The letter felt impossibly light in Jake's hand—and unbearably heavy at the same time. It had crossed an entire continent in less than a month, through safe houses, false papers, and couriers who risked everything. A miracle of the underground network.
For Jake, though, it was like the past had caught up too fast. He'd only sent the message weeks ago, and now the answer was here—too soon, too real.
He turned the envelope over once more. The thin paper was a bridge between two worlds: his grim, blood-soaked Georgia, and the distant, intellectual calm of London. Kamo stood nearby, the pride from Batumi's gold fading into a tense silence. Shaumian was there too, a ledger half-open in his hands. None of them spoke. They didn't have to. Everyone knew what this letter meant.
Jake broke the wax seal.
Inside, a single page, covered from edge to edge in sharp, forward-leaning handwriting. Words that looked like they were charging into battle.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
Lenin.
Jake started to read—and for a moment, the cellar disappeared. The damp walls, the flickering oil lamp, the heavy scent of metal and earth—all gone. There was only Lenin's mind: cold, bright, and ruthless.
The letter began without greeting. It wasn't a conversation—it was a command.
To Comrade K. Stalin.
Your assessment of the Socialist-Revolutionary position is fundamentally correct, Lenin wrote, but your framing is insufficient. To debate them is useless. One must not argue; one must dismantle.
Jake read faster, his pulse syncing with Lenin's clipped rhythm. Line after line carved through ideology like a knife through flesh.
'Land and Liberty,' Lenin wrote, is a sentimental fraud. It flatters the peasant's selfish desire for property. It creates a new class of rural small-capitalists who will defend the old order. You must show them that this slogan offers not freedom, but a new form of slavery to the soil.
Jake's lips curled into a faint, involuntary smile. This was the Lenin he knew from history books—the pure strategist, the man who turned ideas into weapons. And now, those weapons were his to wield.
Lenin's voice on the page drove on:
The Party's position must be uncompromising. Nationalize all land—no division, no private plots. The estates must become collective farms, run by the state, powered by modern science. Your task is to expose the real class divide: between the kulak, the smallholder, and the landless laborer. Divide them. Turn them against one another. That is the key.
Jake exhaled slowly. He had his answer. The perfect intelligence for Stolypin—sharp, detailed, and dripping with ideological venom. Enough to keep both sides believing in him.
He thought that was the end.
But Lenin wasn't finished.
The tone changed. The words became personal.
Your questions, Comrade Stalin, were not those of a provincial agitator. They were the questions of a strategist. You think not only of what we believe, but how we fight. This clarity is rare. Too many of our comrades are either dreamers or brutes. You are neither.
Jake's hands trembled slightly.
Lenin had seen him.
Not as a provincial nobody, but as an equal.
For the first time, Jake felt the strange, electric thrill of recognition from a mind that history called genius—and a future dictator would call his own.
Then came the final lines. And they hit like a hammer.
The upcoming Fifth Party Congress in London will determine our path. The Caucasus delegation has long been undisciplined. I have recommended that you, Comrade Stalin, be added as a delegate. Your presence is required. Make arrangements to travel to London at once.
I wish to meet you.
Jake stared at the signature. Lenin.
A crown.
And a curse.
He had the perfect report for Stolypin—more than enough to secure his position as a double agent. But now Lenin himself had reached across the continent and pulled him into the center of the revolution.
London.
It was everything the real Stalin could have wanted—and exactly what Jake feared most.
He lowered the letter. His face had gone pale.
Kamo and Shaumian were watching him. Neither dared speak first.
"What is it, Soso?" Shaumian asked quietly. "Good news?"
Jake glanced at the gold-filled briefcase on the table, then at the letter still shaking in his hand. Two masters. Two worlds. Both waiting for him to choose.
"London," he said finally.
Kamo blinked. "London? That's insane. It'll take weeks. You can't go there and stay here. How can you be both Lenin's man and Stolypin's?"
The question hung in the cellar air like smoke.
Jake didn't answer. He didn't have one.
He'd just been given everything—status, recognition, a seat at history's table.
And it might be the thing that destroyed him.