September, 1915.
While Koba built his empire of mud and steel outside Berlin, Lenin and Trotsky were stranded in their own wasteland — a world of smoke, paper, and words. It had no trenches, no barbed wire, but it was its own kind of battlefield: the cramped, stale meeting hall of the Zimmerwald Conference in rural Switzerland.
The air was thick with cigarette smoke and frustration. Ashtrays overflowed. Pamphlets were stacked like sandbags. Dozens of voices murmured across the room in a jumble of accents, all trying to define the soul of socialism while Europe tore itself apart outside.
Lenin sat like a coiled spring. Every speech made his skin itch. To him, the conference wasn't a council of comrades—it was a funeral.
A German delegate, round-faced and sweating, was in mid-sentence. "Comrade Liebknecht's courage is commendable," he said, "but to call for soldiers to turn their guns on their officers—it's suicide. Our duty is to defend the fatherland from Tsarist aggression!"
Polite applause followed. Lenin's jaw clenched. He couldn't stand another word.
He rose and cut through the noise. "Defense of the fatherland?" His voice sliced the room in half. "Which fatherland? The one owned by the Krupps and Thyssens who profit from your deaths? You speak of defending Germany from the Tsar, while the Tsar speaks of defending Russia from the Kaiser. It's a carnival of thieves—and you ask the workers to die choosing which thief robs them!"
He jabbed a finger toward the startled delegate. "Our task is not to defend imperialism—it's to destroy it! Transform this war into a civil war! Turn the rifles around! The true enemy of the German worker isn't the Russian peasant opposite him—it's the capitalist standing behind him!"
His words rang like hammer blows. But when the echo faded, all he saw was discomfort—coughs, shifting eyes, downturned faces. He'd spoken the truth, but it was a truth no one wanted. He was a general without an army.
Later, Trotsky took the stage. His voice, smooth and resonant, filled the room with the kind of energy Lenin's fury never could. "Comrades, think of the Russian soldier," he said. "A peasant torn from his home, handed a rifle he can barely hold, dying knee-deep in mud for the Tsar's vanity. He is not our enemy—he is our brother! Waiting for a sign that he's not alone, that we have not abandoned him!"
It was stirring. It was eloquent. But Trotsky knew, even as the delegates applauded, that it was hollow. They had no real information from Russia anymore. The Okhrana had crushed their networks. Their reports were old, their contacts silent. Trotsky's thunder was aimed at ghosts.
Without Koba, they were blind.
Koba had been their Dagger—their eyes, their reach, their connection to the factories and barracks. Ruthless, unpredictable, but real. Now he was gone, and every speech they made felt like shouting into fog.
During the break, Trotsky and Lenin huddled in a corner over bitter coffee. That was when Stern arrived.
He looked older, thinner. The man who had once stood on the bridge at Tilsit now carried the haunted expression of someone who had seen too much.
"I have a report," he said quietly. "From the railway workers in Poland."
He didn't unfold any papers. He spoke from memory. "There's a new propaganda effort on the Eastern Front. Funded by the Germans. But it's… different."
Lenin frowned. "Different how?"
"It isn't the usual nationalist trash," Stern said. "No talk of culture or empire. It's sharper. Simple. Designed to look like it came from the soldiers themselves. One leaflet I saw—just two drawings. A fat general eating a roast chicken beside a starving soldier gnawing on a rat. The caption said: He eats. You die. For what?"
Trotsky stared at him. The simplicity of it was terrifying.
"There's more," Stern said. "They're teaching the soldiers how to surrender. How to fake trench foot. Which German units treat prisoners well. Even how to wound yourself just enough to get sent home."
The words hit like bullets. This wasn't clumsy propaganda. This was precision work—psychological warfare stripped to its essence.
"They're targeting specific sectors," Stern added. "The ones with bad supplies, corrupt officers, poor morale. It's surgical. As if they have a map of every weak point in the Russian army."
Lenin's face went still. Trotsky's hands tightened around his cup. They both knew. They didn't have to say the name. The style was unmistakable. The pragmatism. The precision. The contempt for ideology.
Koba.
Lenin's hand curled into a fist. His anger had burned away long ago; what remained was steel.
"He's not just a traitor," Lenin said softly. "He's a cancer. He's taken our methods, our discipline, and sold them. He's using the revolution itself as a weapon against us."
It was more than betrayal—it was transformation. They had trained him to think like them, to see the world through the cold clarity of revolution. And now, with the power of a state behind him, he was perfecting it.
A new war had begun, not in the trenches, but in the minds of soldiers.
And somewhere, on the other side of Europe, the weapon they had built was already in motion.