The Kremlin apartment was silent.
Jake sat at the breakfast table. The tea in his cup was cold.
Across from him, Nadya stared at her plate. She hadn't spoken to him since the arrest of Svetlana. The silence wasn't peaceful; it was a wall of ice.
"Nadya," Jake said softly. "The parade is today. You should come."
"Why?" she asked, not looking up. "To see the tanks? To see the machines that eat the people?"
"To see the future," Jake said. "To see what we are building."
She stood up, her chair scraping loudly on the floor.
"I see what we are destroying," she whispered. "I see the letters on your desk, Koba. The begging letters from the villages."
She walked out of the room.
Jake watched her go. He wanted to run after her. He wanted to explain that he was trapped in a trolley problem with a billion lives on the tracks.
But he couldn't. He was Stalin. And Stalin didn't explain. He acted.
He put on his greatcoat. He checked his reflection. The man in the mirror looked harder every day. The pockmarks seemed deeper, like craters on a moon.
"Time to wave," Jake told his reflection.
Red Square.
The parade was magnificent. And terrifying.
Columns of Red Army soldiers marched in perfect lockstep. Their boots hit the cobblestones like thunder. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Then came the tractors.
They weren't the broken Fordsons from the mud. These were Soviet-built. The Stalingrad Tractor Factory had finally come online, churning out machines that were ugly, loud, and indestructible.
Jake stood atop Lenin's Mausoleum. The granite tomb was finished—a red block that housed the preserved corpse of the Revolution's father.
He waved.
Below him, the crowd cheered. But were they cheering for him? Or were they cheering because the NKVD men in the crowd were watching?
"Impressive," a voice said beside him.
It was Maxim Gorky, the famous writer. Jake had brought him back from exile in Italy to be the cultural voice of the state.
"It is necessary," Jake said, not stopping his wave.
"It is loud," Gorky observed. "But tell me, Comrade Stalin... do the tractors plow the fields? Or do they just crush the flowers?"
Jake turned to the writer.
"They plow the earth," Jake said. "And sometimes, yes, they crush a flower. But without the plow, there is no bread. And without bread, there is no poetry."
Gorky looked at him with sad, intelligent eyes.
"Be careful, Koba. A gardener who hates weeds too much eventually kills the garden."
A roar drowned out the conversation.
Overhead, a flight of airplanes screamed across the sky. They were new monoplanes, fast and sleek. The engines were Italian, but the aluminum bodies were smelted in the Dnieper dam's new electric furnaces.
Jake looked up.
He saw not planes, but delivery systems. One day, those planes would carry something heavier than bombs. Something that would end all wars.
He looked at the Finn, standing in the VIP section. The Finn nodded slightly.
Progress.
The Politburo.
The meeting started late.
Menzhinsky was coughing into a handkerchief. He looked worse every week. The stress of the Great Turn was killing him.
"The harvest reports are in," Menzhinsky wheezed.
He laid a map on the table.
It was a patchwork quilt of disaster and success.
"The collective farms in the Ukraine... production is down twenty percent," Menzhinsky said. "Resistance remains high. But the Garden Plots..."
He pointed to the green zones.
"The private plots are flourishing. Production of potatoes and vegetables is up fifty percent. The peasants are working their own land eighteen hours a day."
Molotov sneered. "Proof of their greed. They work for themselves, but not for the State."
"Proof of their survival instinct," Jake corrected.
He looked at the numbers. The private plots were saving the country from total famine. But the collective farms were still failing to meet the export quotas.
He needed more grain. He needed more gold for Heisenberg's cyclotron.
"We need to mechanize the collectives," Jake said. "The peasants hate the collective because it is hard labor. If we give them machines... if we make the work easy... they will accept the system."
"We don't have enough tractors," Molotov said.
"We have the factories," Jake said. "But the factories are slow because the workers are hungry."
It was a vicious cycle. No grain meant no food for workers. No food meant no tractors. No tractors meant no grain.
He had to break the loop.
"Buy the grain," Jake said suddenly.
The room went silent.
"Buy it?" Bukharin asked, hopeful. "From the peasants?"
"From America," Jake said.
Bukharin's jaw dropped. "Import grain? But we are an exporter! It would be a humiliation! It would admit failure!"
"It would feed the steelworkers," Jake said.
He stood up and walked to the window.
"The American stock market crashed last year," Jake said. He remembered 1929. "Their prices are collapsing. They are desperate to sell. We can buy wheat for pennies."
He turned back to the room.
"Use the gold reserves. Buy American wheat. Feed the cities. Feed the factories. Get the tractors built. Then... then we flood the collectives with machines."
"And the humiliation?" Molotov asked.
"Censor the news," Jake said. "Tell the people it is 'International Solidarity Wheat.' Tell them the American workers sent it as a gift."
He looked at Menzhinsky.
"Do it. And ensure the wheat goes to Stalingrad first. I want those tractor lines running 24 hours a day."
The Gulag.
Far in the north, at the Solovki prison camp, the wind howled.
Professor Ipatieff sat on his bunk. He was dying. The radiation sickness from the vault was eating his marrow.
But he was writing.
His cellmate, a former Tsarist officer, watched him.
"Why do you write?" the officer asked. "They will just burn it."
"No," Ipatieff whispered. "Koba will read it. He is a monster, but he is a curious monster."
The door opened.
A guard stepped in. Not a regular guard. An NKVD officer.
"Ipatieff," the officer said. "Get your things."
"Am I being released?"
"You are being transferred," the officer said. "To the Urals. Someone wants to talk to you."
Ipatieff stood up. His legs were weak. He clutched his notebook.
He knew what this meant. The bomb. Koba hadn't given up.
"I am ready," Ipatieff said.
He walked out into the snow. He didn't know if he was going to a laboratory or a grave. With Stalin, it was usually both.
The Secret City.
Heisenberg was pacing.
The cyclotron was half-built. A massive copper coil dominated the underground chamber.
"The magnets are inconsistent!" Heisenberg shouted in German. "The Russian steel is impure! It fluctuates!"
Jake walked in. He wore a clean suit.
"Then we will purify it," Jake said.
Heisenberg spun around. "Herr Stalin. You come to inspect your toy?"
"I come to bring you a partner," Jake said.
Taranov wheeled Ipatieff into the room.
The old Russian scientist looked like a corpse. His skin was translucent. But his eyes locked onto the cyclotron.
"You are trying to accelerate protons," Ipatieff rasped.
Heisenberg looked at the dying man with disdain. "And who is this scarecrow?"
"The man who started it," Jake said. "Ipatieff. He built the first pile."
Heisenberg scoffed. "A primitive experiment."
"A dangerous one," Ipatieff corrected. "I see your cooling system. It is flawed. If you run it at full power, the magnets will melt."
Heisenberg stiffened. He looked at his blueprints. He looked at the old man.
"How do you know?"
" because I made the same mistake," Ipatieff whispered. "In 1916. Before the world went mad."
Jake watched them. Two geniuses. One dying, one arrogant.
"Work together," Jake ordered. "Ipatieff has the experience. Heisenberg has the theory. Combine them."
"He is radiant," Heisenberg muttered, stepping back. "He is walking death."
"Then stand back," Jake said. "But listen to him."
He turned to Ipatieff.
"You have a month," Jake said. "Give him everything you know. Then you can rest."
Ipatieff nodded. He looked at the machine with love. It was the child that had killed him.
"Thank you, Koba," Ipatieff whispered. "For letting me see it one last time."
The Apartment.
It was late.
Nadya was asleep on the sofa. A book had fallen from her hand.
Jake picked it up. It was a collection of poems by Akhmatova. Sad poems. Poems about loss.
He covered her with a blanket.
She stirred.
"Koba?"
"I'm here," Jake said.
"Did you save her?" Nadya asked sleepily. "Svetlana?"
Jake hesitated.
"She is alive," Jake said. "She is working."
Nadya smiled. A real smile. She closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.
Jake sat in the armchair opposite her.
He watched her breathe.
He had lied. Svetlana was alive, yes. But she was typing reports about critical mass and radiation poisoning in a bunker miles underground. She would never see the sun again. She was a prisoner of the state secret.
But the lie made Nadya smile.
Jake poured himself a vodka.
He drank it in one gulp.
He was building a utopia on a foundation of lies, corpses, and stolen wheat.
But the tractors were running. The dam was rising. The cyclotron was humming.
The machine was working.
"Just a few more years," Jake whispered to the empty room. "Just let me hold it together for a few more years."
He looked at the calendar on the wall. 1923.
Hitler was writing Mein Kampf in a prison cell in Munich. The clock was ticking louder than anyone knew.
Jake closed his eyes. He didn't dream of sheep. He dreamed of Panzers burning in the snow.