The office of the General Secretary had changed.
It wasn't the closet anymore. It was the Tsar's study, repurposed. But Jake had stripped the gold leaf. The walls were covered in maps.
A new map dominated the room. Germany.
The Finn stood by the window, watching the snow fall on Red Square. He looked older. The stress of running a spy network across Europe was etching lines into his face.
"Hitler is out of prison," the Finn said. "He served nine months for the Beer Hall Putsch. He's writing a book."
Jake didn't look up from his papers. "I know the book. Mein Kampf. It's a blueprint for war."
"He's a clown," the Finn scoffed. "A failed painter with a loud voice. The German communists think he's a useful idiot. They think he'll destabilize the Weimar Republic, and then they'll take over."
Jake stood up. He walked to the map. He slammed his hand on Munich.
"They are wrong," Jake said. "He is not a clown. He is a shark swimming in a pool of blood. And he is hungry."
He turned to the Finn.
"Order the German Communist Party—the KPD—to stop fighting the Social Democrats," Jake said. "Tell them to form a United Front. Tell them the enemy is the Nazis."
The Finn looked shocked. "Koba, that goes against Comintern policy. We call the Social Democrats 'Social Fascists.' Moscow has been telling the KPD to attack them for years."
"Moscow was wrong," Jake said. "I was wrong. If the left stays divided, Hitler walks through the middle."
He paced the room.
In his old timeline, Stalin had refused to let the German communists ally with the socialists. That division allowed Hitler to seize power in 1933. Jake couldn't let that happen again. He had to stop World War II before it started.
"Send the order," Jake commanded. "Tell Thälmann to shake hands with the socialists. If he refuses, cut his funding."
"It will confuse the base," the Finn warned. "They hate the socialists."
"Better confused than dead in a concentration camp," Jake snapped.
The Collective Farm "Red Dawn."
Spring had come to the Ukraine.
The mud was deep and thick, sucking at boots like quicksand. But the fields were green.
Jake walked along the fence line. He wore his boots high, splashing through the muck. Beside him walked Pyotr, the farm chairman.
"The tractors are working," Pyotr said, pointing to the fleet of Soviet-built machines churning the earth. "We plowed the collective fields in record time."
"And the yield?" Jake asked.
"Promising," Pyotr said. "The weather has been kind."
But Jake wasn't looking at the collective fields. He was looking at the small plots behind the peasant huts. The Garden Plots.
They were lush. Vegetables, potatoes, chickens scratching in the dirt. The peasants were tending them with a love they never showed the collective wheat.
"They work harder on their own land," Jake observed.
"It is human nature, Comrade Stalin," Pyotr said apologetically. "They feel... ownership."
Jake nodded. He stopped by a fence. An old woman was weeding her turnips. She looked up, fear in her eyes. She hid a basket of eggs behind her back.
"Don't hide them, Grandmother," Jake said softly. "They are yours."
She blinked. "Mine? The Commissar won't take them?"
"Not from your garden," Jake said. "Sell them. Eat them. Feed your grandchildren."
He walked on.
He was creating a hybrid monster. A state-run economy with a capitalist underbelly. It wasn't pure Marxism. Lenin would have hated it.
But the children playing by the huts weren't skeletal. The silence of the famine was gone, replaced by the noise of tractors and chickens.
It was ugly socialism. But it was alive.
The Factory City.
Magnitogorsk was no longer a camp. It was a city of steel.
Smoke blocked the sun. The air tasted of sulfur. But the blast furnaces were running 24/7.
Jake toured the new tank assembly line.
General Zhukov walked with him. Zhukov looked impressed.
"The T-24," Zhukov said, patting the hull of a prototype. "It is a good start. But the armor is thin. The engine is underpowered."
"It is a practice tank," Jake said. "We are learning how to weld. We are learning how to cast turrets."
He looked at the line of workers. They were assembling tracks with hammers.
"We need a new design," Jake said. "Sloped armor. Diesel engine. Wide tracks for the snow."
"You are describing a tank that doesn't exist," Zhukov said.
"It will," Jake said. "Call it the T-34."
He pulled a sketch from his pocket. He had drawn it from memory. The tank that won the war.
"Give this to the design bureau," Jake ordered. "Tell Koshkin to build it. I want a prototype by next year."
Zhukov looked at the sketch. "This profile... the shells will bounce off."
"Exactly," Jake said.
He walked to the end of the line.
"And Zhukov?"
"Yes, Comrade Stalin?"
"We need to train the crews," Jake said. "Not to parade. To fight. Live fire exercises. Combined arms. Tanks and infantry moving together."
"That is expensive. The ammunition..."
"Spend it," Jake said. "I don't want an army that looks good on Red Square. I want an army that can kill Germans."
The Secret City.
Heisenberg looked like he hadn't slept in a week.
His hair was wild. His eyes were manic.
"The cyclotron works!" he shouted when Jake entered the lab. "We accelerated the beam! We smashed the nucleus!"
Jake looked at the machine. It was humming, a deep, dangerous vibration that he felt in his teeth.
"And the isotopes?" Jake asked.
"We are separating them," Heisenberg said. "Slowly. But the heavy water... we need more. The plant in Norway is the only source."
Jake nodded. He knew about the Norsk Hydro plant.
"We will buy it," Jake said. "Or steal it."
He looked at Ipatieff. The old Russian was sitting in a wheelchair now, breathing from an oxygen tank. He looked like a ghost haunting the machine he helped build.
"Is he right?" Jake asked Ipatieff.
Ipatieff nodded weakly. "The physics is sound, Koba. But the engineering... to build a bomb... you need a critical mass. Ten kilograms of U-235. At this rate, you will have it in 1930."
Jake did the math. 1930.
That was three years before Hitler took power. Nine years before the invasion of Poland.
If he had the Bomb in 1930... history changed. The balance of power shifted. No Barbarossa. No Holocaust.
Just a Cold War that started early.
"Speed it up," Jake said. "Build more centrifuges. I want the bomb before the Reichstag burns."
The Kremlin Apartment.
Nadya was reading a letter.
She looked up when Jake came in. She was smiling.
"A letter from Svetlana," she said. "From the Urals."
Jake froze. "Svetlana wrote to you?"
"Yes," Nadya said. "She says she is happy. She says the work is important. She says she has met a nice engineer."
Jake sat down heavily.
The letter was a fake. He knew it. Menzhinsky must have forged it to keep Nadya happy. Svetlana was probably typing in a lead-lined bunker, her hair falling out from radiation.
"That is... good news," Jake lied.
"She says you saved her," Nadya said, coming over to hug him. "She says you gave her a purpose."
She kissed his cheek.
"I'm sorry I doubted you, Koba. You are hard, but you are fair."
Jake held her. He felt the warmth of her body. He felt the crushing weight of the lie.
He was gaslighting his own wife. He was gaslighting the whole country.
"I try, Nadya," Jake whispered. "I try."
The Foreign Office.
Molotov was waiting.
"The British have sent a diplomatic note," Molotov said. "They are concerned about our grain purchases from America. They say we are dumping cheap wheat on the market and destabilizing prices."
"Let them complain," Jake said. "They are just angry they didn't buy it first."
"And the Germans," Molotov continued. "The Weimar government wants to expand the Rapallo Treaty. They want to train their tank crews in Russia again. Secretly."
Jake smiled.
Historically, the USSR had allowed Germany to test tanks in Kazan to bypass the Treaty of Versailles. It helped the Germans rearm.
"No," Jake said.
Molotov blinked. "But the hard currency... and the technology exchange..."
"No," Jake repeated. "Cancel the Kama tank school. Cancel the Lipetsk aviation school. Kick the German officers out."
"But why?"
"Because I am not going to train the men who will try to kill me," Jake said.
He walked to the map of Europe.
"We isolate Germany," Jake said. "We cut them off. If they want to build tanks, let them do it in Bavaria where the French can see them."
"This will anger Berlin."
"Good," Jake said. "Let them be angry. Angry men make mistakes."
He turned to Molotov.
"And reach out to the French," Jake said. "Propose a mutual defense pact. A real one. If Germany attacks Poland, we march. If Germany attacks France, we march."
"The French hate us," Molotov pointed out. "They call us Bolshevik savages."
"They hate the Germans more," Jake said. "Fear is a great matchmaker."
He looked at the map.
He was rewriting the alliance system. He was trying to encircle Hitler before the Nazis even took power. It was a race against time, against prejudice, against history itself.
"Draft the proposal," Jake ordered. "Send it to Paris tomorrow."
Jake sat down at his desk.
He pulled out the sketch of the T-34 tank.
He looked at the letter from "Svetlana."
He looked at the report on the peasant egg sales.
He was juggling chainsaws. But for the first time in months, he felt like he wasn't dropping them.
The machine was humming. The harvest was coming in. The atom was splitting.
And Hitler was writing a book in a cell, unaware that the man in the Kremlin had already read the ending.