Trotsky's challenge hung in the smoke like a glove to the face.
You're a manager, not a prophet. A policeman, not a visionary.
In this room, that was a dagger.
Eyes shifted to Jake—especially Lenin's. Facts wouldn't save him now. He needed a vision. He needed a future.
He drew a slow breath, mind racing through the vault of history only he knew. Then the debate snapped back into focus: the Party's grand strategy for crushing the Mensheviks and leading the proletariat.
Zinoviev went first, voice booming. "Concentrate on the industrial heartlands—Petersburg, Moscow, the Urals. Pour in our best agitators and every ruble. Win the factory committees and soviets, and the rest follows. The capital is the key."
Trotsky scoffed. Smooth, confident, merciless. "A purely Russian focus is peasant thinking. Alone, we will be crushed by Europe's reaction. We must set Germany on fire. Russia is a spark. The real blaze must be international."
Lenin turned to Jake. "Comrade Stalin. Where do we strike?"
Safe options waited—Zinoviev's practicality, Trotsky's internationalism. Jake chose neither.
"Comrades," he said quietly. "You're looking at the wrong map."
Heads tilted. The room stilled.
"You study the map of 1907," he went on. "Factories, borders, today's alignments. We must look at the map of 1914."
Silence. A number with no meaning to them. To him, it was everything.
"The industrial heartlands matter," he nodded to Zinoviev. "And the international wave is our end goal," he allowed for Trotsky. "But both will be decided by a conflict that is not about class at all. It is about empires made of iron."
He leaned forward, voice turning hard. "Britain fears the German fleet. The Kaiser fears encirclement by France and Russia. Austria-Hungary fears Serbia. The Balkans sit on a powder keg. The contradictions we talk about are about to explode—in steel, not pamphlets."
He wasn't lecturing. He was foretelling.
"There will be a war," he said, calm and certain. "Not a limited one—an inferno. It will devour a generation. When it comes, millions of Russian peasants will die in trenches for the Tsar's glory. And there, in the mud, their faith in the Little Father will finally break."
He let the horror breathe.
"Our true recruiting ground is not today's factory," Jake said softly. "It is tomorrow's trench."
The room froze. Shock. Fascination. Fear.
"Therefore," he continued, steady as a blade, "our secret priority for the next years is not only the worker. It is the soldier. We must infiltrate the army—quietly, systematically. Cells in major regiments. Pamphlets for soldiers that speak of pay, land, and the whip of their officers—not abstract Marxism. When the imperialist war begins and the state is weakest, we must be ready to turn the guns. Not at the German worker across the wire—but at the Romanovs in the Winter Palace."
He ended in a whisper that carried. "That must be our hidden, primary objective."
No one spoke. The air felt heavier. He hadn't argued. He had redrawn the battlefield and the calendar.
Trotsky stared, arrogance burned off, replaced by a hard, unwilling respect. The glove he'd thrown had been returned—and filled with lead.
Lenin was the stillest of all. He leaned in, fingers white on the table's edge, eyes narrowed with fierce focus. He wasn't hearing a guess. He was hearing a plan pulled from another age.
"Explain this 'inevitable war,'" Lenin said, voice low. "Explain it from the beginning. In detail."
Jake had their full attention. He had won the room.
Now he had to defend a prophecy without revealing its impossible source.