Hero of the Revolution."

A threat. But also a test.

She did not look away.

"Whatever you say," she replied.

Good, Stalin thought. Fearless people were dangerous—but useful.

He turned and left the room without another word, calling sharply into the corridor.

"Patruchev."

The Chekist, Mika's old friend from his police days appeared instantly.

"You will escort Miss Brandström. Bring men. Bring a surgeon. Immediately."

"Yes, Comrade," Patruchev snapped.

Minutes later, the room was empty.

Stalin returned to the chair beside the bed and sat where the woman had been moments earlier. He looked down at his brother's ravaged face.

"Don't die yet," he said quietly. "You are too useful."

That was what he told his brother.

That was what he told himself.

March 21, 1921
Fittinghoff house
Petrograd, Russian SFSR

Elsa Brandström walked quickly through the narrow street, her boots crunching through frozen slush that had turned gray with ash. The air still smelled of smoke and damp stone, the residue of bombardment clinging to Petrograd like a second skin. Even days later, the city had not exhaled.

Behind her followed half a dozen armed men—Cheka and Red Army by the look of them—coats heavy, faces shut tight with professional indifference. At her right shoulder walked Patruchev, silent, efficient, his presence both reassurance and warning. He did not speak unless necessary. She appreciated that.

She did not have far to go.

Barely a block from the Fittinghoff building stood the apartment of Dr. Smirnov—the same surgeon she had begged two days earlier, the same man who had wrung his hands and whispered apologies while refusing her outright. She remembered his eyes then: frightened, calculating, already rehearsing excuses for later.

She stopped at his door and knocked. Firmly. Not loudly.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then she saw movement at the window to her left. A curtain twitched. A pale face appeared—Smirnov's—eyes wide, already resigned. A second later, the door opened.

"Miss Brandström," he said, his voice thin and brittle. "What is this? I told you—I cannot do it. Not without—"

"—official authorization," Elsa finished calmly. "Yes. I remember."

She met his gaze without blinking.

"I have it now. Stalin has returned. Mr. Jugashvili's brother." She let the words settle before continuing. "He has ordered me to find a surgeon immediately."

She gestured—not dramatically, simply—with her chin toward the men behind her.

"He has also sent the Cheka to make sure you come."

The doctor swallowed hard. His shoulders slumped, as if the last of his resistance had finally found a place to rest.

"I am sorry," Elsa added quietly, and meant it. "I truly am. But I have no other choice. You remember what I asked of you two days ago."

He nodded slowly. "Yes. I… I understand."

There was a pause. Then, with a tired sigh, he stepped back.

"Please," he said. "Let me gather my tools."

Elsa turned her head slightly. "Patruchev. Help him."

"Yes, ma'am," he replied, already moving.

She remained outside while the two men disappeared into the apartment. She forced herself not to pace. Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. She focused on breathing evenly—the way she had learned in Siberia. Panic helped no one. It never had.

They emerged less than a minute later. Patruchev carried a heavy medical bag. Smirnov followed close behind, coat hastily buttoned, hands trembling despite his effort to steady them.

They returned to the Fittinghoff building in under ten minutes. Guards stepped aside at their approach, eyes flicking from Elsa to the bag to Smirnov with poorly concealed curiosity—and fear.

Inside the room, the air was thick.

Stalin sat beside his brother's bed, rigid, his hands clasped together as if holding himself intact by sheer will. On the other side sat Jugashvili's mother, murmuring prayers in Georgian, fingers moving ceaselessly as she crossed herself again and again.

Elsa stepped forward.

"Stalin," she said softly. "He's here."

He turned. His gaze flicked from Smirnov to the bag to the bed itself.

"Do what it takes to save him," he said flatly. "Now."

Jugashvili's mother spoke sharply, her voice rising. Elsa did not understand the words, but she understood the tone—fear, accusation, grief compressed into anger. Stalin answered too quickly, too curtly.

Then it happened.

The old woman stood and struck him.

The sound cracked through the room like a gunshot.

Everyone froze.

Elsa felt her breath catch. She had seen many things—violence, cruelty, collapse—but she had never seen anyone strike Stalin. Not even imagined it.

The woman shouted again, striking him once more, then again, words pouring out in Georgian like blows themselves. On the fourth slap, Stalin caught her wrist.

He did not raise his voice. He said something low and firm.

She stopped.

Slowly, she nodded.

He released her and turned sharply to Patruchev.

"Find a priest," he ordered.

Patruchev blinked. "A priest? Why—"

"Shut up and go," Stalin snapped. "Now."

Then his gaze swept the room, cold and warning.

"You saw nothing," he said.

It was not a suggestion.

Smirnov cleared his throat, hands already moving as if habit might steady his nerves.

"You said you were a nurse?" he asked Elsa.

"I was," she replied.

"Then you will assist me."

She nodded once. There was no room for hesitation.

She glanced at Stalin, then at Jugashvili's mother, who had returned to praying. Elsa exhaled slowly.

What have I gotten myself into? she thought—not for the first time.

"Bring a table," she instructed one of the guards. "Place it beside the bed. Lay out the tools."

They obeyed at once.

She opened the medical bag, arranging its contents with practiced hands—antiseptic, scalpels, clamps, saws. The metal gleamed harshly in the lamplight.

Smirnov removed the bandages from Jugashvili's arm and laid it straight. The smell made Elsa's stomach tighten, but she did not flinch.

"We will need to amputate the lower forearm," he said quietly. "Possibly higher. Apply antiseptic to the saw. I will make it as fast as I can."

She did so carefully, deliberately.

Just as she lifted the saw to pass it to him, Jugashvili's mother spoke again.

"Wait."

Stalin raised a hand. "She wants the priest to give anointment first."

Smirnov stiffened. "Comrade Stalin, with respect—the infection is spreading. If we delay—"

"And whose fault is that?" Stalin cut in, his voice sharp as glass. "You refused him before. Now you speak of urgency?"

The room fell silent.

"We wait," Stalin said. "When the priest arrives, you proceed."

Elsa lowered the saw back onto the table, slowly.

She said nothing.

A part of her—small, unwise, exhausted—almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all: a regime that closed churches and jailed priests now desperately searching for one at the insistence of a grieving mother.

But she held her tongue.

She knew better.

March 21, 1921
A church near Fittinghoff house
Petrograd, Russian SFSR

Father Sergey Eldarevich Patruchev stood beneath the stone arch of the church entrance, as he did every day after the final blessing, his cassock brushing softly against the worn steps as he bade farewell to the faithful one by one. Their faces carried the same mixture of exhaustion and stubborn devotion that had become so common in Petrograd since the war began—since hunger, requisitioning, and fear had become part of the city's daily liturgy.

Some crossed themselves hurriedly, as if the gesture itself might draw unwanted attention. Others murmured brief greetings, eyes already darting toward the street. No one lingered. No one wished to be seen standing too long outside a church anymore. And who could blame them? Not when the city was ruled by Mikheil Jugashvili.

The butcher of Petrograd.

When the last parishioner departed, Father Sergey closed the heavy wooden doors and allowed himself a long, careful breath. Even now, days after Kronstadt, the air still smelled faintly of smoke and damp ash, as though the city itself had absorbed the violence and could not release it. The memory of artillery and gunfire lingered like an afterimage. He crossed himself slowly.

"Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil," he whispered, the words of the psalm as familiar to him as his own name. "For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me."

He had clung to that verse since the civil war began. Perhaps clung too tightly. He had heard the stories—priests shot against walls, churches shuttered overnight, icons burned, men vanishing into prisons and never returning. He had expected the same fate here.

Yet Petrograd was different.

All because of the same man who had butchered Kronstadt.

Father Sergey shook his head slightly as he retrieved the broom from behind the altar and began to sweep the nave. He remembered that day clearly, the way one remembers a fever dream. Jugashvili standing before them in Smolny, his eyes cool and appraising, his tone almost friend, more conversational than threatening.

"I don't really have anything against the Church," he had said. "Marx says religion is the opium of the people, yes—but he never said to shoot priests or burn churches. So I'll make it simple. Pay your taxes. Don't preach rebellion. And you can exist."

Then, with that faint, unsettling half-smile:
"I give you my word—as a former seminarian who chose a different calling."

Father Sergey had not believed him then. Even now, he did not fully believe him.

And yet—churches remained open. Bells still rang. The faithful still gathered. There were propaganda campaigns, insults, whispered threats. But no mass arrests. No midnight executions. Jugashvili had, in his own monstrous way, kept his word.

The broom rasped softly against the stone floor.

It had been no more than five minutes when Father Sergey heard footsteps outside—heavy, deliberate. Not parishioners. He froze.

When he turned toward the door, his heart sank.

Cheka.

He recognized one of them immediately—Jugashvili's man, a face he had seen before near Smolny. The others stood behind him, rifles slung casually, expressions unreadable.

"What is the meaning of this?" Father Sergey asked, his voice steady despite the tightness in his chest.

"Come with us, Father," the man said. "We have need of you."

"I haven't done anything," Father Sergey replied quickly. "Comrade Jugashvili said—as long as we pay our taxes and remain loyal, we would—"

"Sir," the Chekist interrupted, not unkindly but firmly. "Please come with us. You will not be harmed."

Father Sergey looked past him then—counted them. A dozen men. Armed. Waiting.

There was no point arguing.

"Very well," he said quietly. He set the broom down where he stood, its handle clattering softly against the stone. As he stepped forward, the psalm came to his lips again, unbidden, like a reflex of the soul.

"Even though I walk through the darkest valley…"

They escorted him out into the cold. A truck idled nearby, its engine rumbling impatiently. As he climbed into the back, something inside him finally broke. He pressed a hand to his mouth, stifling a sob.

He thought of his home. Of the simple, holy ordinariness of it. His wife's stroganoff waiting on the stove. The faint smell of onions and butter. The weight of his newborn son in his arms, warm and impossibly small. The way the child's fingers curled instinctively around his own.

Such small joys. Untouched by ideology. Untouched by blood.

He was certain now: he would never return to them.

When the Cheka came, a man did not come back.

"May I send a message to my wife?" he asked quietly as the truck lurched forward. "Just to tell her not to worry."

The Chekist hesitated, then shook his head slightly.

"Relax, Father," he said. "We'll be done soon. Then you'll go back to your wife."

Father Sergey closed his eyes.

He had heard many lies in his life. This one, somehow, felt the kindest of all.

They drove for perhaps five minutes, though to Father Sergey it felt longer. Time had a way of stretching when one believed—quite reasonably—that one was being driven toward death.

The truck slowed and stopped. He recognized the place immediately.

Fittinghoff House.

Even the name carried weight in Petrograd now. People lowered their voices when they spoke it, if they spoke it at all. The Cheka headquarters. A place of screams whispered through walls, of families that entered together and were never seen again. He had heard the stories—everyone had. Prisoners tortured for days, entire households erased overnight, confessions extracted and rewritten until they fit whatever narrative was required. And always, always, the same name attached to it all.

Jugashvili.

Father Sergey closed his eyes and bowed his head slightly, his lips moving without sound at first, then quietly.

"Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil," he whispered, gripping the edge of his cassock as the truck came to a full halt. "For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me."

The back doors opened.

"Please step out," one of the Chekists said.

The word please startled him more than a shouted command would have. The man's tone was almost gentle, as if he were escorting an honored guest rather than a priest summoned at gunpoint. That, more than anything, unsettled Father Sergey.

He obeyed, stepping down onto the frozen street. Armed men closed in around him—not roughly, but decisively—and guided him toward the entrance.

Inside, the house was… ordinary. That was the most disturbing part.

If one ignored the rifles slung over shoulders, the red armbands, the pale clerks hunched over paperwork with the expressions of condemned men, it could almost have been any respectable residence. Somewhere down the hall a woman hushed a child. Somewhere else a door opened and shut softly. Life went on inside the belly of the beast.

He was led up the stairs to the second floor. Each step echoed louder than the last in his ears.

At a door midway down the corridor, the escort stopped and knocked once, sharply, before opening it.

Inside were five people.

A woman in a Red Cross uniform—foreign, unmistakably so—her sleeves rolled up, her face drawn with exhaustion. A surgeon, his hands already stained, eyes darting nervously between instruments and authority. An older woman seated near the bed, murmuring prayers in a language Father Sergey did not understand but somehow recognized in his bones. And standing apart from the rest, rigid and watchful—

Stalin. Jugashvili's master.

"Comrade Stalin," the Chekist announced. "We have the priest."

"Leave us," Stalin said flatly. "Close the door."

The men withdrew at once. The latch clicked shut behind them.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Stalin looked at Father Sergey with an expression that was not hostile, not welcoming—merely assessing, like a man examining a tool to see if it would hold.

"My mother wants my brother to receive anointing of the sick," Stalin said at last. "He is not part of the highest Bolshevik leadership. He has not been excommunicated. You will begin immediately. Be quick. The infection has spread."

Father Sergey almost laughed.

Not from humor—God forgive him—but from the sheer, crushing absurdity of it. The revolution that mocked faith, shuttered monasteries, jailed priests, now stood here demanding the sacraments at gunpoint. All of it balanced on the trembling will of an old woman and the authority of her son.

He swallowed the laughter before it could become hysteria.

"As you wish," he said quietly.

He stepped toward the bed.

The smell struck him first—rot, fever, antiseptic layered over decay. Then he saw the hand.

Gangrene.

He did not need medical training to know what that meant. Even at seminary, books on anatomy and illness had circulated among curious students, and the signs were unmistakable. The flesh was blackened, swollen, dead. Whatever life had once been there was gone.

His gaze lifted slowly to the man's face.

Mikheil Jugashvili.

The butcher of Petrograd.

The savior of Petrograd.

The monster whose name had become a prayer and a curse, depending on who spoke it.

Up close, he looked… smaller. Younger than Father Sergey had imagined. Clean-shaven, his face free of the pockmarks that scarred Stalin's. Lines of exhaustion etched deep around his eyes, shadows beneath them, but otherwise—disturbingly ordinary.

Almost innocent.

His lips moved faintly.

"Maria," he murmured. Again and again. The word trembled with longing, with grief so naked it nearly undid the priest where he stood.

For a fleeting, dangerous moment, Father Sergey wondered if the stories were wrong. If this was simply a sick man, a suffering soul, stripped of myth and terror by fever.

Then he remembered the mass graves.

He began the prayers.

His voice was steady, though his hands trembled slightly as he traced the sign of the cross, anointing the forehead, the chest, the uninjured hand. He forced himself not to look again at the ruined limb. He forced himself not to think of how many hands like this man's had ordered deaths, signed papers, pulled triggers.

He prayed not for Jugashvili's power or legacy, but for his soul—whatever remained of it.

When he finished, he stepped back and inclined his head.

"It is done," he said. "Is that all you require of me?"

Stalin did not answer at once. Instead, he turned to the older woman and spoke rapidly in Georgian. She replied, her voice sharp, insistent. Father Sergey caught only fragments, but the meaning was clear enough.

Stalin turned back.

"She wants you to stay," he said. "Pray while the amputation is performed."

Father Sergey nodded.

"As you say."

It was all he could say.

He folded his hands and stood by the bed, whispering prayers as steel instruments were laid out on a table nearby. Outside, Petrograd continued to breathe—smoke, ash, fear, and faith mingling in the frozen air.

And somewhere in the distance, bells rang. He wondered, not for the first time that night, whether God was listening, laughing, weeping; or maybe all of them at once.

Inside Jugashvili's head

Cold.

That was the first thing I understood when I came to. Not knew—understood, the way an animal understands pain. I was cold in my bones, cold in places bones shouldn't feel anything at all. I was shivering so hard it felt as though my body were trying to shake itself apart, as if it wanted to leave me behind.

I didn't remember where I was. I didn't remember who I was.

I only knew I was cold.

Ice pressed against me from all sides. Not just beneath me, but above me too, crawling up my chest, my throat, my jaw, until it kissed my cheeks. Snow screamed as it whipped across my face, needles of white tearing at my skin, forcing their way into my eyes, my mouth. I tried to breathe and tasted iron.

I was buried.

Not alone.

All around me were bodies—men, women, children—half-swallowed by the snow. Only their faces were visible, pale and frozen, arranged around me in a terrible circle. Their eyes were open. All of them. None blinked.

Tears streamed down their faces, but they weren't tears. They were blood—dark, thick, endless—sliding down their cheeks and vanishing into the snow beneath their chins. The ground drank it eagerly.

Every head turned toward me at once.

Their mouths opened together.

"You," they said.

The word struck harder than the cold.

"You put us here."

Their voices layered over one another—deep and thin, old and young—until it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began.

"You dumped us in this icy hell."

I wanted to deny it. I wanted to scream that I didn't know them, that I didn't remember doing this, that there must be some mistake. But the words wouldn't come. My throat locked, my tongue useless.

Because somewhere deep inside me—below the fear, below the confusion—I knew.

I knew.

I didn't know their names. I didn't know their crimes, or if they even had any. I didn't know how they had ended up here, frozen and broken and staring at me like judges.

But I knew I was the reason.

Whatever I had done, whoever I had become, it had been terrible enough to create this place. This wasn't hell imposed on me. This was hell I had built.

Shame seeped into me, heavier than the ice. It pressed on my chest until breathing hurt. I wanted to sink down, to let the snow close over my face, to disappear among them.

The voices rose again—angrier now, closer—and I couldn't bear it.

I looked up.

The moment my eyes lifted to the sky, the voices stopped.

Silence fell so abruptly it rang in my ears.

The sky was vast and dark, scattered with stars that felt impossibly far away. And there, framed against that endless black, stood a woman.

She was young. Beautiful in a way that hurt to look at. Familiar.

She said nothing.

That was worse.

Her eyes held something unbearable—love, deep and undeniable—but tangled with disappointment so sharp it cut deeper than hatred ever could. She didn't accuse me. She didn't shout.

She simply looked at me.

Tears welled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, falling slowly, gracefully, as if even gravity respected her sorrow. When they reached me, they didn't melt against my skin.

They struck like nails.

Each tear landed with a jolt, driving itself into my face, my chest, my soul. And with every impact, memories flooded into me—not whole, not orderly, but jagged fragments that cut on the way in.

"What's wrong with you, Mika?"

Her voice—soft, hurt, familiar.

"You've become a monster."

The words replayed again and again, each time synchronized with another tear falling, another piece of me cracking under the weight of it. I saw flashes—parks, arguments, laughter that curdled into silence, her face twisted in disbelief at something I had said or done.

She had loved me.

That was the worst part.

She had loved me enough to stay, long enough to watch me change. Loved me enough to be afraid of me. Loved me enough to be disgusted.

I tried to reach for her. My arms wouldn't move.

"I didn't mean to," I tried to say, though I wasn't sure what it was. The words dissolved in the cold before they left my mouth.

Another tear fell.

Another memory broke me open.

Her disappointment hurt more than all the accusing dead combined. They hated me—and maybe they were right to. But she had believed in me once.

I felt something inside me fracture, slow and final, like ice giving way beneath a man who has walked too far already.

"I'm sorry," I thought—or maybe I said it. I wasn't sure anymore.

The tears kept falling.

They did not splash or run—they pierced. Each one struck me like a nail driven into memory, and with every impact something inside me cracked open. Images poured in, uninvited and unstoppable.

Her name came back to me first.

Maria.

And then everything else followed.

Men falling backward as bullets punched through them. Women clutching children that went limp in their arms. Orders barked, written, signed—executions reduced to columns of ink and numbers. Prison yards slick with blood. Faces twisted in terror as I told them to choose: kill, or be killed. I saw hands trembling as they raised stones, bricks, knives. I heard myself speaking calmly while entire lives ended because I had decided they should.

Me.

I wanted to cry out—What have I done?—but my mouth would not obey. My body had forgotten how to form words that meant anything. All that came out was her name.

"Maria."

Again.

And again.

Over and over, like a child repeating a prayer he no longer understands, hoping the repetition itself might save him.

I could not look at her anymore. I couldn't bear the disappointment in her eyes, the love twisted into something heavier, something unbearable. I turned away.

That was a mistake.

They were closer now.

The faces—those frozen, half-buried heads—were no longer distant shapes in the snow. They crowded me, inches from my own face, mouths opening impossibly wide, breath cold and rancid.

"You," they screamed.

"You."

"You put us here."

"You dumped us in this icy hell."

Their voices merged into one, a single roar that drowned out everything else. Tens of thousands. No—hundreds of thousands. The sound of them crushed me, flattened me, pressed me deeper into the ice.

Maria's tears were falling faster now, striking my skull, my eyes, my chest. Each tear carried a memory with it. Her voice in the park. Her hands on my sleeves. Her saying my name the way she used to when she was trying to pull me back from myself.

"What's wrong with you, Mika?"

"What have you become?"

I wanted to scream for them to stop. For her to stop. To tell them I was sorry, that I hadn't meant for it to go this far, that I hadn't known how to stop once it began.

But all I could manage was her name.

"Maria."

A whimper. Nothing more.

A pathetic sound, swallowed instantly by the screaming of the dead.

The visions shifted.

My children appeared—our children. I saw their faces as they slept, as they laughed, as they clung to my legs. I saw myself lifting them, teaching them, promising them safety.

Then the image fractured, split clean down the middle.

Me—the father.

Me—the monster.

And there was no bridge between them anymore.

Then the pain came.

At first it was distant, like heat felt through layers of cloth. Then it grew teeth.

A burning sensation crawled up my right arm, as though the ice encasing me was melting, exposing raw flesh beneath. The pain spread slowly, deliberately, savoring every nerve. I tried to pull away, but I couldn't move. My body would not listen.

I tried to scream.

I couldn't.

I could only whisper her name again, my voice breaking as the pain intensified, climbing higher, gnawing deeper.

And then—another voice.

Low. Steady. Measured.

A prayer.

The words cut through the screaming like a blade through fog. The accusing faces began to dissolve, their mouths still moving even as their forms collapsed into snow and shadow. Maria's tears slowed.

The pain did not.

It sharpened.

It cut.

The ice around me shattered. The snow peeled away from my face. I felt myself ripped back into my body all at once, sensation crashing down like an avalanche.

And I screamed.

A raw, animal sound tore out of me, loud enough to split the world open. The ice cracked beneath me. The visions exploded outward, blown away by the force of it.

"Hold him down!" someone shouted.

Hands—real hands—gripped me. Solid. Merciless. I thrashed, fought, howled as the pain consumed everything.

I could see now.

My right forearm lay exposed, blackened, swollen, dead. The flesh was wrong, ruined, already gone. A blade moved through it, slow and deliberate, sawing me free from what remained.

I screamed again.

And again.

And again.

Until the ice was gone.

Until the snow was gone.

Until my forearm was gone.

Until there was nothing left but pain, and blood, and a wasteland all around me.

 

[Alenco98]

Arise, you who are branded with a curse,
All the hungry and enslaved people of the world!

Mikheil Stalin (Son of Yakov Stalin) singing the Internationale as his first words after landing on the moon.

March 22, 1921
Fittinghoff house
Petrograd, Russian SFSR

I opened my eyes.

That alone felt like a mistake.

The ceiling above me swam in and out of focus, a pale blur stained with cracks and watermarks. My head felt like it had been hollowed out and refilled with lead. Not a normal hangover—this was something biblical. Like I'd personally offended God and He'd responded with a hammer.

I tried to speak. My mouth opened, but nothing useful came out.

"Wh—" My voice rasped like sandpaper dragged across concrete. I swallowed hard, my throat burning. "What's g—"

I cleared my throat again, coughing weakly. Every breath hurt, as if my lungs resented being asked to work.

Footsteps.

Measured. Careful. Close.

Two shadows slid into my field of vision. I squinted, forcing my right eye to focus—well, my remaining eye. The world sharpened just enough for faces to emerge.

One tall. Familiar. Rigid as a statue carved out of suspicion.

The other smaller, tense, watching me like I might shatter if she moved too fast.

I lifted my right arm to rub my face.

Or rather—I tried to.

Nothing happened.

I stared at the space where my forearm should have been.

"What?" The word came out thin, almost polite.

"Mika." A voice said.

I turned my head slowly, every muscle protesting. "Joe?" I blinked hard. Stalin stood there, arms crossed, face unreadable. "Joe… is that you?" My heart began to pound. "Where am I? Am I dead? Is this heaven? Hell?"

"Neither," he said evenly. "You're alive. Cheka headquarters."

Alive.

That word landed wrong.

"How do you feel?" another voice asked.

I shifted my gaze. Elsa stood beside him, hands clasped tightly in front of her apron, exhaustion etched into her face.

"I…" I looked down again. The stump where my forearm had been was wrapped thickly in bandages. Clean. Too clean. "What happened?"

"You don't remember?" she asked softly.

I shook my head. "I remember coming back from Kronstadt. I remember asking you to clean the wound." A pause. "Then the fever." I swallowed. "Nothing after that." I looked at her. "Infection?"

She nodded once. "Gangrene. We didn't have a choice."

"No choice," I repeated, staring at the bandages. "So it was my arm or my life."

"Yes."

"My forearm," I said quietly.

I stared at it for a long time.

That arm. That hand.

The one that signed execution orders. Pulled triggers. Held pistols steady while people begged. A reliable tool. Efficient. Loyal.

If bodies had achievement systems, I'd have unlocked a lot of badges with that hand.

Probably not Hitler-tier—he was more of a late-game grinder—but I'd say Emerald. Diamond, maybe, depending on metrics. If history ran ranked ladders, I was climbing fast.

And I wasn't done.

That realization hit next.

The future rushed back in like a cold wave—Hitler, wars, oceans of blood still waiting their turn. I exhaled slowly and laughed once, hollow and short.

"Still not enough," I muttered.

The dream came back with it. The ice. The heads. The screaming. Maria's face above me, silent, crying.

I looked up abruptly, half-expecting her tears to fall again.

They didn't.

Instead, I turned back to Elsa.

"Who allowed it?"

She frowned. "What?"

"Who gave you permission to save me?" My voice dropped, sharp now, cutting. "Who authorized this?"

Her lips parted, but I didn't let her answer.

"Do you know what I am?" I asked quietly. "Do you know what I've done?"

My breathing sped up. I pressed my left hand into the mattress, grounding myself.

"Men. Women. Children," I said. "Thousands. Tens of thousands." I laughed weakly. "For the revolution. For you, Joe." I looked at him now. "For Lenin. For the party."

I gestured clumsily at myself.

"And look at me." My voice cracked. "One eye. One arm. A broken body." I swallowed hard. "Maria—the only person who ever tried to stop me—she's dead. She died for me."

My chest tightened painfully.

"She called me a monster," I whispered. "And she was right. And she died anyway."

I looked between them, my vision blurring again.

"Every time I try to die, I live," I said. "Every battle. Every charge. Every time I stand in front of guns." My voice rose, breaking now. "So tell me!"

I shouted then, the sound ripping out of me.

"Why did you save me?!"

The room froze.

"Why do I have to live?!" I screamed. "Why do I breathe while she's dead? While all those people are dead? What's the point of it? Why am I still here when so many better people aren't?!"

My chest heaved. My head spun.

For a moment, no one spoke.

It didn't take long for Joe to break the silence.

He always did.

"Because you are useful."

The words landed without ceremony—flat, practical, almost bored. Not cruel, not kind. Just factual. Like stating the weather.

He stepped closer. I felt the weight of him before I saw him, the way a shadow precedes a storm. His hand came down on my shoulder, firm, possessive. Not comforting. Claiming.

"You are my brother," he continued. "And you do not decide when this ends. You do not decide when it begins. And you do not decide when you die."

I inhaled sharply. "Y—"

"Quiet."

His fingers tightened. Just enough to remind me that my bones were still breakable.

"Look at me."

I did.

And there it was. The thing I had been avoiding. The thing I had always known and pretended not to.

This wasn't anger. This wasn't grief. This wasn't even cruelty.

This was ownership.

I saw it clearly now—what this life was about. What he was. What I was to him.

I shouldn't have shouted. I shouldn't have questioned it. I shouldn't have cracked in front of him like that. Weakness was a currency here, and I'd just spent too much of it.

My children flashed through my mind—Iosif's stubborn jaw, Kato's soft voice, Aleksander, Besarion, Aleksandra, Yakov trying so hard to be brave. And with them came the understanding of what Joe was capable of if he ever felt cornered.

I was a monster, yes.

But he was something worse.

I wasn't his equal. I wasn't his conscience. I wasn't even his shield.

I was his sword.

His disposable sword.

And yet—another thought crept in, unwelcome but persistent. The future. The camps. The purges. The mountains of corpses still waiting their turn for the meat-grinder that was world war 2.

If I stayed alive.

If I stayed useful.

If I helped end the war faster, streamlined the system, redirected the machinery—

Maybe I could pull some people out before it swallowed them.

Maybe I could save a few million.

Maybe… I could make some small accounting with the dead.

"I…" My voice faltered. I swallowed. "I understand."

I forced the word out.

"Brother."

That seemed to satisfy him.

He released my shoulder, just like that, as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn't just drawn the borders of my existence with a single sentence.

"Take as long as you need to recover," he said. "Once you are able to stand, you will report to Moscow. I will go with you."

"Moscow?" I asked, faintly.

"Yes." He nodded. "Now that Kronstadt is finished and the civil war is winding down, our work here is done. I will take my proper place in the Politburo."

He paused, then added, almost casually:

"And you will go as well."

"For what?" I asked.

"For your new role."

I looked at him, suddenly very tired. "New role?"

"Yes," he said. "You will become General Secretary of the Cheka. Deputy to Dzerzhinsky."

The words took a moment to register.

"General Secretary?" I repeated.

"There has been… discussion," he continued, his tone smooth. "Kronstadt disturbed many people. A vocal minority has called for your expulsion from the party. They say you are excessively enthusiastic. That you enjoy repression."

He allowed himself the faintest hint of a smile.

"Idiots."

My stomach tightened.

"But," he went on, "you are far too useful to discard. Your organizational abilities in Petrograd were exemplary. Dzerzhinsky wishes to reform the Cheka—centralize it, rationalize it, make it more efficient."

He looked directly at me.

"I recommended you. He agreed. As did Lenin."

So that was it.

Not punishment.

Promotion.

I leaned back against the pillows, staring at the ceiling again. One arm gone. One eye gone. Whatever illusions I still had—gone.

I wasn't being spared.

I was being repurposed.

And the worst part—the part that hollowed me out completely—was that some part of me understood why.

And another part, smaller but louder, whispered:

If I'm going to be damned anyway… I might as well try to change how everyone dies.

I closed my eyes, breathing in relief, hearing him walk out of the door, and leaving me and Elsa alone.

March 22, 1921
Fittinghoff house
Petrograd, Russian SFSR

Elsa watched Stalin leave without looking back.

The door closed with a soft, final sound, and with it the pressure in the room shifted. It was subtle, but unmistakable—like a storm passing just far enough away that one could finally breathe again. For the first time in what felt like weeks, perhaps longer, there were only two people in the room.

Mikheil lay back against the pillows, pale and thinner than she remembered, his breathing shallow but steady. Whatever terror had seized him moments earlier—whatever instinctive submission he had displayed before his brother—had faded. In its place was something quieter. Older. He looked less like a frightened child now, and more like a man who had survived something humiliating.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," he said at last.

His voice was hoarse, but calm. He stared at the ceiling rather than at her.

"Stalin…" He stopped, then exhaled slowly. "Believe me, he is not as forgiving as I am. And neither are the others. Lenin. Trotsky. The rest of the Politburo. They do not forget weakness. They catalog it."

Elsa remained where she was. She said nothing. She had learned long ago that silence often drew out more truth than questions ever could.

He turned his head slightly toward her. "But there is something I want to understand," he continued. There was no anger in his voice. No self-pity. Just a genuine, unsettling curiosity. "Why did you save me?"

She met his gaze.

"You know what I am," he went on. "You've seen what I've done. You're disgusted by it—I don't blame you. If you had refused, if you had simply… let the infection take me, the world would have one less monster in it." His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "You could have smothered me with a pillow and slept soundly, knowing you'd done humanity a favor. So why didn't you?"

Elsa answered without hesitation.

"Because your mother asked me to."

He blinked.

"And because I am a nurse," she continued evenly. "A humanitarian. I don't choose my patients based on worthiness. I can't. Not when a woman—your mother—was begging me in broken Russian to save her son. Not when her grandchildren were clinging to her skirt, translating her words from Georgian into Russian because she couldn't find them herself."

For the first time since he'd woken, Mikheil's composure cracked.

"My… my children?" he whispered. "They… they were there?"

"Yes," Elsa said, nodding. "They were. And instead of shouting at me, or at your brother, perhaps you should have shouted at them."

His breath hitched. He looked away, his chest rising too fast now.

"My children," he murmured. "God." He squeezed his eyes shut. "I told them… I told them Joe would take care of them."

She frowned despite herself. "Your brother?" she asked carefully. "You truly believe that man would care for them? After what I just saw?"

He looked at her then, sharply.

"First of all," he said quietly, "never say that in front of him." There was no threat in his voice—just fear and concern. "Second… you don't know him like I do."

Elsa raised an eyebrow but remained silent.

"We grew up together," he went on. "I saved his life twice when we were boys. He wasn't always like this. Before… before his first wife died, he could still laugh. He had friends. Real ones. He loved her. Losing her broke something in him."

He swallowed.

"If Kato were still alive," he added softly, "maybe he would be different."

"Kato?" Elsa repeated. "Isn't that your daughter's name?"

He nodded.

"Her mother was Kato's sister," he said. "My daughter was born years later. Maria named her after her sister. Joe has a soft spot for her." A faint, sad smile crossed his face. "She looks like her aunt. And lately… she's starting to sound like her, too now that she's growing."

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Then Elsa reached for the water on the bedside table and held it out to him.

"Drink," she said gently.

Elsa watched him lift the glass of water with his left hand, the motion careful and slightly hesitant, as if his body had not yet accepted the new rules imposed upon it. His fingers closed around the glass too tightly at first, then loosened. He drank slowly, deliberately, pausing between swallows the way one does when expecting pain—or betrayal.

When he set the glass down, he studied it for a moment, as though disappointed it had behaved itself.

"It's not poisoned," he said at last. His voice was low, almost conversational. "Disappointing."

A faint, crooked smile passed over his face, more reflex than humor, the remnant of a man who once joked easily and now did so out of habit alone.

Elsa did not smile back.

She sat opposite him, hands folded neatly in her lap, posture straight despite the exhaustion that weighed on her bones. She had learned quickly that levity, however mild, was often a mask with him—and masks were dangerous things.

"Miss Elsa," he said, turning his head toward her. The light caught the sharpness in his remaining eye as his expression shifted, focus snapping into place with unsettling speed. This was the look she recognized now: the look of a man arranging the world in his mind, calculating pressure points and leverage. "Will you remain in Petrograd, coordinating aid here? Or would you consider going to Moscow?"

She did not answer immediately.

Instead, she adjusted her grip on her own hands, feeling the roughness of skin cracked by antiseptic and cold. Silence, she had learned, invited him to reveal more than he intended.

He mistook it for encouragement.

"I will have access there," he continued, voice measured, almost clinical. "Direct access. The Politburo. Sovnarkom. Lenin listens to me—if not because he trusts me, then because he fears me." A brief pause. "My brother ensures the rest of them do the same."

He watched her closely as he spoke, gauging, measuring. Elsa kept her face composed.

"Supply bottlenecks," he went on, "obstruction, officials hoarding food, delaying trains, losing paperwork at convenient moments—all of that disappears when I speak. You have the skill. I have the leverage." His lips pressed together. "Think of what we could accomplish."

He leaned back slightly, then stopped himself, as if the movement reminded him of something he no longer possessed. His gaze dropped to the stump of his arm, his mouth tightening.

"And also…" he began, then exhaled sharply, irritated with himself. "No. Forget it. That's foolish. I shouldn't say more."

He shook his head once, as though physically dismissing the thought.

"Still," he added more quietly, almost reluctantly, "you should consider it."

"I can't," Elsa said.

The words left her mouth before she had fully prepared them. They were simple. Final.

He looked at her—not with anger, not even disappointment. Only curiosity, as if she had presented him with an unexpected variable.

"Why not?"

She hesitated. Of all the things she had said to him—about executions, about cruelty, about guilt—this felt strangely harder to articulate.

"My father," she said at last. "He's been ill for years. I've received more letters recently. The tone has changed." Her voice wavered despite her effort to control it. "He's worse. I think… I think he may not have much time left."

She hated the warmth gathering behind her eyes. She hated that she was admitting this vulnerability to him of all people.

"I'm sorry," he said immediately.

There was no calculation in it. No defensive edge. Just a statement, offered plainly.

"I imposed on you for too long," he went on. His shoulders sagged, just slightly. "If you need to leave Russia—immediately—you may. I won't stop you." He frowned, thinking aloud. "Bullitt is competent. We could arrange something through him. Aid won't collapse because you're gone."

Elsa looked up at him then, genuinely surprised.

"I don't know what to do," she said quietly. "You once asked me how I could live with myself if I walked away while millions suffered. Do you remember that?"

He nodded. Shame crossed his face without resistance, as if he no longer had the strength to fend it off.

"But he is your father," he said. "We cannot save everyone. Sometimes… sometimes one must choose those they love."

He fell silent for a moment, then continued, his voice softer now, almost reflective.

"You know, before this war started—not the civil war, the great war back in 1914—before all of that, Maria and I had a dream. We would have gone to America. Me, her, Mama, the children. We would have settled down, opened a restaurant." A faint smile touched his lips. "I even had a name for it. Do you want to know what it would have been?"

Elsa blinked. "Sure. What was it?"

"McDonald's," he said, then chuckled quietly at himself.

"McDonald's?" she repeated, unsure whether she had misheard.

"Yes." He nodded. "I got it from a book at the library. Something about Scottish clans, I think. A good name. Catchy." His eye grew distant. "I even had ideas—golden arches, a giant cursive M. Burgers, ice cream, fried potato sticks with a simple sauce. It would have been perfect." His voice darkened. "Better than this hell."

She did not know what to say. The dissonance unsettled her: this man, capable of ordering mass death, speaking with earnest nostalgia about hamburgers and slogans.

"Why?" she asked softly. "Why did you stay?"

"Joe," he said simply.

He met her gaze again. "I offered him the chance to come with us. I wanted him to. But he refused. He was already in too deep. And I was raising his son." His jaw tightened. "Despite everything, a child deserves to be with his father."

He gestured with his stump, then pointed clumsily toward his eyepatch.

"What I'm trying to say is this is what loyalty to other people gets you," he said. "It's too late for me now, Elsa. I cannot step away. Stalin will walk down a river of blood." His voice was flat, resigned. "And I will be the one to dig the channel."

He looked at her then, truly looked at her.

"But you," he said. "You're a good person. You should go see your father. Take time away from this place. Breathe." A pause. "You've told me what you've endured—Siberia, famine, typhus, trains full of corpses. And now you're doing work that will save millions. I've been exploiting you." His mouth tightened. "You deserve rest. You deserve to be with people you love—and who love you."

Elsa sat very still.

She wondered—without bitterness, without judgment—how a man capable of such deliberate, merciless violence could also speak with such tenderness. How the same hands that signed death warrants could tremble when granting someone else permission to live.

Elsa hesitated, the words catching briefly in her throat before she allowed them out.

"I… I will return, then," she said carefully. "I will go back to Sweden."

For a moment, he said nothing. Then he nodded once, as if confirming something he had already expected.

"That's all right," he replied. His voice was even, measured. "Take as long as you need, like I said. Whatever happens—if your father recovers, or if he doesn't—send him my best wishes." He paused, choosing his next words with unusual care. "And when that chapter closes, however it does, don't rush your decision. Think. Rest. Your work is important. Millions are alive because of you."

He studied her face for a moment, not intrusively, but with a quiet intensity that made her uneasy.

"But your health matters too," he continued. "Not just your body. Your mind. Your heart. This place…" He gestured vaguely at the walls. "It eats people alive. Take time away from it. When you're ready—if you're ready—come back. I'll handle the rest. I always do."

Elsa nodded, but even as she did, her mind betrayed her. She saw again the aftermath of Kronstadt—the bodies dragged across the ice, the sailors crushed under artillery, the civilians broken by fear and coercion. She remembered the maps, the bombardment, the casual way orders had been given that erased entire lives.

This man—this same man—had conceived much of it.

And yet here he sat, speaking to her with gentleness, with consideration, as if the world were not soaked in blood because of his decisions. The contradiction made her stomach tighten. Disgust rose in her, sharp and undeniable. And yet, beneath it, something else lingered—pity. Not forgiveness. Never that. But the clear-eyed recognition of a man who understood he was trapped and despised himself for it.

"I'll be leaving within the week," she said. "I'll make the necessary arrangements."

"Of course," he replied. He exhaled slowly, then let out a short, almost self-mocking laugh. "It'll be lonely here without you."

He shook his head as if scolding himself. "I hate that I said that. Truly. You remember what I told you before—how, if I survived…" He hesitated, then continued more lightly, "how I wouldn't mind lunch someday. No war. No reports. No accounting of the dead. Just music. Caruso."

For a fleeting moment, he looked almost embarrassed—like a schoolboy who had spoken too much, too honestly.

"No," Elsa said immediately. Her voice was firm, not unkind. "I can't."

He nodded at once. There was disappointment in his eyes, but no resentment.

"I understand," he said. "I'm sorry for imposing. That wasn't fair."

She rose, smoothing her coat, grateful for the physical motion, for something ordinary to anchor her.

"I have to go," she said. "There's still work to be done."

"Yes," he replied quietly. "Of course there is."

She left without looking back, her footsteps steady in the corridor. And as she walked away, Elsa knew one thing: If she had agreed, she wouldn't have been able to leave.

 

[Alenco98]

NEW YORK NATIVE

Within the Iron Closet

By Larry Kramer
January 12, 1987

Five years. Six in June.

That's how long this nightmare has been going on.
Five years since the first whispers.
Five years since the first funerals.
Five years since the government decided that if enough of us died quietly, the problem would solve itself.

As of today, we are looking at more than fifteen thousand dead in this country alone. Fifteen thousand lovers, sons, brothers, daughters, friends—gone. If that number doesn't make you furious, then you are either numb, lying, or already dead inside.

And yet, somehow, we are still expected to be polite.

I'm not writing today to gently remind you to donate to another hospice or to clap politely for the latest half-assed promise from Washington. I'm writing because there is something happening across the Iron Curtain that should scare the living shit out of you—and if it doesn't, then God help us all.

You've heard the rumors. You've seen the speeches. Jesse Helms practically salivates when he talks about the Soviet "solution" to AIDS. Pat Robertson and his ilk drool over it in private and hint at it in public. Forced testing. Mandatory confinement. Sanitariums. Registers. Guards.

And don't kid yourself—this isn't propaganda. The Soviets are doing it.

In the USSR, if you test positive, you disappear. You are interrogated about every person you've touched, every body you've loved, every bed you've ever shared. Names are taken. Files are opened. Those names are dragged in too. Entire networks of human beings are scooped up like garbage and dumped into "medical facilities" that look suspiciously like prisons. You don't leave. You don't protest. You don't sue. You rot.

The state calls it "public health."
I call it mass incarceration with syringes.

And here's the truly terrifying part: it works. At least on paper. Their numbers are lower. Their spread is slower. And every fascist asshole in America knows it.

That's why this matters.

Because if we don't act—now—someone in this country will stand up in Congress, wag their finger, and say:
"Well, the Soviets solved it."

And then we're finished.

Do you think it stops with gay men?
Do you think they'll stop with drug users?
Do you think Black people, poor people, immigrants, sex workers, prisoners—do you think they'll be spared once the machinery starts rolling?

Wake the fuck up.

This disease is not what's killing us fastest. Complacency is. Cowardice is. Politeness is. The endless, soul-crushing ritual of begging for scraps from people who would rather see us gone.

We cannot keep playing defense. We cannot keep organizing bake sales while they build cages. We cannot keep whispering while they sharpen knives.

I am sick to death of funerals.
I am sick to death of being told to wait.
I am sick to death of being told to be "reasonable."

Reasonable is what got us here.

What we need now is direct action. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now. We need strikes. Sit-ins. Occupations. We need to make this epidemic politically impossible to ignore. We need to demand massive federal funding for research, for care, for education—and we need ironclad guarantees that no American will ever be locked up for being sick.

Because once you accept sanitariums for AIDS, you accept them forever.

The Soviets didn't start with camps either. They started with "necessity." With "emergency." With "the greater good." That's how every nightmare begins.

If you think this country is immune, ask the Japanese Americans who were shoved into camps forty years ago. Ask the Black men rotting in prisons for victimless crimes. Ask the women whose bodies are legislated by men who will never bleed.

This is not hysteria. This is foresight.

So let me be perfectly clear: I would rather die than be locked up for having AIDS. I would rather die than watch one more friend dragged away in the name of "order." I would rather die standing than live in a sanitarium while politicians congratulate themselves for being "tough."

And if that scares you—good. It should.

Because fear is finally what we need. Not fear of the virus—but fear of what happens when we stop fighting back.

Act now. Or be acted upon.

Hell no.
I won't go.