St. Petersburg (Still Leningrad), January 15, 1991, 11:32 PM
The smell hit first.
Antiseptic that failed to mask decay. Urine. Cheap tobacco smoke clinging to nurses' uniforms. The Soviet healthcare system was dying, and it smelled like a neglected animal slowly rotting from the inside.
Alexei Dmitrievich Volkov stood at the foot of the hospital bed, his sixteen-year-old frame rigid with a tension that had nothing to do with military school training. The room held twelve beds, separated by faded green curtains that did nothing for privacy. An old woman coughed wetly two beds over. A man whimpered in his sleep. The fluorescent light flickered, casting the dying in strobes.
His mother lay in the center bed, propped on pillows that had long ago lost their shape. Svetlana Mikhailovna Volkova, née Kuznetsova, thirty-three years old, was a ghost of the literature teacher who had once animatedly discussed Pushkin's duel with her tenth-grade students.
Cancer had taken everything but her eyes.
"Alexei," she whispered, the sound barely audible over the hospital's nocturnal symphony.
He moved to her side, his military-school posture perfect even now. "I'm here, Mama."
Her hand—all bone and translucent skin—reached for his. He took it gently, afraid he might break what little remained. Her fingers were cold. He remembered those same hands turning pages of Tolstoy, making *blini* on Sunday mornings, smoothing his father's uniform before deployments.
"You should be sleeping," she said, each word costing her.
"Where else would I be?"
A faint smile touched her cracked lips. "At home. Studying. Being sixteen."
"I'll have time to be sixteen later."
The lie hung between them, as tangible as the IV drip that hadn't contained actual medicine in three days. The bag was saline—grandfather had paid a nurse's cousin twenty dollars for it on the black market. The actual chemotherapy drugs had stopped arriving in November. The system was unraveling, and Svetlana Volkova was just one of countless threads coming loose.
"You look like your father," she said, her eyes studying his face. "The same jaw. The same... intensity."
Alexei felt the familiar twist in his gut. Captain Dmitri Volkov, Soviet Airborne, Hero of the Soviet Union (posthumously), died in a dusty Afghan canyon in 1988 for a country that would cease to exist three years later. Died for nothing. Left a widow and a son to face the coming collapse alone.
"I wish I remembered him better," Alexei said, which was partially true. He remembered the smell of vodka and distant eyes after Afghanistan. He remembered the bear hugs between deployments. He remembered the funeral with full military honors while the empire cracked beneath their feet.
"You have his strength," she said. Then, with sudden clarity: "You've always been stronger than you should be, Alyosha. Even as a child. Sometimes it frightened me."
He said nothing. What could he say? *I'm not really sixteen, Mama. I died in a different life, in a different century. I woke up in 1983 knowing everything that would happen, including this moment, and I was powerless to stop it.*
The guilt was a stone in his throat.
"Your grandfather..." she began, then coughed—a dry, rattling sound that shook her whole wasted frame. Alexei held a cup of water to her lips. She sipped, water trickling down her chin. He wiped it gently with the sleeve of his worn school uniform.
"Grandfather is at home," Alexei said. "He was here until nine. The doctor made him leave—his heart."
Vladimir Sergeyevich Volkov, Hero of the Soviet Union (actual, from the Great Patriotic War), principal of the Suvorov Military School for twenty-five years, was now a tired old man who had spent his life savings on black-market drugs that hadn't worked. The medals he'd sold—the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, everything but the Hero of the Soviet Union gold star—had bought them three extra months. Three months of watching her fade.
"The address book," she whispered.
Alexei stiffened. "Mama?"
"Your grandfather told me. The black notebook. All his students." Her eyes were suddenly fierce. "Use it, Alyosha. Don't let pride stop you. The world is changing. The rules are... different now."
He stared at her. She knew. Of course she knew. His mother had always seen more than people thought.
"I will," he promised.
The clock on the wall ticked. 11:41 PM.
"Soviet Union is dying," she said, her voice growing fainter. "I heard the nurses talking. Shortages everywhere. No medicine. No hope." She paused, gathering strength. "Your father believed in something. He really did. Even at the end."
Alexei remained silent. His father had believed in the Soviet brotherhood, in the mission, in the system. He'd died for it. And what had it given his family? A pension that barely covered bread, a medal in a velvet box, and a widow's slow death in a crumbling hospital.
"I don't know what to believe in," Alexei admitted, the words escaping before he could stop them.
Her hand tightened with surprising strength. "Then believe in building something. Something that lasts. Not ideologies. Not flags. Something real."
Her eyes drifted to the window. Snow fell on Leningrad, white flakes against the black sky. The city that would soon be St. Petersburg again. The empire that would fracture into fifteen pieces. The chaos that would birth oligarchs and gangsters and a new kind of Russia.
"Be better than this world, Alyosha," she whispered. "Promise me."
He looked at her—really looked. At the woman who had read him fairy tales, who had cried when his father's body came home, who had smiled through chemotherapy until her hair fell out, who had never once complained about the pain.
"I promise," he said.
And he was lying.
He knew exactly what was coming. The hyperinflation. The privatization. The gang wars. The rise of the oligarchs. The brutal calculus of the 1990s. He'd studied it in business school in another life. He knew the names—Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Khodorkovsky, Abramovich. He knew the schemes—voucher privatization, loans-for-shares, asset stripping. He knew the outcomes—fortunes made overnight, men falling from windows, a new tsar in the Kremlin.
This world had already made him cruel. It had made him calculating. It had made him into someone who saw his mother's death not just as tragedy, but as data point one in a survival algorithm.
Her breathing changed. Slowed. The pauses grew longer.
"Alexei," she said, one last time.
"Yes, Mama?"
"Don't let this world make you cruel."
Too late, he thought. But he said, "I won't."
Her eyes closed. The monitor beside the bed—when it still worked—would have shown a flatline. But the monitor hadn't worked since December. So there was just the silence. The absence of breath. The stillness.
Alexei stood there, holding her cooling hand, for five full minutes. He counted the seconds. Three hundred of them. Each one a beat in the death of his childhood.
Finally, he leaned down and kissed her forehead. "Goodbye, Mama."
He released her hand, arranging it gently on the sheet. He smoothed her thin hair. He closed her eyes.
Then he turned and walked out of the ward.
In the corridor, a nurse glanced at him, saw his expression, and looked away. No words were exchanged. Death was routine here.
Alexei walked down three flights of stairs—the elevator had been broken for weeks—and pushed through the heavy doors into the January night. The cold hit him like a physical blow, minus fifteen degrees Celsius, the air so sharp it hurt to breathe.
He stood on the steps of Hospital No. 26, his breath steaming in the yellow light of a lone streetlamp. Snow collected on his shoulders. Somewhere in the distance, a car backfired. Leningrad slept, unaware that in eleven months, the Soviet Union would be gone. Unaware that everything was about to change.
He looked down at his hands. Sixteen years old. No money. No parents. A grandfather with a failing heart. And a memory of another life—of corporate boardrooms and financial models and case studies about emerging markets.
He knew what was coming. The greatest wealth transfer in modern history. The looting of a superpower. The birth of billionaires from the corpse of communism.
And he had nothing. No capital. No connections. No way to play the game.
Wrong.
Grandfather's address book. Two thousand, one hundred forty-seven names. Every student Vladimir Volkov had trained over twenty-five years. Officers. Officials. Men of influence scattered across a dying empire.
His mother's last gift: permission to use it.
Alexei Volkov looked up at the hospital window where his mother's body lay. Then he looked south, toward the city center, where power was already shifting in anticipation of the collapse.
"I'll build something, Mama," he said to the empty street. "But first, I need to survive."
He turned and began walking home through the snow. The temperature dropped. The wind picked up. But Alexei didn't feel the cold anymore. He felt something else—a coldness from within, a calculation beginning.
Phase one: acquire capital.
Phase two: acquire assets.
Phase three: build infrastructure.
Phase four: survive the coming purges.
Phase five: become untouchable.
He was sixteen. He was an orphan. He was a reincarnated corporate drone with the knowledge of thirty years of future history.
And he was about to become a player in the greatest game of his lifetime.