The revolution was a drug, and Trotsky was born an addict.
He stood on the turret of an armored car, the wind whipping at his coat. The roar of a thousand Kronstadt sailors washed over him, a symphony of raw, anarchic power. They were the fiercest, most loyal fist of the revolution, and they were his to command.
He delivered a speech that was pure fire and poetry. The air was sharp and salty, smelling of the nearby sea mixed with the cheap, strong tobacco of the sailors' cigarettes. He spoke of the world proletariat, of the dawn of a new age, of the chains of history breaking apart in their hands.
They roared their devotion. In that moment, he was not a man. He was a rock star, a prophet, a god of the spoken word.
He finished, his voice raw, his body thrumming with the electric energy of the crowd. A grizzled old sailor, the leader of their Soviet, a man whose face was a roadmap of a hard life, climbed up to shake his hand. The sailor's grip was like stone.
"A fine speech, Comrade Trotsky!" the man boomed, his voice a gravelly roar. "You have the fire of the Party! The true fire!"
He leaned in, his expression turning conspiratorial, his eyes alight with a kind of boyish excitement. "But tell us, when will we meet the other one? The Golden Demon?"
The question was a splash of ice water in the face.
Trotsky's smile tightened, the triumphant energy of the moment instantly curdling. "He is a myth, comrades!" he boomed, his voice effortlessly projecting over the crowd, trying to reclaim the narrative. "A useful story for the early days! A ghost to frighten the Tsar!"
He raised a fist in the air. "The Party is the reality! The Soviet is the power!"
But it was too late. He could see the doubt in their eyes. They cheered, but the cheer was different. The legend was more exciting than the institution. The demon was more interesting than the committee.
Frustrated, his jaw tight, Trotsky returned to the Kshesinskaya Palace. The sweet taste of victory had turned to ash in his mouth. He was tired of chasing a ghost. It was time to put it in a cage.
He got his first solid lead from a nervous informant, one of Sasha's students, who was terrified of Lenin but even more terrified of this new, unpredictable force.
"A printing press," the boy whispered, his eyes darting around the hallway. "In a back alley off Zabalkansky Prospekt. It was his first nest."
That was all Trotsky needed. He gathered a small, handpicked contingent of his most loyal Red Guards, men from the factories who looked at him with an unquestioning, dog-like devotion. The hunt was now a physical chase.
Time to remind this "demon" who holds the leash, Trotsky thought, the anger a cold, hard knot in his gut. This ends now.
They stormed the printing press an hour later, kicking in the flimsy basement door. The sound of splintering wood echoed in the alley.
The basement was empty.
The small stove was cold, the ashes gray and dead. A half-eaten loaf of stale bread sat on a crate. The ghost had been here, but he was long gone.
One of the guards spat on the floor in disgust. "He is gone, Comrade. A waste of time."
Trotsky said nothing. He walked slowly around the small, damp room. He was not a thug. He was a hunter, and he was looking for a trail. He found it.
On the flatbed of the printing press itself sat a single, neat stack of freshly printed leaflets.
He picked one up. The paper was cheap, the ink still smelling faintly. He had been expecting a long, dense, theoretical essay on Marxism, the kind of impenetrable propaganda the Party usually produced.
This was not that.
This was a work of brutal, effective genius.
The headline was simple, stark, and printed in huge, angry letters:
"THE TSAR'S GENERALS WANT YOUR BLOOD. THE SOVIET WANTS YOUR BREAD. CHOOSE."
It was a perfect, populist message. It bypassed ideology entirely and spoke directly to the fear and hunger in every man's heart.
Below the headline, it was not a list of demands. It was a list of names. The Volinsky Regiment is with the people. The Pavlovsky Regiment is with the people. The Preobrazhensky Regiment is with the people.
It wasn't a call to arms. It was a declaration of inevitable victory. It created a sense of momentum, the feeling that you were either on the winning side or you were about to be crushed.
Trotsky crushed the paper in his fist. The ghost was real, and he was smarter and faster than any of them had imagined. He was fighting a new kind of war, a war of information, of psychology.
He read the words again, printed with German ink on Russian paper.
This wasn't the work of Koba the thug, the bank robber, the exile. This was the work of someone new, someone who understood power in a way that was both terrifyingly modern and brutally effective.
And it was brilliant.