Home, love, family

by Gabros

… there was once a time the Romanovs had it all. This is just the story of Anastasia and her siblings before the revolution. Prequel to Light at the end of the tunnel.

22. A dress rehearsal

Trigger warnings at the end notes.

The Tsar wants to improve Russia's economic situation, but due to the country's backwardness in relation to Europe and advisors who insist that sacrifices must be made for the sake of progress, his efforts have had the side effect of further increasing the burdens of the peasants and industrial workers. The Minister of Finance, the now Count Witte, has worked with the Tsar to base Russian currency on the gold standard, finance the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and accelerate the growth of Russian industry through subsidies to industrialists. This forced the government to increase the taxes among all classes, placing an additional burden on the lower class, which had already been struggling.

The average yearly wage for a Russian man at the turn of the 20th century was 188 rubles, or less than 95 dollars, while the average American worker in 1900 earned 490 dollars. Russian women were paid half as much, and children earned a third of this.

The working day averaged eleven to fourteen hours, but this did not include overtime work, which workers were frequently compelled to undertake either by lack of money to support themselves and their families or by pressure from the factory managers.

What has driven Stephen to work extra hours is Gleb. His hope for the future.

The working and sanitary conditions where he works are deplorable, but the worst part is being further degraded by the frequent searches for illegal literature, weapons, or stolen parts and tools both at the factories and inside their own living quarters, where they should supposedly be allowed their little free time in peace. One of these impromptu searches through the Vaganovs' flat took place early in 1905, terrifying Gleb, who was convinced he was about to become an orphan.

Fines for inefficiency continue to present another form of degradation to the workers, also making their pitiable earnings even smaller. The workers' living quarters, often provided by the company they work for, are badly built, crowded, unsanitary, and expensive.

Making matters worse, the turn of the century was marked by an economic crisis that forced many workers to return to their native villages while the poverty of those who remained increased. With Gleb in school, Stephen could not afford to go back to his wife's village. Besides, he had a mission.

The harsh conditions in which the workers found themselves made them a dissatisfied class vulnerable to revolutionary propaganda, their concentration in large industrial areas making agitation among them much easier, and although the propagandists themselves didn't like to admit this, there was one more reason why the workers were the most targeted: They were usually just literate enough to absorb new ideas while also ignorant and gullible enough to radically and uncritically accept all of them as long as they offered solutions to their hardships.

The people's grievances have never been enough to spark a revolution though. Previous uprisings have been poorly led, but this is the twentieth century, and there is a class in Russia willing and able to provide the restless masses with much needed leadership and organization. The intelligentsia. Students and professional men such as doctors, lawyers, professors, and engineers, although the term can also include anyone who has had a middle school education and is aware of the new ideas through the reading of books and newspapers. Most of the intelligentsia seeks to improve Russia through peaceful means, scientific discovery, and economic reform, but organized opposition to the autocracy carried out by parties has also arisen, among them the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks who, since the news of Russia's many defeats started coming from the front, have increased their propaganda and agitation among all classes, but particularly the armed forces.

The January massacre didn't take Stephen's party by surprise. While they saw Father Gapon's walkout as an opportunity to increase proletarian solidarity and thus spread numerous leaflets throughout St. Petersburg calling all workers to support and join the general strike, the Bolsheviks did not entirely approve of the spontaneous movement of the workers of St. Petersburg. They saw Gapon as a bourgeois adventurist, at best a well-meaning idealist who was drawing the masses away from the revolutionary movement.

The Bolsheviks could not afford to stay aloof from a movement which could reach the proportions of a general strike, but they considered all attempts to petition the Tsar futile and warned the people that they could only win liberty by their own efforts and not as a gift from a tyrant. Knowing that the police would take action against the crowd, they attended the march with red banners, ready to use any ensuing violence as an opportunity for anti-tsarist agitation.

What happened next wasn't surprising for many Bolsheviks, but it was shocking to most people nonetheless. Fourteen-year-old Gleb Stephanovich Vaganov cried when he heard of the massacre. He couldn't help it. Bloody Sunday had taken the lives of hundreds of men, women, and children. He couldn't stop thinking about what it might have been like to be there, being stabbed or shot at before that palace. The fear and terror of those children…

"Snap out of it, boy!" The no-nonsense Stephan exclaimed to his sensitive son as they sat at the table reading the newspapers the Monday morning following the tragic events. "What did you even think was going to happen? Stop whining and think about what we can do with this!"

Having paced and cried for hours in a self-soothing manner, Gleb did as he was told, renewed anger and hatred for the man responsible for such horror, Tsar Nicholas II, pushing him to set aside his apprehension and speak before the whole school during recess, stirring up the students and causing them to express their outrage about the government's actions by refusing to attend class for weeks. They could not expel all of them, and Gleb couldn't be the scapegoat, not when several of his friends and numerous older students had spoken out in similar ways.

The change in routine and the stomach-turning fear of doing something as embarrassing and socially dangerous as speaking his mind out loud without his father to endorse him would have been hell for Gleb without Feodosia's support.

"It will be fine", she would tell him during his now daily visits to her house. "The teachers are the ones who will have to worry about going through the whole curriculum, not you."

Smart, mature, and knowledgeable about the party's inner workings, Feodosia makes Gleb long to impress her, so much so that he borrowed several books from the gymnasium library without permission in order to read them aloud with her. He has always known that his school administration is made up of elitists who deserve nothing less, but only recently has he dared act on his long-held beliefs. Gleb is bolder around her. She makes him bolder.

"You have nothing to be ashamed of", she tells Gleb about his speeches before he makes them public. "I know what! Let's go break another factory manager's window!"

Throughout the early months of 1905, Gleb has spent his free time throwing anti-war propaganda leaflets at the soldiers passing by, Feodosia often joining him. The police are less likely to give youngsters harsh sentences for doing so, and the party knows this.

Also by Gleb's side have been his friends Peter, Leonid, Alexander, and Pavel, although this is not a common occurrence. The boysʼ parents are not fully aware of the political proclivities of their sons' newest friend. Peter is nevertheless becoming more involved than ever. Gleb even started lending him books after he promised to keep them well hidden while at home.

Gleb has also made a new friend. He had always wanted to talk to Sergei Pavlovich Ivanov, a boy his age who works at the same metallurgical plant where the Vaganovs labor, but only recently has his newfound confidence allowed him to make acquaintance with him and the other boys of the workplace.

Gleb has even befriended and recruited thirteen-year-old Yakov, Mr. Zeldovich's oldest grandchild. The child has often recalled to Gleb the terrible way in which his family and people have been treated by the tsarist police and soldiers. Always with suspicion, always with disdain. The Zeldovich family moved out of the Pale of Settlement during the reign of Alexander II, but they are still in contact with their relatives living back there. They are dirt poor despite working every day like beasts due to the many restrictions the government imposes on them, and the little they have is often threatened by brutal pogroms. Despite being brighter than most youngsters, none of Yakov's older cousins has managed to get into a university due to the quotas restricting the percentage of Jewish students allowed.

Yakov cannot deal with the unfairness of it all nor his father and grandfather's quiet acceptance of such injustice. The boy is worried sick about the possibility that his family may find out what he is up to though. If they did, they would surely disown him.

Now an official party member who is sometimes even assigned tasks, the fourteen-year-old Gleb has gradually assembled several of these friends and acquaintances and founded a Young Workers and Students' Revolutionary Organization, which may become a battle brigade if a fight breaks out. A committee was elected, and despite the fact Feodosia was the one who gathered the members of the group with her superior social skills almost single-handedly, Gleb was made the chairman. He accepts Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, and anyone willing to stand up against the tsarist regime.

Being too young to play much larger roles, Feodosia, Gleb, and their youth committee friends and acquaintances spend most of their sessions discussing Marxism, although when Sergei's older brother Ivan got mobilized, the group did not waste the opportunity to invite him to one of their meetings and coach him to talk some sense into the other reservists.

"The war is being fought to increase the profits of Russia's capitalists", Gleb told the soldier, "who in the meantime saddle the Russian people with the burden or hardship, casualties, and taxes.

"The Tsar is the people's worst enemy, not the Japanese or whoever he decides to turn you against tomorrow. If you should turn your weapons against anyone, that is him. Talk to you comrades, tell them to join the Russian people in their struggle for a democratic republic!"

A few weeks later, Gleb felt a great sense of satisfaction when he learned that there had been a huge mutiny among the soldiers of Ivan's regiment, impeding its mobilization. No weapons were turned against the Tsar though, at least not then.

Oo

The uprising on the battleship "Potemkin" of the Black Sea Fleet was one of the greatest acts of rebellion that took place during the war, but despite its strict and sometimes even sadistic superior officers, for the most part, the Russian army and navy remained loyal throughout the Empire, and the vast majority of its disciplinary problems consisted of refusals to obey orders rather than active resistance to the government.

All of this still had a huge effect on the people's overall morale and respect for authority.

Oo

From the Swiss city of Geneva, Lenin, his wife Nadezhda, and other Bolshevik exiles received the news of "Bloody Sunday" with emotion, weeping not necessarily from sorrow, as they knew that a revolution would surely begin after such a violent act.

The following week, Lenin wrote several articles instructing his party to arm and organize the proletarian masses and to obtain the support of the army.

"You went to the Tsar to obtain your rights and were met with rifles and gunfire, blows by spears, and sharp swords!" The Bolshevik agitators exclaimed everywhere. "You begged for bread and work and he welcomed you with a hot lead. Didn't we Social Democrats tell you that you would get nothing from the blood-sucking Tsar? Didn't we tell you that he is not a friend but an enemy of the people and does not concern himself with the good of the people but with the good of his mistresses and attendants?"

Stephen's factory went on strike, in no small part due to these words, which he cried out with such passion that several of his previously unconvinced coworkers burst into tears.

Even the fourteen-year-old Gleb was given short assignments distributing propaganda and speaking to the workers of several smaller local factories and workshops, occasionally attracting considerable crowds. He would later disappear into the night as fast as he had arrived.

"Gather around our red banner!" He exclaimed. "Rise. Go down the streets and see that work is stopped everywhere. Down with the Tsar! Down with the autocracy! Long live the constituent assembly!"

Gleb had never felt as happy as he did when the crowd cheered for him, or more importantly, the revolution, the mere thought of which has come to fill him with overwhelming joy. People sharing, workers earning a fair share of what they labored to produce, children growing to be adults…

The boy has discovered his own love for public speaking. He is a completely different person when he engages in it. Proud, passionate, and fearless. No trace of the boy he used to be, the boy who is locked up within the confines of his own mind and becomes easily stressed by bright lights, uncomfortable sensations, and strange sounds. The boy who flaps his hands and repeats words he finds soothing to alleviate this discomfort. That boy comes out only at home now, and the socially acceptable persona he has fully pieced together is who he exhibits to the world.

That filtered persona doesn't draw stares unless that is what is needed. It is not reproached for being distracting, weird, or annoying. When this Gleb is in public, he is careful to mind the way he stands and what he does with his hands. He keeps an eye on his public's reaction to his every word and action, trying not to fidget.

This isn't easy for Gleb, but it is better than loneliness, or being unable to help the cause he is so passionate about.

Oo

Turning a series of strikes into a revolution was proving harder for the Bolsheviks than they had expected. The strikes continued, but some of the workers preferred to keep laboring and thus stay out of trouble. Some others appeared to be slightly confused as far as politics were concerned. They shouted revolutionary slogans and yet also petitioned the government. Added to all of this was the party's rivalry with the Anarchists, the Mensheviks, and the Socialist-Revolutionary movement.

In fact, the great majority of the workers ignored political issues, seeking only to improve their economic condition.

Arming the workers hasn't been easy either. Rifles and revolvers which could be smuggled into the country or stolen from gun shops are rare. The Socialist-Revolutionaries make bombs for the workers, but most are armed with daggers or home-made lances.

Furthermore, the police are not completely incompetent. Apartments serving as Bolshevik meeting places are frequently raided, its many leaflets stored there destroyed.

By late February, it had fallen on Stephen to illegally smuggle weapons into the country for his party cell in Ekaterinburg, only visiting his family and taking other missions sporadically. Most of the time, Gleb doesn't know where his father has been sent, as his mission is very secretive.

The strike movement has nevertheless threatened to die out in part due to the Tsar's attempts to create a committee to improve the workers' conditions. Despite being firmly against this, the Bolsheviks didn't attempt to sabotage the elections for fear of antagonizing the workers, who supported the initiative.

Bolshevik orators and pamphlets were quick to point out that the Tsar was only trying to fool the people, but despite managing to bring about many walkouts, they failed to produce a general strike.

The early 1905 disorders were nonetheless disruptive enough to cause a commotion in Moscow.

Oo

By April, revolutionary ardor and unrest had somewhat decreased, but no one had forgotten about Bloody Sunday, and the situation was far from peaceful. To revive the revolutionary spirit, all revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks among them, took advantage of every occasion to incite political demonstrations.

On May 1st, 1905, Bolsheviks all over the country took advantage of International Workers' Day for this purpose. A rally took place on Ekaterinburg's Cathedral Square, where the outbreak of the war with Japan had been announced more than a year before. Unlike that last time, however, Gleb did feel capable of moving a crowd of strangers with his words.

In the company of his friends and youth organization members, he spoke to the people about the importance of organizing and demanding a voice, of never conforming to tyranny. The boy wasn't alone in this, for several other men and women of revolutionary proclivities had attended the march and talked to the public:

"As long as the autocracy exists, we cannot organize ourselves into effective trade unions, not as our comrades abroad, and as long as we are not organized, we will be unsuccessful in our attempts at struggling against capitalism. For that we need freedom to strike, associate, gather, and speak, to freely gather, discuss, and print our demands."

Oo

Before his friends and fellow party members, Gleb tried to pretend that the end of the Russo-Japanese war on September 5, 1905, had disappointed him, and in some ways, it had. The longer the war continued, the closer the revolution would have come, so the Bolsheviks didn't exactly welcome the early peace, which left the autocracy in power and released the troops of the Far East for the revolution's suppression. It would have been better, the party members claimed, for the Tsar's downfall to have occurred before the achievement of peace with Japan through a constituent assembly.

Weeks before the ceasefire, the Bolsheviks had been spreading leaflets accusing the government of being in the process of preparing another war, this time against Britain, Japan's ally. This had, of course, no basis in reality, but that didn't stop the reds from holding the much-desired concept of peace out as a bait for revolution, which Gleb secretly found somewhat distasteful, not that he would ever confess to that.

Throughout 1905, the Bolsheviks had been urging for the general strike that they hoped would turn into a final armed uprising. And then, unexpectedly, it happened despite the peace. On September 20, a strike broke out spontaneously among the Moscow printers and spread to the bakers, restaurant employees, and workers of the furniture factories and tobacco shops. As the strike spread through Moscow, the mood of the workers became more and more violent. By October, around a third of Russia's industrial workforce was on strike along with liberal professors, students, lawyers, doctors, and even bank employees and government bureaucrats.

Many of the workers entered the strike demanding civil rights and a real constitutional assembly, but a great number also participated simply to satisfy economic demands or because they had been coerced by the other workers.

Surprisingly, neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks had incited the strike. They were in fact worried about the workers' lack of weapons and organization. There was no time to waste, however.

By October 12, every industrial enterprise in the city had been affected by the strike and soviets were appearing everywhere. The violence kept escalating until it reached its peak on October 17, 1905, when Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto that ended Russia's centuries-old autocracy.

The parliament known as the Duma was to be elected by all classes and nationalities previously excluded, and no law could now be promulgated without the consent of the Duma, to which the Tsar's officials were also accountable. Although the suffrage was designed to be partial to the overrepresented privileged and wealthier classes and the executive power remained wholly in the hands of the Tsar, his power had been undeniably limited.

The news was met with various reactions. Russia's conservatives were dismayed. The recently formed Constitutional Democratic Party, a moderate liberal group the members of which were known as "Kadets", was dissatisfied with the October Manifesto but perfectly willing to enter the Duma. The constitutional government they wanted would eventually come. Another group made up of gentry, businessmen, and bureaucrats with centrist and liberal views would soon form the Octobrist Party, which strongly supported the Manifesto and was firmly committed to a system of constitutional monarchy.

The Mensheviks thought of the Duma as a wonderful opportunity to agitate and organize the masses without opposition from the government.

The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, condemned the October Manifesto as an agreement between the Tsar and the nobles. Considering it a grant of limited freedom, an attempt of the Tsar to divide the forces of the revolution, and at best a step towards constitutionalism, the Bolsheviks diligently agitated against the Duma through leaflets, gatherings, and even breaking into liberal meetings, struggling to convince the people that the Manifesto had gained them nothing, for the first few days after its issuing, the streets of St. Petersburg had been filled with rejoicing crowds.

Oo

On 19 October 1905, many of Ekaterinburg's gymnasium students entered the Cathedral Square to discuss the so-called "Highest Manifesto for the Improvement of Public Order", published by Emperor Nicholas II.

Gleb went along with his four school friends after having picked up Sergei from the metallurgical plant.

"This is good news!" Leonid exclaimed when the now fifteen-year-old Gleb finished reading the document posted on the wall. "Is it not, Gleb?"

"But why doesn't it say anything about our salary?" The pragmatic Sergei asked. As a mere worker until very recently, the boy still didn't give much thought to the concept of parliaments.

"Because the Tsar isn't worried about our salaries, Sergei", Gleb replied. "Don't you get it?" He turned around, facing both his friends and the crowd filling the square, mostly older students. "The Tsar is trying to fool us with promises and mock concessions, do you think he is really going to care about what even the rich people in this new parliament are going to say?!" Somewhat scared but also motivated by the thought of Feodosia's encouraging and even somewhat admiring gaze, the boy raised his voice when he noticed that several strangers were listening. "Not so! He is a liar and a tyrant who survives by sucking on the people's hard work, on their blood! He won't give up on that!"

"Hey!" Another boy's voice cried amidst the crowd. "How dare you speak like that about our Tsar!"

Gleb looked at him with open eyes for a few seconds. He was a tall blond a couple of years older than him. In spite of everything, Gleb didn't find the right words to answer back. Before that day, he had only dealt with disinterested people and debaters from his own side at worst, never with outright reactionaries.

"What you heard!" A worker next to the blond said. "Down with the Tsar!"

"Down with the Tsar!" A chorus clamored.

"You all think you could do better, but you are wrong!" A woman shouted."Stupid children!"

"He is our Tsar!" Others yelled. "God's anointed!"

"That is foolishness!" Someone exclaimed.

"Those are fairy tales!" Peter went further.

All around Gleb, more and more students, workers, clerks, teachers, members of the bourgeoisie and other people were drawing closer and closer, making him lower his defenses. And the noise, the noise, everyone talking and yelling… he decided to fidget with his fingers. That is not as noticeable, he thought.

The pressure kept building and building up, and for a moment he felt lost, about to lose it, but he balled his hands into fists and kept everything inside.

"How dare I?" Gleb spoke again as he glared at the older blond boy, his voice clear and sure in order to catch the people's attention. "How dare you defend the slaughterer of your people?" He analyzed the crowd's reaction and made sure they were paying attention before continuing. "He holds his whip threateningly while we sleep on dirty factory floors! He still holds autocratic power! Are his troops and police gone? No, comrades! Not even the promised release of political prisoners has been carried out! How many of your brothers and sisters have been imprisoned?!"

Gleb studied the gathering again, seeing both angry furrowed brows and nods of approval. He must be doing something right.

"He spilled his soldiers' blood over Manchuria and now wants them to spill the blood of the people", he continued. "Will you allow that?!"

"No!" Multiple men and women cried, encouraged by Gleb's friends.

"Down with the Tsar!" Many students yelled.

"Watch out!" Gleb heard his friend Alexander shout, and before he knew what it was all about, he was being pushed aside. Alexander had protected Gleb from the blond boy's assault.

That is when the brawl broke out. The students started fighting each other over the platform in the middle of the square. Everyone was screaming and shouting. Gleb saw a young man with a broken nose fall onto one of the walls of the church. Dodging the violence taking place around him, Gleb ran towards him. It was Pavel.

But before he could help his schoolmate, a fist landed on his face, and Gleb got caught up in a fight with two other boys. The following minutes were unbearable for the fifteen-year-old as hundreds of people punched and shoved each other in intense fits of rage. He couldn't determine who was angrier, the workers and students against the Tsar or the equally ferocious students, village people, and even workers defending him. All he knew is that he was trapped amidst a mass of unpredictable and unbearably loud people. His worst nightmare came true when another one of his fits started. Gleb hadn't had one in public since his most recent and shameful experience in front of the entire classroom. This time, however, it wasn't just his aching head suffering the consequences of his temporary lapse of judgment, it was also the people around him.

Gleb began making his way through the crowd by shoving, quicking, and punching people out of his way, trying hard to unleash his fury mainly on those damned reactionary Tsarist supporters, and once he got hold of his friends and helped them fight off their attackers, he urged them to run away from the square, leaving the dozens of people quarreling behind.

For quite some time, Gleb had been used to talking about the revolution and even mentioning the use of violence as necessary, but he had just witnessed such anger in people's eyes that he was overwhelmed. The whole fight had been too real. Too real. The workers had become violent and unafraid to strike people. They wouldn't stop if beaten, and that was terrifying. Gleb had read about what happened to people who resisted the government, it wasn't pretty.

As the bruised boys ran away from the violence, Peter started laughing. "That was awesome!" He cried.

Sergei gave him a look. "Peter, you should've seen yourself. You looked like you were possessed!"

"I don't know about that, Seryozha... Gleb is the one who beat the two guys that were keeping me on the ground and kicking me!" He grinned. Gleb could have blushed at the compliment. He had been extremely confused when he did that, his body moving almost without his mind's aid.

Oo

Gleb, Sergei, Peter, Leonid, Alexander, and Pavel decided to stop by Mr. Zeldovich's candy store. Gleb planned to use some of his saved money to buy Sergei something, as the child worker barely ever had enough for candy, but when they arrived there, the windows had been smashed open, the shelves were on the ground, and most of the products had been looted.

"Mr. Zeldovich!" Peter called out with horror. The old man was lying on the ground, holding his bleeding forehead as two of his daughters tried assisting him with wet cloths. The women were wearing dark clothes and white scarves around their heads. Next to them stood a very upset Yakov, whose teary eyes met Gleb's.

"The store is ruined!" He exclaimed. "What will become of us now?!"

Leonid approached the family and crouched down to help them pick up the pieces of broken glass scattered across the room and gather whatever was left of the merchandise. The other boys began doing the same thing.

"Thanks, children", one of the shopkeeper's daughters smiled as they guided their father out of the shop with the cloth still pressed against his wound.

"Don't worry, Yakov, we will figure out something", Pavel said.

"We can give you some money so that your grandpa can open this place again", Leonid quickly added.

Alexander looked at the old man and his daughters with pity as they walked out of the shop, wishing to say something. Gleb picked up on this.

"What happened?" He whispered to his friend Yakov as they both took a couple of brooms from a cabinet located at the back of the enclosure and started sweeping the floor.

"A mob of thugs came and broke into the shop", Yakov replied with a low tone of voice. "I was doing my homework sitting next to my grandfather, behind the counter, and they came in shouting 'Down with the Jews! Down with the Jews!'" He turned away from the other boys and crossed his arms, frowning. "They threw rocks at us and would have beaten us too if it weren't for papa and Cousin Isaac. It happened to almost the entire neighborhood, and they even set one house on fire, that is why they are not here, helping us."

"I am so sorry, Yakov", Gleb said.

"Who are these thugs anyway?" Peter asked.

"Yeah, I would like to get my hands on them!" Exclaimed Sergei, making Yakov smile before answering Peter's question:

"I don't know exactly who they are, all I know is that they are a group of Christians who support the Tsar and make no secret of blaming us for everything that is going wrong with Russia."

"Describe them to us!" Peter said eagerly.

"Yeah!" Alexander jumped. "We will find them and teach them a lesson!"

Gleb frowned, feeling uncomfortable with the idea of looking for someone just to beat them up, as much as they might deserve it, but he remained silent, resigned to his friends' desire for revenge. The revolution was at hand, and the recent squabble at the plaza was evidence of that. Gleb couldn't stay inside his comfort zone any longer.

Oo

Despite Nicholas's best intentions, a wave of brutality unlike anything seen before swept the Russian Empire following the announcement of the October Manifesto.

The people loyal to the Tsar were angry at the agitators for having made their sovereign agree to limit his powers. The revolutionaries were not satisfied with the concessions. The ethnically diverse regions of the vast landmass were yet again caught up in a cycle of racial violence as the minorities battled for autonomy.

In the wake of the October Manifesto, another chain of unrest spread throughout big Russian industrial centers, including the city of Moscow.

Nikolay Ernestovich Bauman was very active in assembling and igniting the crowds to march on the Moscow Governorate Prison, from which he had been recently released. He was also the man whose affair with, and mockery of, a fellow revolutionary's wife had driven the latter to suicide and scandalized numerous Russian political exiles years ago, but that didn't matter anymore.

The mobs followed Bauman as he demanded the release of political prisoners, carrying red banners with the motto: "Let's level the Russian Bastille to the ground!"

"Down with the Tsar!" The rebel shouted as he rode a car with the banner. "Down with the Empire!"

His plans were foiled when he crossed paths with Nikolay Mikhalin, an employee of the Shchapov's Factory in his late twenties who was a former soldier with the Emperor's Own Horse Guard Regiment, an elite cuirassier regiment of the Russian Imperial Guards. A keen monarchist, Mikhalin armed himself with a cut-out of a steel pipe and got into the cab to confront Bauman, trying to take a red banner from him.

In the following struggle, Bauman managed to produce a pistol and shot at Mikhalin once, but the former soldier, a six-feet tall dark-haired man of considerable strength and excellent swordsmanship, managed to hit Bauman with the pipe and make him miss. Mikhalin then struck Bauman three times on the head, causing almost instant death to the first member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party to perish violently, or at least the first well-known for doing so.

The killer voluntarily gave himself up to the police and was sentenced to 18 months of imprisonment for excessive use of force.

Bauman's previous scandal was completely forgotten the moment the Bolsheviks decided to turn him into a martyr, effectively 'cleansing him of his sins' in order to play on the sympathies of the masses. Tens of thousands attended his funeral procession, a mighty propaganda exercise. The leaders of the party carried red flags and large velvet banners with slogans made up of golden letters as they followed the coffin, which was carried through the streets of Moscow by the tallest party members.

The procession marched all day, filling the streets with a dark menace. The orations were emotional. Despite not being officially married to Bauman under the law of the Russian Empire, Kapitolina Medvedeva proclaimed herself as the martyred rebel's widow and urged the crowds to avenge his death. Subsequently, several altercations ensued with a few of various pro-tsarist groups that would soon be widely known as the Black Hundreds.

Oo

The Union of the Russian People, the Society of Russian Patriots, and the Russian Monarchist Party, were some of the organizations collectively known as the "Black Hundreds" that had been formed as a reaction to the Empire's growing revolutionary sentiments.

Many times with the local authorities' passive approval and even assistance, although just as often in defiance of all authority, murderous pogroms were carried out against the Jews in Odessa, Kiev, Gomel, Lodz, Belostok, and many other cities, villages, and towns. These pogroms were more brutal than they had been in years, the pogrom of Odessa being the worst anti-Jewish pogrom in the city's history, with around 1,000 Jews murdered, millions of rubles lost in property damage, hundreds of ruined businesses, and 3,000 families reduced to poverty. Among the perpetrators were members of Black Hundreds organizations.

In Saratov, police, troops, and outraged volunteers carried out a general pogrom against local revolutionaries. In Chelyabinsk, ninety members of the local Bolshevik combat detachment were surrounded in a building and severely beaten by the mob.

In Ufa, Sverdlov barely escaped an armed conflict between the Bolsheviks and the Black Hundreds, and in the Siberian town of Tomsk, a large crowd of the Black Hundreds surrounded a building where a workers' meeting was being held and set it on fire, burning about 400 people alive despite the resistance offered by a group of Bolsheviks. Another tragedy was averted in Moscow when a group of students surrounded in their university by a menacing crowd were saved by the police.

Although many of those belonging to the Black Hundreds were undoubtedly fanatical, brutish, and violently prejudiced individuals, a considerable number of them engaged in subtle political activism that was no different from that of their revolutionary counterparts, from whom they had acquired successful methods of working among the masses. While many Black Hundreds organizations were guilty of stirring up hatred and organizing massacres, several others strictly forbade any kind of violence or incitement to pogroms and crimes.

A considerable part of these monarchists' efforts were in fact a reaction to the revolutionaries' activities. Claiming to represent Russia's "silent majority", the common people loyal to or at least content with their "little father" and for that very reason uninterested in politics, these conservative organizations would distribute pamphlets and leaflets meant to make the people resist revolutionary propaganda. They built schools, libraries, and tea houses, spreading the message that a constitution or parliament would only create a bigger and stronger bureaucracy. Bureaucracies only cared about enriching and empowering themselves, they claimed. The Tsar represented the people, not them.

The movement was fairly diverse, with some organizations embracing the new constitution and the majority favoring the preservation of absolute autocracy. Most of the members of these ultra-conservative parties were local aristocrats, civil servants, and soldiers, but this changed as their activism grew and more and more artisans, workers, and other people from different class backgrounds joined the movement until it was as numerous as all of the main revolutionary parties combined.

The Black Hundreds were horrified by Tsar Nicholas II's refusal to strike down harshly on the revolutionaries and therefore decided to organize paramilitary bands that marched through the streets holding pocket knives and brass knuckles, ready to defend themselves against the revolutionaries or even attack them unprovoked. They carried icons, crosses, patriotic banners, and portraits of Tsar Nicholas II. Whenever the revolutionaries killed clerks, lawyers, policemen, or other public servants, the Black Hundreds would assassinate prominent party members in response.

Nicholas II himself was highly supportive of a conservative organization known as the Union of the Russian People and even patronized it, wishing the leaders success in their efforts to unite loyal Russians in defense of the autocracy.

He naively and wholeheartedly put his faith in these loyal and devoted people, actively choosing to overlook the fact that some of them took part in the most violent and despicable of actions. They were on his side, on the side of Russia, and this is all that mattered.

The fact not even his concessions had quelled the revolt managed to turn Nicholas more cynical than ever. He reacted with cold disinterest to the news of the pogroms and massacres that had followed the October Manifesto.

"The impertinence of the socialists and revolutionaries had angered the people once more", he wrote to his mother Minnie, "and, because nine-tenths of the troublemakers are Jews, the people's whole anger turned against them. That's how the pogroms happened. It is amazing how they took place simultaneously in all towns of Russia and Siberia. In England, of course, the press says that those disorders were organized by the police, they still go on repeating this worn out fable. But not only Jews suffered; some of the Russian agitators, engineers, lawyers and such like... Cases as far apart as in Tomsk, Simferopol, Tver, and Odessa show clearly what an infuriated mob can do: They surrounded the houses where revolutionaries had taken refuge, set fire to them, and killed everybody trying to escape."

Oo

After Bauman's murder, the Bolsheviks acknowledged the weakness of their combat organization and increased their efforts to build a real army. Many committees were urged to organize small combat detachments and encouraged to clash with the Black Hundreds as a method of practice. Veterans held lectures on street fighting methods used by Western European workers during the revolutions of the 19th century. Stations and escape routes for snipers were selected, plans for lines of barricades were drawn up, and bomb laboratories were set up.

All over the nation workers, soldiers, and sailors rebelled. The riots and assassinations kept occurring frequently, more so than before the publication of the October Manifesto. They were now often followed by occasional and sometimes even successful coup attempts against regional governments. Nicholas was dumbfounded. His sacrifice should have bore fruit by now, and yet the violence only kept escalating.

The Bolsheviks had little trouble in keeping up the revolutionary ardor of the peasantry since, after all, they had plenty of help from the more countryside-focused Socialist-Revolutionaries in that respect. The Socialist-Revolutionaries, or SRs, were agrarian socialists and supporters of a democratic socialist Russian republic. Russia's rural peasantry tended to support the Socialist-Revolutionary programme of land-socialization, the equal distribution of land into peasant tenants, as opposed to the Bolshevik programme of land-nationalization, the collectivization of the land into state management. But all of this was not enough, not when half the peasants still held superstitious beliefs, an independent spirit, a lack of interest in city politics, and a naive sense of loyalty to the Tsar. The poorest of peasants were unhappy with their conditions, but for a successful revolution, organization was needed.

When the October Manifesto was issued, the first reaction of the average peasant was: "What? Nothing about the land?" That is all they cared about, not who ruled the nation.

Seeing that the October Manifesto had only brought on more disorders throughout the countryside, the Tsar issued a special decree reducing and gradually abolishing all payments collected by the state to compensate the landowners for the loss of their serfs' lands in 1861 and establishing a land bank which would provide cheap loans to the peasants. Worried that the peasants would be satisfied with this, the Bolsheviks launched a propaganda campaign against the decree.

"Stop all payments!" The Bolsheviks urged. "Don't comply with their gradual reduction! In the past forty years, you have paid more than the lands are worth! The land bank is a means of making the rich peasants richer and driving you further into debt!"

Several groups of party members were sent out to the villages to organize revolutionary peasant committees with varying degrees of success. Peasants would sometimes seize towns' government offices, confiscate all of the money and arms they could find, and install their own committees. States and lands were seized and mansions were robbed.

Nevertheless, the agrarian revolts of 1905 constituted more of a crime wave than an organized revolution of political aims. This lack of organized cooperation between the peasants and the urban proletariat would be one of the main causes for the failure of the revolution of 1905.

Oo

Count Witte was stuck in an awkward corner. Having convinced a reluctant sovereign to grant a constitution, he was installed as President of the Council of Ministers and expected to make the new system work.

To Witte's great shock and despair, however, rather than getting better, the situation appeared to be growing steadily worse. The conservatives hated him for degrading the autocracy, the liberals did not trust him, and the left feared that the revolution would slip from their grasp. By stripping the local police of many of their powers, the October Manifesto had led directly to an escalation of violence in many parts of Russia. A rash of little village republics were proclaimed as the peasants rose up against their German Landlords throughout the Baltic states.

Feeling slighted by the recent political developments, some priests went as far as supporting the pogroms of Kiev and Odessa. The Trans-Caucasus was the setting of similar attacks made on the Armenians under the guise of patriotism and religious fervor. The Poles and Finns saw the October Manifesto as a much-welcomed sign of weakness, so mass demonstrations clamoring for autonomy and independence followed its publication. Naval mutinies broke out at Kronstadt on the Baltic and Sevastopol on the Black Sea.

In the meantime, Nicholas waited impatiently for the constitutionalism experiment to produce results. As Witte stumbled, the Tsar became bitter.

"It is strange that such a clever man should be wrong in his forecast of an easy pacification", he wrote to his mother that November, and later that month he added in another letter: "Everybody is afraid of taking courageous action. I keep trying to force them—even Witte himself—to behave more energetically. With us nobody is accustomed to shouldering responsibility, all expect to be given orders which, however, they disobey as often as not."

Oo

Gleb and his friends managed to hunt down those guilty of destroying the candy store before getting involved in a fierce and brutal street fight with them. Despite being outnumbered, they ended up effectively teaching all of those reactionaries a lesson, because at the tender age of fifteen Gleb was nonetheless taller and stronger than the most muscular of the gang of loyal monarchists, and he was still growing. Yakov was thrilled by the spectacle, and Gleb couldn't blame him. The grey-eyed boy's heart aches for his new friend, which is why his revolutionary youth organization has gathered a modest sum of money to help the unlucky family start over.

School life has been unstable, with classes often interrupted by news of revolutionary activity. This drives Gleb crazy at times, but right now he has more important things to be perfectionist about.

Feodosia's secret library is the best place for Gleb's youth organization to meet. Not only are there books on every topic from history to religion, science, politics, and mathematics, but the room is also hard to access without knowledge of the house.

For months, the youngsters have gathered there to read aloud and talk about politics and Marxism, discussing and debating complex subjects such as how the Russian proletariat should deal with their enemies once victory is achieved. They have also examined new ways of aiding the cause.

Gleb, Feodosia, and the few members of the group older than both of them by a couple of years or so are the ones who most often have something of value to contribute to the conversation. Like her mother, Feodosia is the perfect host, and she is also good at establishing new social connections and thus attracting members to the organization. She says Gleb comes up with the best and most unique of ideas, although the boy can hardly bring himself to believe that. While he feels flattered, as the leader Gleb understands the need to listen to those older and more knowledgeable than himself, and for now, the two nineteen-year-olds talking about the next mission as they stand before the rest of the youths gathered inside the library seem to fit into the "more knowledgeable" category.

"I am not visiting that village ever again!" Sergei exclaims when they are done, referring to the organization's attempt to distribute pamphlets among the villagers last week. The young worker is amongst the most participative of Gleb's recruits. Unlike, Leonid, Pavel, and Alexander, who only nod in agreement and sometimes ask questions, Sergei always has something to say that could potentially go against what the latest speaker pointed out. "Those peasants are not at all interested in anything we have to say, all they care about is land, land, land..."

"Well, we can not leave them out of the conversation, can we?" Feodosia looks over at Gleb from her place next to him on the floor, where most of the twelve boys sit. "Our numbers are too low, and they shouldn't think our movement is for townspeople only when they are the majority of the country." She looks at Gleb with something resembling a fond smile, making his heart skip a beat. He has often caught her staring at him, but he urges himself not to think much of it. All those times she looked… she was probably just paying attention, he thinks. But it is hard not to get his hopes up when she does, like now, especially since they have become such good friends.

Sometimes, Gleb and Feodosia will meet alone, and not only in the library. They once went to get ice cream before the others arrived. He would have thought himself dreaming if it weren't for the fact he knows Feodosia does this with several other boys and girls. She is simply quite sociable.

Their conversations never get too personal, although Gleb is sure that Feodosia is aware of his insecurities, as they are too obvious. Instead, the fifteen-year-old and the sixteen-year-old talk about the topic that impassions them both the most, the revolution. Doing so is always a challenge for Gleb, as in Feodosia he has found an intellectual equal, which inevitably means he is always trying his best to impress her without much success. Being Feodosia's friend is amazing, but not as much as Gleb fantasized it would be before he spoke to her for the first time. As much as he understands his apprehension is irrational, he still has to hide parts of himself for fear of losing her, maybe even more than he does with Peter and Leonid, who know full well what he is hiding. Despite her kindness and friendliness, Gleb's guard is up more often than not with Feodosia.

"What do you think, Gleb?" She asks, distracting the boy from his thoughts.

Gleb nods slowly, trying not to let his excitement shine through on his face. "You're absolutely right," he tries to sound calm and confident. Their eyes, he tells himself, look them in the eye, but not for too long. "But I have been thinking about what Igor said", he adds, referring to one of the two Socialist Revolutionaries of the organization. "They have a different idea of what would constitute a good land reform." Gleb turns to the young man in question. "Igor, will you please…"

Surprised by Gleb's open-mindedness, Igor begins explaining what a land redistribution would be like under a Socialist Revolutionary program.

"Anything that can get them to rise against the Tsar and his guard dogs!" Peter exclaims, almost shocking Gleb, who is sometimes startled by Peter's passion and enthusiasm for a cause that he was acquainted with relatively recently. His anger is somewhat unsettling, and yet exactly as it should be.

"Now, don't misunderstand me", Gleb speaks again, "I don't mean to say that we will promise the peasants any one type of solution to the land issue. After all, many of you here have different opinions about what that solution might be. My point is that land itself is the only thing that seems to matter to them. Remember the last time we spoke to the peasants? That is all they asked us about! They don't care about what politicians do in towns, they care about and resent the fact richer peasants are exploiting them!"

Most of those present nod in agreement.

"We should take that into account when we meet them again", Gleb continues, "and speak to them about the revolution not as an opportunity to take control over the country, but as a chance to have a say when it comes to the soil they work on."

There is a short silence as everyone takes a moment to consider Gleb's words. This makes the boy grow as tense as he always does whenever he speaks up like this, although he now hides his discomfort very well.

"That is a good idea, actually", a young party member named Yuri suddenly says, making Gleb let out a sigh of relief. "When should we try this? And where?"

"We already know the village where Gleb's mom Elena grew up", Feodosia says, "I think we should go there."

"Does Friday evening after work or school sound good?" Sergei asks.

"Could it be Thursday evening?" Yakov interjects, and Gleb understands why. Regardless of what his real personal beliefs might be, Yakov can't lose his family. He and Gleb have talked a lot about religion, and the two boys share the same ambivalence towards it. Yakov uses his kippah only around other Jews, Gleb won't pray, and neither one of them believes in God anymore. Gleb has tried telling his mother Elena this, and she seems understanding of the fact her son no longer wants to go to mass with her. This, for Gleb, is further proof that religion is nothing more than the opium of the masses. If her mother truly believed in God, Gleb can't help but think, wouldn't she insist that Gleb be grateful to the entity that gave him life? But she doesn't, she doesn't care, which shows that the more open-minded one becomes regarding God, the more likely that person is to understand the fact religion is a man-made construct designed to spare people's feelings and help them through the harsh reality of life, and of course, it is good business to exploit this need the populace has of believing everything will be fine someday.

Gleb wanted God's love, but what is the point of love if it is a lie?

Religion won't be necessary in the future, and it is not necessary to be a revolutionary. The revolution is their true religion. It serves the same purpose, and it is real.

The youth organization eventually decides that the plan will be carried out on Thursday evening.

Oo

St. Petersburg didn't suffer any serious uprising during the last months of 1905, but many other Russian cities, especially Moscow, were to be the scene of clashes between the government and revolutionary forces. This began with the rebellion of a dissatisfied military unit that had been used to restore order in Sevastopol in November, spilling the blood of countless people in the process. This experience had disgusted many of the men with the government.

After taking possession of the regimental arsenal and food stores, the soldiers announced they would no longer carry out police duties against their own people. They also demanded better treatment, abolition of the death penalty, amnesty for all political prisoners, freedom of discussion of soldiers' needs, and the shortening of military service.

On December 3, the city of Moscow received the news that the St. Petersburg Soviet had been arrested, causing an outburst of indignation among the Moscow Soviet, which with the support of the rebellious unit called upon the people of the city to prepare for a general strike and an uprising.

The revolutionary forces consisted of around 300 armed Bolsheviks, 300 Socialist Revolutionaries, 100 Mensheviks, 150 students, and 200 armed men of other groups. It was hoped, however, that others would eventually join.

The Bolsheviks had their doubts about the potential success of the revolution, but with the workers and the soldiers in such a revolutionary mood, they could not pass such an opportunity up, so they recommended the Moscow Soviet to organize a general strike and take up arms. This was also supported by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.

After several officers promised to make concessions to the soldiers such as a raised monthly pay, some battalions refused to join the movement, but the general strike started on December 7 nonetheless. The Moscow Soviet ordered all enterprises to be closed except for essential ones such as the gas works and food stores, which were allowed to remain open after being warned not to charge more than the usual prices and to grant the strikers credit. Furthermore, all tenants were encouraged to stop paying rent.

The disorderly fighting started the day following the beginning of the general strike. There was no surprise coup against all strategic points. Instead, the rebels, consisting mostly of students and workers, carried out a sloppy, scattered, and uncoordinated campaign of attacks on small groups of police and army officers, burglarizing gun shops in the dark and hoping that the soldiers would be won over to the cause. The most unreliable elements of the garrison had been kept within the barracks, however, so they were unable to help. The soldiers who did patrol the streets did not usually fire at the revolutionaries except in self-defense, but they refused to join the rebels.

Oo

After a long and stressful day, all members of Gleb's Young Workers and Students' Revolutionary Organization have gone back home. Only Gleb and Feodosia remain. They are chatting in the library while eating a late dinner, a very late dinner.

It has been the most eventful Thursday of Gleb's life. It was not only eventful, but also quite amusing looking back now that the danger is temporarily over.

Despite being Thursday, Yakov decided not to go with Feodosia and the other boys to the village. There was no way to ensure that they would all get back to the city before sundown, and his parents would have probably stopped by his cousin's house and asked for him, as that is where he always tells them he is staying at whenever he hangs out with Gleb and his friends. Instead, Yakov decided to aid the cause by anonymously distributing pamphlets throughout his neighborhood along with his older cousin Lev, who he recently discovered is involved in a revolutionary movement as well. It was a good decision, because Gleb, Feodosia and the other volunteers from the organization barely got out of the village alive.

It is not that there was something wrong with Gleb's speech, there wasn't, the boy knows by now how to move a crowd, how to read their reactions. Too many hand movements? No, Gleb knew they were fine and even expected to express emotion or emphasize points as long as there was moderation. A smile here and there among the people of the crowd? That didn't necessarily mean mockery as long as there were no chuckles.

Gleb is not an expert on what normal is. The only thing he knows is that he is not it, so he tries to be as unlike himself as possible in all contexts except around his mother. He longs to open up to people, but trying to do so is a real struggle. Controlling his every word and movement is instinctive by now, so much so that he can't let it go.

For speeches, however, none of this had been a problem so far, but in general, the peasants were not at all receptive to the revolutionary message despite the new way in which it had been presented to them. Not even Gleb's distant relatives were happy with a bunch of strange city boys trying to get them to rise up against the Tsar, their Tsar, their "little father", and they went as far as throwing rocks at the fifteen-year-old and his comrades, shouting insults. The teenagers managed to dodge most of the stones, but they were chased out of the center of the village and had to seek refuge among the trees and bushes. Luckily enough, Gleb's endeavor was not completely fruitless. The revolution gained more than a couple of supporters among the landless peasants and the poorest of the villagers. These sympathizers gave Gleb and his friends shelter before promising to join their paramilitary unit in order to fight against the government when the time comes.

The time will come. Ivan and some of his friends from the mutinous regiment are already training the members of Gleb's organization on firearms use and fighting tactics, and Stephen will provide them and his entire party cell with weapons. Gleb knows that his father is working abroad, getting in contact with people who will help him smuggle weapons illegally into the country. He has been away for a while, and Gleb doesn't know exactly where, as Stephen's is a very secret mission.

"You were very brave, Gleb, trying to shield me from the rocks", Feodosia says as she chews her last pelmeni, "that mob almost kills us."

Gleb blushes at the compliment before replying. "I don't know what could get them to give up on their beliefs, and I worry about how hard it will be to convince them to cooperate with us when we win."

"You shouldn't worry about that, they will probably follow whoever is in charge, they see the Tsar as a distant, all-powerful figure, and the loyalty they have for him depends on his power."

"You are probably right", Gleb shrugs, "and the poor peasants will come around as soon as they see how much more we care for them."

"The rich peasants are the problem", Feodosia stands up and picks up her empty plate, which makes Gleb do the same with his.

They leave the library briefly to put the dishes in the kitchen sink and then return. Gleb looks at the clock on one of the bookshelves and realizes how late it is.

"Look at that!" He points at the time, "my mother will be worried."

Feodosia grins as she blocks the door. "Why do you want to leave me?" She pouts.

"I don't want to leave you, I swear!" Gleb replies, startled. "But my mother always worries about me when I'm out late. I could have been arrested, or worse…"

"I know Gleb", Feodosia smiles as she shakes her head playfully. "Don't take everything so seriously." Gleb holds his breath before looking down at her. She is wearing her honey-colored hair up in a ponytail, and the sweat beads on the back of her neck stand out against her smooth pale skin. He long dark skirt clings to her hips, revealing her shapely legs, and her white blouse buttons are undone. She couldn't look more gorgeous. "Relax, you look so scared", Feodosia's pink lips part slightly as she speaks again with a somewhat sly grin. Gleb gulps loudly. They are standing so close to each other… Feodosia suddenly grabs his face, pulls him closer, and then kisses him.

Gleb's eyes widen as he struggles to get used to the sensation of her soft but firm lips moving against his own, trying to part them open, but he doesn't pull away. The wetness of her mouth is making him dizzy, first in a bad way, it is new… new, strange, and too much. He can't help but worry about bacteria invading his mouth, but kissing Feodosia is something he has wanted for too long to let a fear of germs ruin. Gradually the sensation goes from scary to thrilling. New. Forbidden. Feodosia. It is really happening. How can he be so lucky? He decides to open his mouth more widely, allowing her to deepen the kiss, which goes on for several seconds.

When she finally pulls away, Feodosia looks up at Gleb with a big smile on her face and eyes searching for his reaction, for his feelings towards her. "Did you like that?" She asks almost shyly.

Gleb doesn't reply, he just gapes at Feodosia with a lovesick expression.

"Good", she says happily, leaning in to capture his lips in another sweet kiss, a short one this time. "We should do it more often then."

Oo

The following party cell meeting, Gleb and his mother Elena were surprised to see Stephen among the attendees. Gleb pleasantly so, Elena not so much.

An uprising and several strikes were being carefully planned by the party, so neither mother nor son dared interrupt the speakers merely to discuss trivial family matters or express how much they had missed Stephen, but as soon as there was a break, Elena all but dragged her husband away from the dining room and out of the house so that they could talk alone briefly before Gleb noticed their absence.

"When did you arrive?" Elena whispered, her eyes conveying a feeling of betrayal she tried to hide. "What happened?"

Stephen sighed in exasperation. "I missed you too, love."

Elena closed her eyes and looked down in shame. "I am sorry, I did too."

Stephen laughed and then took Elena in his arms, kissing her passionately. When they pulled away, he whispered in her ear. "You look beautiful today."

Elena rolled her eyes, smiling. Her smile disappeared quite soon though. "I am serious though, Stephen, when did you return?"

"Can we talk about this after the meeting is over?"

"Please," Elena said quietly.

"Yesterday evening", Stephen admitted with a sigh.

"Yesterday evening?" Elena raised an eyebrow. "Yesterday evening and I knew nothing about it?"

"Yes", Stephen confirmed without an ounce of regret.

"And you didn't stop by your house to tell your wife and your son that you were alive?!" Elena raised her voice, her face turning red as she slapped her husband on the arm repeatedly. "Gleb was worried about you, you, you…!"

"Ow!" Stephen rubbed his shoulder with annoyance as he stepped away. "Look, Elena, I know you started attending these events for my sake, but can you at least pretend to be understanding toward someone who is still actively working for the revolution? The weapons are in, but there is much more work to do distributing them and organizing and training the different cells."

"So you didn't have a second to stop by and tell us you were fine?" Elena asked. "Can you at least tell me where you are staying?"

"Papa!" Gleb suddenly ran outside to hug Stephen tightly, glad that the separation had provided him with an excuse to do so. "Why didn't you write? How did it go? We missed you so much!"

Elena smiled at her husband and son and decided to stop asking questions, at least for now.

"It is good to see you again, my boy", Stephen smiled as he pulled away. "Look at you! You grew a head while I was gone and now you are almost taller than me!" He ruffled the young man's hair affectionately. "How is school going?"

"I am doing well, papa, and I am doing my part with the party too!"

"Is that so?" Stephen raised his eyebrows, pleased. "That is wonderful news."

Gleb went on to describe to his father everything he had achieved during his absence, trying to impress him with anecdotes about his youth organization, the soldier they had convinced to organize a regiment mutiny, the workers and peasants won over to their side, the speeches he had made, and the leaflets he and his friends had distributed.

"And that is how we helped organized a strike at the small women's textile factory near mama's restaurant", the boy finished, proud of himself, but to his great dismay, Stephen's expression had remained as unimpressed as ever throughout his son's entire retelling of the adventures. The father had, in fact, barely reacted to Gleb's contributions to the cause, only smiling and nodding every now and then, evidently distracted by the fact the break was almost over and the older party members were initiating impromptu discussions on the organization's next steps to contribute to the many uprisings breaking out throughout the country.

"Papa?" Gleb tried to get his attention nonetheless. "What's wrong?" He knew he was no Yakov Sverdlov, the young man who had become a Marxist and an underground organizer at sixteen and was now, at just twenty, organizing the Bolshevik underground cells, workersʼ councils, and committees of Ekaterinburg. Gleb himself had listened to several of his speeches and was proud to have had him operating among his city's revolutionaries. The boy looked up to him.

The Urals had become an important Bolshevik stronghold, in no small part due to the efforts of Sverdlov. Sent to Ekaterinburg on the party's orders, the 20-year-old had organized the revolutionary workers to be more efficient.

Before Sverdlov's arrival, the Bolsheviks had a well-developed web of local rebel groups, Stephen's among them, but they were scattered, had deficient communication, and often acted independently from one another under their different management.

Yakov started taking part in the different party military reunions, standing out as a great speaker, and in little time he managed to organize and unite the many Bolshevik cells into a trustworthy network overseen by a base. Over the course of 1905, he founded the Bolshevik-dominated workers' and soldiers' Soviet of Ekaterinburg.

Gleb's achievements were much more modest, but he had still hoped to please his father and make him proud.

"Nothing is wrong", Stephen smiled softly as he placed a hand gently on Gleb's shoulder. "Nice, Gleb", he added before leaving to join an ongoing debate taking place inside the house.

Something is better than nothing, Gleb thought, but despite this, the fifteen-year-old couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed by his father's lack of enthusiasm. On the other hand, Gleb knew that Stephen didn't often show his emotions, so he was pleased with his approval either way.

Elena had watched as her husband all but ignored their son, again, and she felt utterly helpless to intervene, so all she did was squeeze Gleb's cheek and smile at him before returning to the dining room.

Oo

The first barricades began to appear on December 9, their rough pattern indicating that the revolutionaries were trying to cut off the center of Moscow from the outer districts. There was no coordination between the different rebel units though, so no coordinated offensive could be taken against any strategic point.

Military units would often clear the barricades with shells and case shot, but even combined with the city's police forces, the military was too small to occupy the entire city and it wasn't unheard of for barricades to spring up in the same places where they had been cleared.

The army also had successes. Many places were cleared of demonstrating crowds and armed anarchists. The Fidler school, where hundreds of revolutionaries had gathered for a general descent upon the police, was surrounded by the army and shelled. The defenders surrendered after some ineffective shooting and bomb-throwing, and hundreds of prisoners were taken, most of them Socialist-Revolutionaries.

In response, the revolutionaries adopted partisan tactics, and the Moscow Committee issued a leaflet advising the revolutionaries to operate in small units.

"1. The first rule: Do not act in crowds, work in small details of three or four men, not more. Let there be as many of these details as possible and let them learn to attack quickly and disappear quickly. The police strive to shoot crowds of thousands of people with a hundred Cossacks. To fall on a hundred is easier than on one, especially if that one shoots and escapes unnoticed. The police and army will be helpless if all Moscow is covered with these small and elusive details.

2. In addition comrades, do not take up fortified positions. The army always attempts to take them or simply destroy them with artillery. Let our fortresses be passable yards and all places from which we can shoot and escape easily. If they take such a place, they will not find anyone there and will lose many of their own. It is impossible to take them all, for to do that it would be necessary to settle every home with a Cossack.

3. Therefore, comrades, if anyone should call you to go in a great crowd or to take a fortified place, consider him a fool or a provocator. If he is a fool, don't listen to him. If a provocator, kill him."

The leaflet went on to suggest that the revolutionaries attack soldiers only in self-defense, but that they unhesitatingly kill officers, Cossacks, and high-ranking policemen or those known to have been cruel to the workers.

For the most part, the revolutionaries followed this advice, sniping, running, and attacking individual officers and policemen. Barricades were not seriously defended, but only used to slow up charging troops so that they would provide better targets.

Oo

The Moscow uprising could not avoid having repercussions for the rest of the Empire, and an ever-widening circle of rebellion spread from the heart of Russia outwards. A general strike was called in cooperation with the Moscow strike in Nizhny Novgorod, and a couple of days later workers clashed with Cossacks and patriotic demonstrators. As in Moscow, the revolutionaries would fail to seize the strategic points of the city.

Similar occurrences took place in the Ukraine and the Don Basin, Chita, Kharkov, and Gorlovka, among others. Casualties rose on both sides of the conflict as policemen, soldiers, and civilians died, and whenever the revolutionaries took the towns' governments, they taxed the rich to support the unemployed and controlled prices.

The revolution easily found its way to the Urals, where the Ufa Soviet called a general strike in support of the Moscow strike. Some of the Bolsheviks kidnapped a handful of Cossacks, causing the troops to react incredibly violently.

Oo

The workers of Ekaterinburg had also created a well-organized militia that soon began clashing with the policemen, soldiers, and Cossacks stationed in the city. To Gleb's great dismay, however, he was given an embarrassingly easy and humiliating task. Unlike the adult militia members of his party cell, Gleb and his friends from the youth organization were to guard a few Cossacks who had been kidnapped by the party for political reasons.

The four men are being kept inside the warehouse of a coffee maker factory that has been taken by the rebels. They may be liberated someday, but only in exchange for a ransom, although even that is unlikely. Feodosia, Gleb, and some of the younger boys from his youth organization are taking turns guarding them in shifts, doing so two at a time.

Gleb has a rifle on him at all times when he is around them. He knows very well how to use it, but he doubts he ever will. No escape attempt has been made yet, and Sergei, the boy who is guarding the Cossacks with Gleb right now, loves pointing his rifle at them whenever they move. This scares the prisoners into compliance, and it seems to amuse Sergei greatly as well.

Right now, Gleb is watching over the four men inside the warehouse, while Sergei is patrolling outside.

"What do you want from us?" One of the Cossacks asks with a shaky voice. "All of them have wives and children", the soldier tilts his head towards the other Cossacks. He has dark brown hair and blue eyes, and he seems young, just slightly older than Gleb.

"Shut up!" The boy replies harshly.

"It is useless, Alexei", the Cossack tied behind the one who spoke first says. "These traitors won't take pity on us." They are proud people, those Cossacks, Gleb thinks. Their iconic black fur hats, swords, and daggers were taken from them upon capture, and yet no one could mistake them for anything else.

"I haven't killed anyone", the first one insists nonetheless. "I have a fiancee, my parents are aging and…"

"You're probably lying about not having killed anyone", Gleb rolls his eyes.

"I am not lying!" Alexei insists.

"When we captured you, you had several medals with you", Gleb retorts. "You couldn't have earned them without killing people."

Alexei shakes his head. "I earned those fighting in Manchuria, but I haven't struck down a single Russian, I swear!"

"That is no better", Gleb asserts. "You are still slaughtering your fellow men to do the Tsar's bidding." He then sees the other three men struggling against the ropes around their wrists. "Stop that, you are not getting out of here until we say so!" Two of the tied-up men glare at Gleb as if nothing gave them more pleasure than the thought of killing him on the spot. This makes Gleb feel wickedly glad to hold power over them, those who would not have given an order to strike him and his fellow working men down a thought weeks before.

Oo

Practically against his will, Gleb learned more and more about his hostage over the course of the next few days. Alexei's father owned a decent amount of land, because of course he did, and Alexei, like the other Cossacks, had spent his childhood working in the fields and perfecting his sword and horsemanship. Riding horses every day, the countryside, the folk music, it all sounded so fun... Gleb didn't even know how to ride, but he loved horses. He almost envied Alexei, and despite his best attempts not to, he had begun pitying him too. But why? The fifteen-year-old often wondered. Alexei belonged to a privileged military culture that in Gleb's eyes was no different from a mercenary organization. He had grown up relatively wealthy and was loyal to the Tsar, committed to maintaining his power. But he also looked scared and… normal. And Gleb loved his war stories, shamefully so. Despite being horrible and useless, the topic of war couldn't help but excite the grey-eyed boy. He felt useless to the revolution performing such an easy and cowardly task. Watching over unarmed men was no fun, he wanted to fight armed soldiers and Cossacks in defense of the workers of the motherland… not whatever this was.

The unearned pity grows stronger than ever when Gleb arrives at the warehouse one morning for his shift only to find two of the Cossacks bleeding from their noses and mouths.

"What happened?" Gleb asks with an annoyed tone of voice, assuming they have gotten into a fight.

The one who looks like the oldest glares at Gleb, and the other one, a dark-eyed man in his late twenties, answers with dripping sarcasm. "They broke our faces, and who do you think did?"

"We are all going to die", another Cossack says grimly as Alexei looks at his swollen eye with a sad expression. Then Gleb realizes that the blood is dry.

"What happened?" The boy asks again, softer this time.

"The tall man with the gray eyes", Alexei begins, "he and his men, they… they wanted to know where we keep our weapons, the ammunition."

"No one told him", the oldest Cossack adds before spitting on the ground with disdain.

Oo

Gleb doesn't know how to feel. While the thought of his father beating people up to get them to talk scares him, he understands why Stephan did what he did. He understands that it might have been necessary.

But Gleb can't imagine himself doing the same thing, and that scares him even more.

He tried to bring up his concern for the ultimate fate of the Cossacks with Feodosia on one occasion, but she just told him not to worry too much and then suggested that they start kissing on the back of the warehouse. That is all she wants to do lately, not that Gleb would ever dare complain and risk what they have now, but he does miss their deep conversations, which seem to have become somewhat obsolete lately now that real action is being taken.

Oo

"Boy, hey, young man!" Alexei tries to catch Gleb's attention the next time he comes for a routine check on the four prisoners.

"What do you want?" Gleb snaps back angrily.

"How old are you?" The question catches Gleb off guard. "You seem young, how did you come to join a revolutionary party?"

"Why do you care?"

Alexei shrugs in defeat, but then he tries to engage Gleb further. "Do you even go to school? Are your parents forcing you to be here?"

"What do you want?" Gleb frowns and crosses his arms defensively, offended by the last question.

"I genuinely wish to talk to you, but to be fair... I do need to pee", the young Cossack looks back at his tied wrists. "Will you help me go outside?"

"My comrade took you outside an hour ago!"

"You have been more generous with the water supply today", Alexei explains, sounding sure that Gleb will agree to his request.

Gleb sighs, rolling his eyes. "Fine, but let's hurry." He approaches Alexei with the rifle hanging on his shoulder and unties him from the other Cossacks quickly before tying his wrists tightly once again with another rope, which the boy then uses to pull him up and outside.

As soon as the pair exit the warehouse and pass the other guard on duty, the prisoner suddenly lunges at Gleb and tackles him, causing both of them to fall to the ground. The Cossack is not as easy to deal with as the majority of Gleb's previous opponents have been, for he is much larger and stronger than the boy, who unlike the soldier didn't go through years of training to become a lethal combatant. The boy struggles under him, trying to prevent him from yanking free of the rope, but the fight is over almost before it starts.

Having successfully untied himself, Alexei is taking off running through an empty alleyway. Still lying on the ground, Gleb looks up at him and panics.

This can't be happening, the fifteen-year-old thinks, this can't be happening. He stands up quickly and uses his trembling hands to aim his rifle at the soldier's back, unsure as to whether he is holding the weapon correctly or not.

Aiming is easy enough, and he is quite a good shot as well. Ivan always says that Gleb is a natural during shooting practice.

I can do it, Gleb tells himself as Alexei runs away, he is not even zigzagging.

But he can't. The boy can't help but think about every silly little conversation he had during his short acquaintance with Alexei, who would ask him questions in what seemed to be good faith and laughed whenever Gleb tried debating him or took something too seriously. As much as any sort of ridicule pains Gleb, the thought of killing someone for not caring about the same things he does can't help but feel disturbingly final. That man will not breathe again. He will never marry his fiancee, never have children.

Gleb doesn't even like Alexei, or what he represents. Alexei is an annoying asshole, and now it is also clear that he had been trying to lower Gleb's guard with all that chatter, but if he was telling the truth… if he has indeed never spilled the blood of his own people, the people of this Empire, well… then Gleb must admit that he doesn't hate him that much. He tries and tries and can't make himself want him dead. Humiliated and perhaps hurt after the success of the revolution? Yes. But not dead.

It is not about what you want! Another voice reminds the boy. But Gleb can't stop thinking about Alexei's little village, which sounds like paradise. Would he be willing to take a part of it away and then destroy it so carelessly? The parents, they will be destroyed… Gleb can't stop thinking and thinking, and before he knows it, Alexei is completely out of reach.

No.

No!

Gleb just failed the simplest of tasks. He mocked the task in his mind, like a silly little spoilt boy, and then he failed. He is failing the revolution even with the simplest of tasks. He is a failure, a failure.

Oo

Alexei's escape allowed him to ask for help, and so it was followed by a police raid on the warehouse during which a member of Gleb's organization was seriously injured and the three remaining Cossacks were found and rescued. Gleb wasn't there, but his father made him aware of what had occurred. The fifteen-year-old dares not confess to the fact he let Alexei escape. He lied to both his father and Igor, the boy he was on duty with the day the first Cossack ran away, telling them that the prisoner had received aid from a mysterious cloaked figure.

The following day, Stephan and a few other party members lined up the youngsters before them right outside Feodosia's house, where they had been summoned to meet the evening before under threat of death. Gleb had acted as the messenger, delivering the frightening letters to his friends and acquaintances.

Now he feels lower than dirt. Because of him and his stupid weakness, the revolution has lost four valuable hostages, and one of his friends from the youth organization is in critical condition, being treated for a bullet wound at a party member's home instead of a hospital for fear of arrest. Gleb still can't quite believe he was capable of such stupidity. The thought a comrade could get hurt by his well-meaning yet hopefully naive actions, or lack thereof, never crossed his mind. And yet the fact someone would get hurt was evident.

"Was it you?! Were you the cloaked figure?!" Stephen points his finger threateningly at Sergei, but he isn't surprised when the boy merely shakes his head. This is only warm up.

"It wasn't me", Sergei says. "I kept a close eye on them at all times."

Stephen takes a deep breath. "Don't lie to me, no one outside our cell or your organization knew about the prisoners' whereabouts." He knows this particular boy isn't lying. He has known him for years, a working-class boy that his own son only recently gathered up the courage to speak to. Stephen has no reason to question his loyalty to the cause, or Yakov's, or Feodosia's, or that of any of the boys known to have belonged to different revolutionary parties before joining them.

"No, sir!" Sergei insists. "I don't lie!"

The loyalty of Gleb's four schoolboys, on the other hand…

Stephen turns to Peter abruptly, causing the rich boy to stop smirking as he was doing. "What do you think about this?"

The fifteen-year-old's eyes open wide. "Nothing, sir, I wasn't even there the day they escaped."

That doesn't mean you couldn't have planned this in advance some other way, Stephen thinks. There is a brief silence before he chooses his final suspect.

"Pavel", he says, pointing a finger at the well-dressed short boy standing next to Leonid. "Were you there when the police arrived and shot Yuri?"

Pavel stares back at the tall man, scared. He opens his mouth to answer, but for seconds, no sound comes out.

"Yes, si-sir", he eventually admits with a stutter. "But… bb… I didn't… bu-ut... he..."

"Why were you not harmed? Did you also help the first Cossack escape? Were you the cloaked figure?!" Stephen takes Pavel by the collar of his shirt, shaking him with fury. Pavel looks completely terrified now, almost ready to pass out. Gleb pities him greatly, for Pavel has never been as invested in the mission as his other friends.

Pavel constantly fails to attend the youth organization's meetings, and whenever he is present, he looks disinterested more often than not. Gleb boy cannot help but suspect that Pavel stays around simply because he enjoys the other boys' friendship and company. Perhaps even my company, Gleb thinks. The idea moves him.

"Answer the question!" Stephen barks, making Leonid let out a terrified whimper. This catches Stephen's attention immediately.

"Don't be such a crybaby!" Peter exclaims, turning to look at his younger brother, who Stephen is already walking towards menacingly.

"It was you!" Stephen grabs Leonid's collar now. "You filthy little leech, you arranged the attack on the warehouse!" He exclaims as the young boy starts crying and shaking his head. "You led them here! How dare you betray us!?"

"Please stop!" Leonid whimpers pathetically. "I am sorry Mr. Vaganov! It wasn't me, I swear!"

"He is telling the truth, sir", Peter defends his brother, worried now. "We are both loyal to the cause, Gleb can tell you, please don't hurt him!"

But Stephen takes out a revolver from his leather jacket's pocket without warning and, still grabbing Leonid by the collar of his shirt, he aims it at his jaw. "Why are you so scared then?" The older man's voice is filled with venom. It is deep, frightening. "Why are you so afraid, boy?"

Gleb does not recognize his father. Stephen yells fairly often, but he had never raised his voice as abruptly and harshly as he is doing now. He had never sounded so angry, so hateful, so willing to do the unthinkable. When yelling, he had sounded worried or strict before, not hateful as he does now. He had never threatened anyone with a gun, much less a child younger than Gleb, Gleb's friend.

Gleb starts fidgeting with his nails and fingers, the guilt swallowing him whole. He can't allow Leonid to take the blame for something that was his fault, but he is finally admitting to himself that which took so long to realize. He is scared of his father, although not because of what he may do to him.

Leonid stays still, trembling and whimpering. Stephen keeps the gun in place as he keeps shouting questions at the paralyzed boy.

"Gleb, tell him to stop!" Peter cries, tears welling up in his eyes.

Goodbye, feeling of hoping father is proud of me, Gleb thinks before confessing to what really happened. "It wasn't Leonid, father." He says, pausing to swallow. "It was me." Silence rigns for a few seconds as Stephen lowers the gun slowly, his head turning towards Gleb with the most unreadable of expressions.

A sob of relief escapes Leonid when Stephen leaves him alone. The man's attention has now fully shifted to his son.

"There was no cloaked figure, I let the first Cossack escape", Glen continues, speaking very quickly as his furious-looking father moves towards him fast, very, very fast. "He must have called the police and told them where to find the others, I didn't mean it, he tricked me, it was an accident, fath…"

Gleb is silenced by Stephen's fist colliding hard with his face. The punch takes the boy completely by surprise, making him lose balance and stumble forward as his hands move to soothe the burning sensation rising in his left cheek and lower lip. He doesn't fall down to the ground though, and when he looks up after uncovering his face, Gleb finds dozens of eyes staring at him. It takes a while for him to read pity in them. Both adults and peers pity him. He can tell by the way the women cover their mouths and the men shake their heads in disapproval at his father. He can't stand their stares, so he looks down to see that his hands are covered in blood, probably from using them to rub his newly broken lip. He can taste the blood in his mouth, he can feel every drop running down his skin. It is unbearable.

This is too much, Gleb thinks as his breath quickens. It is happening again. The boy kneels, covers his ears, and closes his eyes, but he doesn't have much time to think with horror about the fact he is having one of his episodes in front of almost the entire party cell, because his father soon grabs him by the collar of his sweater, fully intending to hit him again.

"No!" A woman's shout stops the man. "No!" Elena rushes outside the house, where she had been watching everything through the kitchen window. She places herself between her son and her husband, facing the latter and struggling to physically restrain him. "Stop it, Stephen! For God's sake!" Several party members rush to help her restrain her husband.

"Calm down comrade", murmurs can be heard, "let the boy explain himself."

Feodosia has approached Gleb and is now kneeling before him. She puts a gentle hand on his head, trying to console him. Peter and Leonid are also approaching, wearing looks of concern.

The next few moments are a blur for Gleb, both because of the tears in his eyes and the chaos in his head. He hears distant heated arguments between the many party members present and his father's embarrassed and disappointed grumbling.

Stephen is not only ashamed of Gleb for having let the prisoners escape, but is also extremely embarrassed by the boy's childish and weak reaction to such well-deserved punishment. His shame grows into anger, the anger into disappointment, and that disappointment into quiet resignation. He has come to the realization that true revolutionaries can't be raised, much less brilliant ones, because smart children will inevitably rebel against their parents. He can't trust Gleb. He still loves him, he still fights for him, but the boy is weak at best and bound to turn against them at worst.

Oo

Gleb is done with his father. He needs to hold on to what is left of his dignity… if there is any there after he embarrassed himself in front of the whole party. Stephen taught him about what needed to be done, that is true, but Gleb is not a child anymore. He is more than capable of fighting for what he believes in without his encouragement. He doesn't need Stephen. I don't, I don't, Gleb has been telling himself for days. Who cares if his father or even a few other party members believe that he let the Cossack escape on purpose? Who cares? Most of his youth organization, all of his gymnasium friends, Yakov, and Sergei have stood up for him, and so have his mother and Feodosia, who has happily tried to distract him with as many kisses as she can possibly give every time they are alone together. And he never thought that they would react to his darkest secret, his weakness, with anything but disdain, and yet they haven't mentioned his breakdown at all.

He doesn't need a father. He needs to prove himself that he means what he says in his speeches. He wants to fight.

There is a problem having to do with Stephen though, which is that he won't let him. Being a long-time party member with a certain degree of power, Stephen seems to have gone on a petty revenge crusade against Gleb for no reason whatsoever. He disbanded his son's youth organization, selected a few of the older members to join one of the cell's battalions, and then forbid the rest of them from taking part in any fighting. Even their weapons were confiscated, as the party suspected the boys of being involved in contra-revolutionary activities.

Gleb has never been angrier at his father.

Oo

Despite the fact he was born to an aristocratic Russian family, Gleb admires the old Leo Tolstoy a lot. This great Russian writer could come to be regarded as one of the best authors of all time. His novel "War and Peace", detailing the lives of several families during Napoleon's invasion of Russia, is a favorite of Gleb's, as he loves history.

Leo also wrote a book called "Sevastopol Sketches" based upon his experiences during the Crimean War where he examines the senselessness and vanity of war.

He is an anarchist and a pacifist now, and his beliefs are similar to those of Gleb's mother. Tolstoy takes Jesus's Sermon on the Mount quite literally and believes in nonviolent resistance. Gleb can respect that, but he does not agree with those beliefs.

The world is brutal. The boy and his father can at least agree on that. Gleb wasn't able to shoot the escaping Cossack in the back. He didn't think of him as a threat. Now his cell will have to face four more Cossacks in battle. Four possible casualties on their side, four or more.

As he walks through the heavily barricaded streets of Moscow at the heat of the battle, Gleb begins to grow scared that his actions, which at the time felt like sparing an innocent life, will actually just multiply the losses.

The gray-eyed boy was not going to stand by as his father prevented him from taking action. With the help of Peter, Sergei, Igor, and Yakov, Gleb sneaked into the house where the party kept some of its weapons while nobody was using them. The boys stole them, arming themselves for the upcoming battle. Sergei's lock-picking skills played a useful role, but it was Feodosia who had told them about the weapons' location. Gleb truly loves her.

Oo

While she would have been amused to join the boys in their adventure, Feodosia decided not to. She preferred to stay in Ekaterinburg with her mother, aiding the cause in more practical ways. To be honest, she considered them rather foolish for thinking their average and newly acquired shooting skills would help turn the tide at all. Gleb was, in particular, acting very unlike himself, almost completely emotionally. He had always been so rational, so methodical, which is what she liked about him. His recent actions came across as a childish outburst against his father.

Feodosia wouldn't be guided by her feelings, not when so much was at stake. Never. But she pitied Gleb. She would never reveal this to him, but following his breakdown, she heard two of his school friends making fun of him when they thought no one was listening. Pavel and Alexander don't seem too invested in the cause either, which must be the reason why they are not risking their lives for its sake or even providing much money. They don't deserve Gleb's friendship.

Feodosia's sweetheart didn't fully succeed at inspiring unconditional devotion among the members of his organization either, for only one of them decided to follow him. They knew that the idea was stupid. It pains her to know she won't always be by his side to offer him her unwavering loyalty.

Oo

Only Gleb, Peter, Sergei, Igor, and Yakov ventured to travel to Moscow, Russia's capital and the center of a furious battle between revolutionaries from different factions and government's troops. Lev is once again covering for Yakov, whose parents and grandfather think he will be staying with his cousin. Peter told his parents a similar story.

The young men traveled on several peasant carts, and Peter paid the owners generously for each ride. Upon arrival, the boys struggled to find their way in such a labyrinthine city, and if it weren't for their badly hidden weapons, they would have passed for lost tourists. The fact a battle was taking place in Moscow was not immediately evident, but the shooting sounds that could be heard in the distance soon made it clear. The first time Gleb heard a shot, he was so frightened that he grabbed Sergei's arm and squeezed it tightly enough to cause pain. The next few times, he ended up curled up into a ball, rocking back and forth with his hands pressed against his ears. The fact his friends didn't tend to react any better was soothing for Gleb. He only had to fear death, not ridicule. For the first time in his life, his distaste for certain sounds was completely shared by the people around him. He felt understood.

The shooting almost caused Gleb another breakdown, but its almost predictable regularity ended up becoming bizarrely reassuring. The bullets still frighten him, of course, and he, like his friends, always ducks whenever they whistle or sound as if they were whistling particularly close, but he isn't incapacitated by their presence, at least not anymore.

As they approached what seemed to be a barricade made up of old wooden crates and planks, the boys were spotted by three policemen, who were easily identifiable as such due to their uniforms consisting of baggy pants, long black leather boots, long dark jackets decorated with medals, and dark caps. They started interrogating the boys about their weapons, and once it became clear that the latter wouldn't be allowed to remain armed given the circumstances, the five of them ran.

The police chased them for what felt like half an hour, and at some point, the patience their youth had originally inspired dissipated and the firing started. For the first time ever, Gleb feared for his life, and so did his friends.

The chase was abruptly stopped when two of the cops fell dead, having been shot by someone that the boys couldn't immediately see. The other policemen ran away, scattering and leaving the boys panting, catching their breath as they stood over the corpses.

"What do we do now?" Peter asked, clearly shocked by the sight of the dead men despite his best attempts to hide it.

Suddenly, the boys heard a sound coming from an abandoned store. At first it sounded like a man calling a horse, or maybe a dog. "Hey! Hey you!" The voice eventually grew loud and aggressive. "Idiots!"

An angry-looking man wearing walked out of the store slowly, his rifle pointed at Sergei. "You are blocking our view", he whispered, and the boys realized his voice was different. "Come here with us if you want to live."

Gleb, Peter, Sergei, Igor, and Yakov hurried to do as the man had ordered, entering what used to be a clothing store and marveling at the variety of weapons held there, not only rifles and bullets, but also pistols and homemade bombs. A man and a woman, probably the shooters who had saved them from the policemen, appeared to be on duty, kneeling and aiming their shotguns through the window. The two men who had spoken to them made them sit on a couple of chairs located behind a pile of weapons. Due to a lack of seats, Gleb, Yakov, and Leonid sat on the ground.

"You are on our side, right?" The one who had insulted them asked. "Are you anarchists, Bolsheviks, Socialists, or what?" Gleb opened his mouth to reply, but the man interrupted him. "It doesn't matter, you came here to fight against the Tsar, and you are not from this city, that much is clear. We need to set the rules."

Oo

The man went on to explain the rules in question. Gleb and his crew wouldn't be able to stay with them, as the group would have grown too large. Instead, the boys would be sent to a different street a couple of blocks away. They would receive help if needed.

Their job would consist of shooting down any Cossack or policeman who dared to approach them, but they wouldn't stay in one place. Taking fortified positions was out of the question, as they needed to be able to escape if anything happened. The attacks needed to be swift and quick, coming from different places in order to confuse the enemy.

Bullets can still be heard in the distance, but disregarding that, it is somewhat quiet. The boys are in their new hiding place now, waiting patiently for the danger to come, willing to follow instructions and shoot the first policeman they happen to come across. Gleb worries he may not be able to do so, that he will let them be like he let that Cossack be, but he cannot share his fears with his friends, who seem excited by the prospect of killing someone, anyone, for the first time, and even more so by the fact the victim is going to be an enemy of the people. They may doubt his loyalty to the cause or think him weak, even Peter, who truly believes Gleb tried his best to shoot the Cossack and simply failed.

Gleb's strength is finally put to the test when a patrol of Cossacks rides by their hiding spot, an empty classroom full of chairs turned upside down, behind which they sometimes take cover.

"Look!" Yakov whispers in Gleb's ear as he aims his rifle at them. "Look at the bastards…"

Gleb aims too, and so do Sergei and Igor.

"Should we shoot now?" Igor whispers, looking at Gleb in search of approval despite being three years older.

Gleb's heart starts beating faster. Not only does he fear for his and his friends' lives, but the prospect of killing someone without warning makes him feel nauseous. "Wait until they are close to us", he decides to say. "Then we will kill them."

"They are close to us", Yakov frowns.

"Yes, but we should wait until they are even closer", Gleb replies without noticing his friend's exasperation.

Then one of the Cossacks spots the boys inside the old classroom and turns his head around, his eyes meeting Gleb's for a brief moment. He looks way older than Alexei, a hardened veteran, and his gaze makes Gleb's skin crawl. Gleb, who can still hear bullets in the distance. They are more than capable of shooting, he panics. They are lethal, trained warriors. Before the older man can make a move against them, Gleb fearfully and impulsively pulls the trigger of his rifle and shoots the Cossack right in the chest almost without realizing what he has done. Gleb lowers his rifle in disbelief as the lifeless man falls from his horse. That is enough to make the other members of the patrol start shooting.

"Down!" Igor cries as a wave of bullets hits the chairs and walls around them. The boys don't need any convincing to follow his advice. Everyone ducks under the wooden tables or hides behind the walls and chairs. Gleb does so behind a stand.

"We are dead! Mom!" Peter screams in a fit of hysteria. "We are dead!"

"Peter", Gleb whispers softly at the boy cowering opposite from him. "Your head is not fully covered, don't move it, as that will draw attention."

Peter reacts by gasping in horror, but he does as he is told and tries to be still.

Gleb surprises himself by responding in an incredibly calm manner to the situation, patiently calculating how best to protect his friends while also peeking out from behind the stand to look through the window in the hopes of catching sight of another Cossack. I can do this, I can.

The bullets have stopped. Good. At first, Gleb detested the sound shots made almost more than anything he had ever experienced, but he has developed a strange liking for them somehow. They have a pattern. They can tell him things.

The Cossacks must be inspecting their surroundings, looking for him and his friends, or perhaps mourning their fallen friend. Friend. Gleb has just killed someone, and the realization horrifies him. But he has to keep going.

A few minutes go by. The mounted men know where we are already, Gleb thinks, they just fear being shot back.

"Do not imitate me", Gleb says, "I am going to look for them." He starts crawling from his hiding place, keeping his head as low as possible.

"No, Gleb!" Peter exclaims in a whisper, sounding terrified.

"I will be alright", Gleb lies. He has no clue. He doesn't know whether he is going to live or die, and despite the fact his heart is beating faster than ever, he doesn't truly know if he is even worried about dying. He just fears for his friends.

"Be careful, Gleb", Yakov warns him.

"You are insane, kid", Igor adds. Hyperbole, Gleb concludes, for Igor hasn't tried to stop him.

Gleb crawls around different spots of the classroom, trying to get a good look through the window by raising his head for short periods of time. This is incredibly impractical, as a second or two is not enough to get a proper glimpse of the street. He is going to have to step outside, using building walls as cover.

That is what he does. His friends might as well be shouting at him with their sights, but he leaves the classroom either way.

He feels naked outside, weak and vulnerable.

Minutes go by. The relative silence is overwhelming, the bullets in the distance too far away to conceal it. Gleb doesn't move far from the school, only a couple of blocks, but he still feels further from life than his friends. The fifteen-year-old boy chokes down a gasp when he sees one of the Cossacks walk calmly past the corner where he is standing.

Gleb hides behind the wall he was moving parallel to, breathing deeply. Weapon in hand, the soldier is walking towards the school where his friends are hiding. Something else catches Gleb's eye when he peeks at the classroom again. Another Cossack is approaching his unsuspecting friends from behind the building where they are. One more walks a few steps behind.

No, it can't be. If Gleb shoots at those two, the one who just walked by will immediately find and shoot him, but if he does nothing, their friends will surely be dead in minutes. Think, Gleb. His heart is pounding, it is breaking out of his chest.

No, he can not let any harm come to his friends. Friends are hard to find. Friends are gold. An idea occurs to the grey-eyed boy, which is that he can serve as a distraction.

Gleb takes aim and fires twice at the back of the Cossack closest to him, the one who just passed by. This has the intended effect, because the other two turn their attention towards him and begin firing in his direction.

Gleb dodges a couple of bullets that instead hit the walls close to him, making him flinch. He then takes off running with his rifle at hand. The soldiers follow him, often shooting at him and failing. Nearby windows shatter in the process.

Gleb runs for minutes without stopping, taking random turns as the soldiers follow closely behind. They have stopped shooting, but Gleb knows they are just saving their bullets. He looks back constantly to see how close they are, until he catches sight of a mounted man he hadn't seen before riding towards him.

"Move aside!" The man on the horse yells at the two other men chasing Gleb. "I will get him!" He takes out his sword in one swift movement without slowing down.

This is it, Gleb thinks with horror as he lets out a scream, I am going to die. His life amounts to nothing and he is going to die.

But the strike never comes. A gunshot rings in the boy's ears instead, a gunshot that is followed by several others.

When Gleb dares stop running and turns around, he finds Peter, Sergei, Igor, and Yakov standing before the bodies of the soldiers, their weapons pointed at the dead men as if they still feared them.

Peter is crying, Yakov is shaking, and Sergei's eyes are wide open. Gleb wonders if having taken a life or two will come to haunt any of them as much as it will probably haunt him.

Only Igor is composed enough to talk.

"Are you hurt, Gleb?" He asks, sounding fearful and worried.

Gleb truly doesn't know. Is he? Did any of those bullets hit him while he was running? He inspects his own body in search of pain, in search of injuries. There are none, so he shakes his head.

"Good", Igor says. A gunshot rings again in the distance, and he turns around quickly. "We need to find another hiding place, there are probably more coming."

This is only the beginning, Gleb realizes.

Oo

The revolutionaries of Moscow would have several moments of success, but far more costly mistakes were made when they learned that soldiers were far more accurate shots than policemen, and at a far greater distance. Added to this, on December 13, 2800 armed volunteers were sent to combat the revolutionary forces. Another 1000 were to guard the strategic points throughout the city.

"He is now prepared to arrest all the principal leaders of the outbreak", Nicholas wrote on December 14, referring to Witte. "I have been trying for some time to get him to do it, but he always hoped to be able to manage without drastic measures."

The rebels would hold off government forces for days, proclaiming a new "Provisional Government", but on the night of December 15, two completely reliable units arrived from St. Petersburg to aid the government.

By then, the battle raged in full force. Sympathetic towards their comrades held captive in St. Petersburg, the Moscow Soviet had declared a strike and thousands of Muscovites had taken to the streets in protest.

Since their first clash with the Cossacks, Gleb and his friends had taken part in several more battles. Most of them have been less than pleasant. The boys have had to seek help from many other small groups of rebels or risk getting hurt due to their inexperience with fighting and lack of knowledge of the city.

Gleb thinks that Igor has been the bravest. As the oldest, he never loses composure or starts crying like Gleb and the others do sometimes when someone on their side dies, the bullets fly too close for comfort, or the Tsar's soldiers start walking or galloping nearer. Igor always knows how to soothe and encourage everyone.

Sergei also does his best. While not as daring as Igor, he never backs down when it is time to raise his head from behind the many wooden boxes that once contained vegetables and other products but now make up the barricade their small battalion uses to hide.

Yakov doesn't shoot at the soldiers, not often, not ever, although he pretends to in order to keep appearances before the other combatants. He recently confessed to Gleb that despite the hatred he feels towards his oppressors, he can not bring himself to kill anyone. He has tried, and he can't. It feels so wrong that he always ends up missing his target on purpose. This makes Gleb feel a lot less lonely.

But Yakov makes up for what he considers his greatest failure. He is very good at running errands and delivering messages to other groups of rebels, sometimes doing so under heavy fire. Because of him, Gleb, his friends, and the many older and more experienced revolutionaries that the boys sometimes fight with still have a way of communicating.

The boys have noticed that several of the Cossacks sent to break up the rebel battalions and demonstrations sometimes refuse orders to charge. They seem to sympathize with the revolutionaries and strikers. The Semenovsky Regiment of the Guard that has just been brought from St. Petersburg is far less sympathetic. They have started cornering protesters in Presnia, the Moscow workers' district where Gleb and his friends are fighting, cutting the area off from the rest of the city.

Lastly, Gleb tries, he truly does his best to protect his friends and feel like he is playing a big part in bringing about the revolution, but with every soldier he kills, a small part of him dies, and he feels further and further away from that loving, fatherly God he doesn't even believe in anymore. It is so stupid.

Gleb has only killed three people, without counting anyone who might have died from wounds, but he has also seen many people falling dead around him, eyes wide open in fear for a last time. The first time Gleb saw a corpse, he was confused by how similar they looked to the living, as if they were only sleeping. Only by looking at their faces and feeling the stillness of their hearts and breathing can one know otherwise. It is especially terrifying now that he doesn't believe in God. All of those people ceasing to exist just like that. Their experiences, and memories, gone. Forever.

This only makes Gleb more committed than ever. The revolution has to succeed. Even as the Semenovsky Regiment approaches, he tells himself over and over again that those deaths cannot have been all in vain.

Presnia is a poor neighborhood, so most of the people living there support the rebels with free food and water. Gleb and his friends will sometimes stay the night with the locals, who spare no expense in their hospitality despite having little to offer.

Gleb has become acquainted with quite a few of the men, women, and children who work at the many factories that litter the area. It is hard to dissuade them from putting themselves in danger by bringing snacks when he and his friends are aiming their rifles at the Tsar's soldiers from behind the many wooden boxes and flour sacks making up the barricade that the older revolutionaries have started building around the district. Gleb's comrades in arms have many different backgrounds. There are workers and students among them, and a few peasants and intellectuals. He gets along with the students of the Imperial Moscow University best and hopes to attend that same institution once the fighting is over. Well, I also need to finish my education at the gymnasium, Gleb thinks with horror.

Oo

The day starts as usual. Gleb, Sergei, Igor, Yakob, and Peter have breakfast with Mr. and Mrs. Vikhrov and their five children before they head towards the improvised revolutionary committee that has recently begun assigning them duties. Strong leadership is necessary and has spontaneously arisen now that the situation is dire, for the rebels are completely surrounded and constantly being harassed by snipers from the Tsar's army.

Gleb recently lost a comrade he had just met and was beginning to grow fond of. It happened unexpectedly. One second the schoolboy and the young history student were talking, and the next one a sniper's bullet had shattered the latter's skull.

Gleb doesn't think he will ever get the image out of his head. He has been regularly thinking about Tolstoy's pamphlet "Bethink Yourselves!"

Again war. Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for; again fraud; again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.

Men who are separated from each other by thousands of miles, hundreds of thousands of such men (on the one hand—Buddhists, whose law forbids the killing, not only of men, but of animals; on the other hand—Christians, professing the law of brotherhood and love) like wild beasts on land and on sea are seeking out each other, in order to kill, torture, and mutilate each other in the most cruel way. What can this be? Is it a dream or a reality? Something is taking place which should not, cannot be; one longs to believe that it is a dream and to awake from it. But no, it is not a dream, it is a dreadful reality!

One could yet understand how a poor, uneducated, defrauded Japanese, torn from his field and taught that Buddhism consists not in compassion to all that lives, but in sacrifices to idols, and how a similar poor illiterate fellow from the neighborhood of Toula or Nijni Novgorod, who has been taught that Christianity consists in worshipping Christ, the Madonna, Saints, and their ikons—one could understand how these unfortunate men, brought by the violence and deceit of centuries to recognize the greatest crime in the world—the murder of one's brethren—as a virtuous act, can commit these dreadful deeds, without regarding themselves as being guilty in so doing.

Gleb often wonders if the author is right. Well, he firmly believes Tolstoy is right about the Russo-Japanese War. Seeing firsthand what mass slaughter actually is makes it hard to believe that people, including himself, are so easily talked into partaking in it willingly, as if it were so normal, good even. But could Tolstoy be right about this war? Gleb wonders. And what about the one father warned me about?

As he and his friends prepare themselves to aim and shoot from behind their spot at the barricade, Gleb's thoughts are interrupted when something changes. From a place he cannot see, the army starts shelling the district.

The boys immediately duck for cover and remain still for a moment, but when the first shell explodes against the wall of the house located just a couple of streets left from them, the ensuing panic becomes so intense that they all scatter, running around and trying to find shelter as the shells start hitting the very pavement they stand on.

The sound the shelling makes is new, louder than that of gunfire, and unpredictable, so Yakov is forced to guide a disoriented Gleb through the chaos in order to hide in a corner until the danger is over. On the way, they are met by the heart-wrenching sounds of women, children, and even grown men crying for their mothers, and when the fifteen-year-old's grey eyes meets those of the youngest Vikhrov daughter, he almost lets out a panicked scream at the sight. The girl was only five. She was only five and now she is dead, eyes and abdomen wide open.

Gleb doesn't scream, but silent tears roll down from his cheeks as he looks away and curls up into a ball on the muddy ground, rocking back and forward and covering his ears to keep the dreadful sounds out of his head, but the image of the little girl bleeding on the street with her intestines out stays there. How could they do that? Gleb thinks, or perhaps asks himself out loud. How could they do that? How could the soldiers throw those shells to kill us knowing there were civilians among us? He can feel himself becoming more and more hysterical with each passing second until his mind becomes useless and blurry. This is different, he decides, this war is different. The Tsar, Gleb decides, is not just dumb. He is pure evil. A monster. One has the duty to fight monsters.

Oo

Gleb doesn't know how long his attack lasts, but he is quite sure that it takes longer than the shelling to end. The next thing he remembers is desperately trying to stop Yakov's shrapnel leg wound from bleeding.

Help takes time to arrive due to the many wounded around them, but Yakov survives and is sent to live with a local nurse's family willing to treat his injury.

After that, things only became worse for Gleb and his allies. The soldiers only got closer and closer, killing or taking prisoner anyone who fell under their grasp. The boys saw people dying almost every hour.

The day after the soldiers first started shelling, Igor was killed and Sergei was taken captive. Gleb made arrangements for Yakov to be smuggled out of the district and sent home through the same route they had used to go to Moscow. He knew his friend's health wasn't exactly good enough to travel yet, that the journey would be dangerous for a wounded person, but he couldn't bear to think about what might be done to him if taken captive. The Tsar's soldiers weren't known for being kind to Jews, and Yakov could have accidentally said something revealing regarding his background.

Gleb felt very sorry for his friend. Yakov had saved his life, and he longed to keep helping them all so much. When Gleb said goodbye to him, Yakov was crying, desperate to do more, because they both have experienced the same things, seen the same things.

Now it is only Gleb and Peter, the fifteen-year-old's first friend. It is not uncommon for Gleb to comfort him after a particularly scary shelling. On more than one occasion, he saves his life by making him duck in time.

"There, there", Gleb will hold Peter, "everything is going to be fine." Peter always clings to Gleb tightly, tears falling down his face as he shakes like a leaf.

The boys' friendship solidifies during the three days the army shells the district. They are then cleared from the streets with bayonets along with the remaining rebel fighters.

The day the battle ends, Gleb is taken prisoner amidst tears and confusion just minutes after Peter is tackled and taken away. Unable to aim his rifle, he simply fidgets with it and walks from one place to another, sobbing and gasping for air as the soldiers circle around him, walking closer. For once, Gleb doesn't care one bit about what might be thought of him. The men sense that the boy's mind is not working properly. That and his evident youth are the reasons his life is spared out of pity.

Gleb's weapon is forcefully taken from his hands, and he collapses sobbing on the ground, the debris of a destroyed building serving as a pillow. It is not the innocent childhood dream the revolution represented that he is crying for, it is those men, women, and children he saw die these past few days. The fact it was all for nothing.

The fact all of his fellow revolutionary fighters are surrendering or running away after having hidden their weapons for the next uprising, demoralized because the workers seem to have betrayed them. Many factories, newspapers, and electric plants were back at work, meaning that the workers had actively refused to remain on strike while Gleb and his comrades fought for them. The boy is angry and confused about this.

Then there is also the fact nothing has gone according to plan, that they lost. The revolution had broken out, all he had hoped for, all he had dreamed about as a naive little schoolboy who knew little about death. It had happened, but they had been utterly defeated. Crushed.

It is the fact they may not ever get another chance.

Oo

Many hundreds were killed during the Moscow uprising, including at least 86 children. 1905, which had started with the Bloody Sunday massacre, had ended with the Presnia massacre. The Tsar's forces, including the much-feared Okhrana secret police, had prevailed.

The rebels of the Urals would end up scattering into the hills after enraging the authorities by attacking and disarming policemen.

As in Moscow, the Bolsheviks built a few barricades and did a lot of sniping, but after they tried and failed to seize some of the strategic points in the area, most of them were surrounded and captured. The rising workers of the Ural towns hadn't generally received support from the army or the peasantry, and they had been short of firearms.

Rebels throughout the entire Russian Empire would suffer similar defeats, although some areas would resist control of the government for longer than others.

The uprising was mostly over, but the Bolsheviks were not, and neither were the majority of the surviving revolutionaries. The days, weeks, and months following the defeat, several defiant leaflets were issued calling for preparation for the next revolt, Lenin's writings among them.

For a time during the uprising, Lenin had slipped back into Russia to lead the Bolsheviks. The police soon found his trail and he was forced to flee secretly from place to place, diminishing his effectiveness. Still, he had been gleeful during those days on the run. "Go ahead and shoot," he would cry. "Summon the Austrian and German regiments against the Russian peasants and workers. We are for a broadening of the struggle, we are for an international revolution."

Having also been active during the uprising, Trotsky and thirteen other members of the St. Petersburg Soviet were arrested for political scheming and spent thirteen months as prisoners in the city jail awaiting trial. In January 1907, each would be given a life sentence of exile in a small Siberian village above the Arctic Circle, 600 miles from the nearest railway station. Trotsky would escape on his journey into exile and travel for hundreds of miles through the Urals before making his way to Finland from where, after an extremely frosty meeting with Lenin, he would go on to Stockholm and then Vienna.

Oo

Torture is, in paper, illegal in the Russian Empire. In 1895, Nicholas II even thanked the Head of the Main Prison Administration, Alexander Petrovich Salomon, for the humane treatment shown to the detained students who had participated in riots in St. Petersburg.

This, however, hardly ever stopped individual policemen and Okhrana agents from inflicting torture on their detainees if they wished to do so. Now at their hands, Gleb is learning this the hard way.

He doesn't want to fight back. His mind is too haunted by the image of that bleeding little girl to do anything, too busy grieving Igor. Luckily enough, it is also too foggy to reveal anything to the two agents holding him by an arm each and making him kneel before a big metal bucket of water.

Gleb's leather boots and sweater have been removed, so he is wearing only a white linen shirt, black striped trousers with suspenders, and black socks. He is so cold. The water is cold, but the air is even more so. Hopefully, the men will give him the boots and the sweater back once they are done with him. That will keep him warm, but he has no clue when the nightmare is going to end. He has been in the jail cell for hours now.

"Where are the remaining weapons hidden?" One of the men holding him asks, grabbing his black hair roughly.

Another boy or man, a braver boy or man, one with a sharper mind full of wit and sarcasm would have probably replied with a clever insult, or perhaps he would have spat at his captor, his oppressor. Not Gleb. He is tired, tired, and so, so cold. Most of all, he now fears that dreadful drowning sensation that threatens to make him lose composure.

"I don't know", Gleb says weakly in response to the interrogator's question. "Maybe under a floorboard..."

Without warning, the man dunks the boy headfirst into the water, and the cold hits him hard enough to knock out any sense of awareness left in him. A few seconds go by and his oxygen runs out. Now Gleb waits for mercy from these two taller, stronger men as the sensation that he is dying slowly invades every part of his body with panic.

Then it is over. He is pulled by the hair again and allowed to breathe, but doing so hurts now. His lungs and chest burn. It is too much, the pain, the water against the collar of his shirt, and the cold. He is feeling too much.

"Where did the rest go? Where are they hiding? How many of them?" The interrogators' questions continue, and Gleb almost gets the urge to cry. He pulls himself together though. He reminds himself that this is nothing. He hasn't been hit or physically harmed, only manhandled roughly at most. This is nothing compared to what Yakov must be going through, injured on the road. Nothing compared to what the mothers of those children are going through. If only he had managed to save that one in time before the roof…

But the torture continues, becoming hard for the fifteen-year-old to bear even while knowing it could be worse. His hair is pulled, the dunking goes on, and soon enough he is shivering uncontrollably. His mind goes back to when he spoke up against his father, opposing the idea of undermining the war effort out of some misguided sense of solidarity with his suffering countrymen. Stephen had all but called him a stupid boy, saying that the revolution would not be a clean affair and that their enemies would play even dirtier. Gleb knows this to be true now. He was just a silly child who thought himself smarter than everyone else. He didn't have a better plan than the adults did, he had nothing. No plan. Not only do his enemies not play clean, but they are also more ruthless than his innocent younger self could have ever imagined.

The boy feels stupid now for thinking he could have proved himself by simply going to battle and being a good shot. There were lots of good shots, he saw them with his own eyes. He had fought, he had killed, but how had any of that helped? Perhaps the real difference could have been made by not letting those Cossacks escape… silly idea, he knows, but now he cannot help but wonder… what if he and others with similar weaknesses are to blame for the failure of the uprising? The thought makes him feel incredibly guilty, so he pushes it away abruptly.

The man dunks Gleb again, barely distracting him from his thoughts. They are all muddled now, his physical discomfort and feelings of hopelessness having combined to make his head spin. Igor is dead, all for nothing… he has never felt this miserable before. The revolution is failing, failing. What is he to do now? And I have been captured, Gleb thinks about the implication for the first time. Will he and Sergei go to jail now? What about Peter? What will become of them?

Oo

As the year 1905 drew to a close, the Tsarist government was still standing. Terror attacks, on the other hand, would continue for several years. Throughout 1905, 1906, 1907, and 1908, several hundred policemen, government officials, clerks, and civilians of many backgrounds and professions caught in the crossfire would fall victim to rebel bullets and bombs.

Russia was no longer the absolute autocracy full of loyal subjects it had been at the beginning of the year, and it would never again be, but it was far from being the democratic republic the Bolsheviks had aimed for.

One of the Bolsheviks' main weaknesses and that of their revolutionary allies had been their lack of weapons, as an entire nation could not be armed by a series of smuggling operations, gun shop burglaries, or assaults on individual policemen.

The inexperience of the revolutionaries fighting battles was another great drawback, for most of the men making up the combat units were merely professional agitators or workers who would soon find that engaging the army was a far cry from merely dodging the police. A failure to execute well-planned attacks against strategic points was evident not only in Moscow but repeatedly throughout countless towns and villages.

The very size of the revolutionary forces had made victory almost impossible. Only a fraction of the proletariat was actually revolutionary. In fact, less than half of the proletariat had participated in the strikes. Added to that, groups like the "Black Hundreds" had succeeded at influencing the workers.

The Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties had even less support among the peasantry, the largest class in Russia. The Socialist-Revolutionaries were arguably the exception, but their semi-organized peasant uprisings had been scattered, undisciplined, aimless, and almost totally disconnected from the proletarian revolutionary movement.

More detrimental to the revolutionary cause had been the failure to obtain the support of the army, this in part due to the difficulty that evading the army's security and disciplinary measures against agitators and revolutionary organizations posed.

While the revolutionary parties did indeed try to set their differences aside and work together to overthrow the Tsar's government, they were inevitably weakened by division and lack of unified leadership. Lenin was a forceful leader, but he only commanded the loyalty of the Bolsheviks, a small party.

Bickering, mismanagement, and confusion were common. Father Gapon's congress collapsed, and after being discovered to have been a police informant, the priest would be murdered by members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1906.

The 1905 revolution was not a total loss for the rebels though, as it did serve to make the masses more politically aware. The soviets had been permanently introduced as a concept into Russian politics, and numerous lessons had been learned by the Bolsheviks. The army's support was crucial, and they couldn't rely on the spontaneity of the masses, which could cool down at any moment.

While the Bolsheviks didn't immediately acknowledge the fact they had lost, they eventually did. The scheming continued, and the members of the party learned and adapted, many of them knowing too well, and painfully so, that there probably wouldn't be another revolution for many years to come.

Oo

The consequences of the country's rapid liberalization had been too much to deal with even for Count Witte, its main advocate. He hadn't expected the nation's many rebel sympathizers to be anything but appeased by the October Manifesto, and he had been disastrously mistaken. By January of 1906, Nicholas had completely lost faith in him.

"As for Witte, since the happenings in Moscow he has radically changed his views; now he wants to hang and shoot everybody", the Tsar wrote. "I have never seen such a chameleon of a man. That, naturally, is the reason why no one believes in him any more."

Knowing his position was at risk, Witte tried to recapture the Tsar's good will by cynically watering down the October Manifesto. Without even waiting for the Duma to be elected, Witte drafted a series of Fundamental Laws reinforcing the Tsar's autocratic power.

Furthermore, to make the government financially independent of Duma appropriations, Count Witte used his own personal reputation abroad to obtain a massive loan from France.

Despite all of this, Sergei Witte would end up playing no part in the affairs of the parliament he had helped create, and on the eve of its first meeting, Nicholas asked for his resignation. Witte pretended to be pleased by the move, but for the rest of his life, he would long to return to office.

But Nicholas had made his decision. "As long as I live, I will never trust that man again with the smallest thing," he once said. "I had quite enough of last year's experiment. It is still like a nightmare to me."

Oo

Moscow. July 23rd, 1918.

Doroteya Filippovna Lavrova.

I probably should have asked who it was before opening the door, but I was so scared for my husband that there was only one worry on my mind.

My shift ended early, but he still had to perform a couple more surgeries, so I returned home and waited for him to come. He only took a few minutes longer than usual, but now I know that it was not irrational of me to panic.

Andrei is sporting a swollen eye, and his clothes are dirty and dishevelled.

"What happened?" I ask with a worried frown as I rub his shoulders and lead him inside.

He smiles at me as if nothing were wrong, but his body is nevertheless stiff. "Apparently, wearing glasses is an unmistakable hint that I belong to the, I quote, 'degenerate bourgeois' class", he takes out his now-broken glasses from one of the pockets of his sweater and hands them over to me with an amused grin. It is so like him to find humor in something so awful. I try to humor him by keeping a smile on my face and laughing at his jokes as he recalls the way he was robbed and assaulted by two men. I do so while checking him for serious injuries, but fortunately he has none, just a few scratches from the broken glass.

After having dinner and putting our daughter to bed, we spend the night making jokes and pretending everything is fine. I can take it now that I know everything will indeed be fine, but regardless of our relatively good luck, I don't find the situation itself amusing at all.

It is madness out there. Middle-class people only step outside wearing old clothes for fear of being assaulted. They avoid top hats and expensive or expensive-looking fur coats. Family men grow their beards in an attempt to look poor. With the old police gone, there is crime everywhere, some of it increasingly violent, but all our new law enforcement officials do is encourage people to protect themselves, and as a result of this, the people have resorted to the most animalistic forms of mob violence, even against petty thieves who resort to crime out of poverty and desperation. It is disastrous.

Part of me has trouble understanding how we got back here, 1905 all over again. I was just eleven years old, but information flies from mouth to mouth among us country folk, and it reached my parents' ears through the gossip of peddlers and wanderers.

Throughout the countryside, agitators fired up the peasants by spreading rumors that the Tsar had granted them the land they wanted and that help was needed to take it away from disobedient landlords. Due to this, many peasant mobs stole grain and livestock from the landlords. The motive for these actions was not revolution but robbery and revenge though. I actually heard from my mother that rebellious peasants often returned their loot and even turned agitators who had spoken against the Tsar over to the police.

What happened in the cities I am less sure of, but my parents didn't let me and my sisters travel to Moscow that year, so it must have been chaotic.

Although this was not the case with all neighboring villages, my village remained loyal throughout the many uprisings of the early 1900s, and yet detachments of soldiers were sent to put us under surveillance. A young man who was being hidden by one of our neighbors was found and later hanged for sedation, as he allegedly belonged to a group of bandits and rebels who had taken over a local landowner's state. After all of these years, I am still not sure if he was truly guilty, and part of me is afraid of seeing.

Many innocents might have been executed in order to restore order, but the gravity of the situation and the fear of crime and lawlessness made most around my family indifferent to the plight of the condemned.

The great prophet St. John of Kronstadt, who must have foreseen the approaching catastrophe we are now engulfed in, repeatedly exhorted his countrymen to repent, return to their former piety, and support the Tsar, whom he considered God's anointed ruler, lest the people of Russia face untold disasters both on Earth and in the world to come.

"We have a Tsar of righteous and pious life", he warned the people back in those days. "God has sent a heavy cross of sufferings to him as to His chosen one and beloved child, as the seer of the destinies of God said: 'Whom I love, those I reproach and punish'. If there is no repentance in the Russian people, the end of the world is near. God will remove from it the pious Tsar and send a whip in the person of impure, cruel, self-called rulers, who will drench the whole land in blood and tears."

But many parts of the land were already drenched with blood and tears, as they and others are now. Looking back, I am impressed by the fact that the events of 1905 came to nothing. Well, nothing then. The happenings certainly fueled resentment, they certainly planted a seed, a reminder of what was possible, and inspired the revolutionaries that would succeed at toppling the regime twelve years later, as if they had been some sort of sick dress rehearsal for the bloody events taking place right now.

It is bizarre to know that while the Russian Empire struggled for its existence, the happy lives of the four Grand Duchesses and their little brother had remained practically unchanged.

Oo

Following Tsesarevich Alexei's birth, Margaretta Eagar had to return to Ireland for personal reasons. Although the governess received a pension from the Russian government, she continued working with children, something she deeply enjoyed. Margaretta never forgot her four dear charges, and would continue sending them letters for many years to come. Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia often wrote back.

I suspect that Alexandra might have been at least slightly relieved by the woman's departure, because despite liking and appreciating Miss Eagar very much, she hadn't been fond of the way people had started commenting on her daughters' Irish-sounding English.

Before Margaretta Eagar left Russia, she asked Empress Alexandra for permission to write her memoirs. Not only did Alexandra allow her to do so, but she also encouraged her, saying that there were many lies about Russia and the imperial family circulating already. Alexandra had faith that Miss Eagar would set the record straight.

Eagar's memoirs were published several years ago, and I, of course, could not resist te urge to see for myself if there was any truth to them. I read Miss Eagar's books and magazine articles regarding her time with the four Grand Duchesses while letting my mind do the rest of the work. There was truth. All of the nanny's anecdotes were true. The girls' family life was just as happy and idyllic as described in them. This did not change during the last months of 1905.

Oo

When Alexei was around a year old, Nicholas took him to a review of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. The soldiers gave the baby heir a mighty "Hurrah!" that Alexei responded to with delighted laughter.

On December, Alix took little Alexei with her so that he was present at a parade, the first of many to come and the beginning of little Alexei's love and admiration for soldiers. The baby's mood always changed around them, becoming exited and joyful. From the moment he was able to, the young heir started imitating their movements and marches.

The six-year-old Maria Nikolaevna also loved soldiers and sailors. I had a vision of her during the last months of 1905. The family was sailing on their yacht, and Maria was playing on deck with one of the sailors. This man was in his twenties, had dark hair and mustache, and was immensely endeared by the little Grand Duchess. In order to make her dream of piloting the vessel, he picked her up and let her stand on top of the spindle of the helm. Seldom did I again see her happier than she looked at that moment, feet on the spindle, arms holding the handles as she pretended to direct the course of her beloved ship, face lit up with a huge grin as she burst into a fit of giggles. The young man stood a few steps behind the precious child, smiling at her with fondness.

The little Grand Duchess would grow fond of the sailor too, and she would remember that magical moment for many years to come.

From their early childhood the Grand Duchesses had been accustomed to shaking hands with ladies and giving their hands to be kissed by gentlemen. This chivalrous tribute was especially appealing to Grand Duchess Tatiana, who as a young girl never lost an opportunity to bring herself under general notice. During one of the Tsar's journeys through the country, the little girls were left inside the train at the station whilst their parents attended a function in town. Curious to see the imperial children, many people assembled in front of the carriage allotted to the nursery. Little Tatiana came to the window, but she could not reach high enough to look out, so she climbed on to a footstool and calmly surveyed the people. At first, she only smiled and looked coyly at them, but after a few seconds she diffidently put out her hand, giving it to the lady standing nearest. The delighted lady kissed the girl's chubby little paw, so confidingly held out. This was the signal for all others to come forward, and the young Tatiana, only seven years old at the time, gave her hand to every individual of the assembled group.

"Grand Duchess Tatiana just held her first reception!" The amused Emperor Nicholas joked when he heard of the incident.

As a small child, Tatiana was similar to her siblings, full of pranks and mischief. She never truly stopped having fun with her family whenever the circumstances allowed for that, but as the years went by and she learned about the effects her brother's illness had on him and their mother, she developed a more mature spirit, becoming a huge help to her parents in almost every situation.

Four-year-old Anastasia kept making people laugh, ten-year-old Olga learned more everyday. Pure souls, the five imperial children. I still fail to understand how anyone could have done what was done to them. How could everything have gone so wrong?

Ask those who like or believe simple answers and they will reply that the man Nicholas and Alexandra met in November of 1905 is the sole cause of their downfall.

Oo

I have conflicting feelings about the man known as Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, who was born on the 21st of January 1869 according to the new calendar to a family of peasants in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye. He was a mystic, and almost everyone seems to think of him as either a holy man or an evil hedonist in a pact with the devil himself. There are few people whose opinions place him somewhere in between, but he has also been called a charlatan, a madman, a liar, and an opportunist.

I don't think he was any of those things. He was never a priest or a monk, but I think he truly believed God had endowed him with special abilities, special abilities similar to mine. I think he tried to use them for good. I think he often failed, that the temptations accompanying his eventual success were too many and too much for him to bear.

Rasputin's father Yefim was a peasant farmer and church elder. He also worked as a government courier, ferrying people and goods between the cities of Tobolsk and Tyumen. The couple had eight other children, but seven of them died in infancy or early childhood, causing a huge impact on the young Grigori. His little sister Feodosia survived, and as the godfather to her children, he was certainly close to her.

Rasputin had visions like me, that is all I can say for sure. The other kids in the village would cover his eyes and ask him what object they were holding in front of him. He would always have the right answer. On more than one occasion, he helped the local authorities catch horse thieves. He often saw the burglaries take place, and initially he had thought that everyone had that same ability. One of the first times he made use of his power was when he mysteriously identified the man who had stolen one of his father's horses. From that moment onwards, Rasputin developed a reputation for having a knack for identifying thieves.

Although he was also bullied for his unique ability, Rasputin has a charisma that prevented him from becoming ostracized the way I was. He had several friends and would eventually become exceptionally good with women, with all this entails. Talking to them, seducing them, pleasing them. He somehow found a way to use his visions to learn from other people, to observe what worked to manipulate, to convince, and even to attract. This is not to say that his decent shape and long dark beard drastically contrasting with his piercing, almost hypnotizing, icy blue eyes didn't help.

Rasputin's gift was not always good for his soul, for his power would also cause him lots of inner conflicts, straightening his demons. There are things Rasputin did with our ability that I would never dare do. He saw things more dreadful than I could ever imagine.

Having had a few visions of Rasputin's childhood, I find it hard not to feel sympathetic towards the little boy, who like me grew up with powers he could not comprehend. I would eventually have Gerasim to help me, but he never had anyone to guide him. He had to figure out what to think and what to do about his powers on his own.

Not unlike most peasants, Rasputin was not formally educated, remaining illiterate well into early adulthood. He had an unruly youth involving drinking, small thefts, and disrespect for local authorities. This later fueled rumors that he stealed horses, blasphemed, and bore false witness. These rumors were untrue, but Rasputin was far from innocent.

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin grew up jealous of his siblings Maria and Dmitri. True or not, he felt that their parents gave them more attention, more gifts. He felt that they went easier on them when they were naughty, particularly Maria, who was epileptic and needed special care.

One night, Grigori dreamt that his sister Maria drowned in the river. Not yet understanding that sometimes even the things he saw in his sleep had prophetic meanings, the boy was pleased with the fantasy and enjoyed the extra attention his parents showed him in the dream. A couple of days later, Maria drowned in the river, truly drowned, and Rasputin never forgave himself. Despite the jealousy, he had loved his sister deeply, he had cared for her whenever she was ill and played countless games with her. She was his precious sister.

Dmitri later died of pneumonia after falling into a pond, an incident that took place following another prophetic dream that Grigori definitely didn't enjoy this time. The supernaturally gifted boy jumped into the water to save his sibling, but he failed to do so when the illness took him.

The deaths affected Rasputin deeply. He never stopped blaming himself for them, wondering if he had caused them, if he was capable of worse, if there was something deeply wrong with him, if his powers came from the devil. Following the funerals, his thoughts started traveling to dark places, and in consequence, so did his visions. He stated seeing, witnessing, the worst of humanity. Thieves, cheats, murderers, corrupt businessmen and politicians, greedy tricksters, and more. He started seeing some of himself in all of them despite the fact he seldom shared their guilt, and this only got worse when he started becoming interested in women. He saw what some of the worst men often did to them. He saw not only that, but also the way men and women coupled when both of them desired each other. His young mind became fixated on both situations, especially after reaching adolescence, when he first started experiencing lust.

Focusing on his newfound desires became an obsession for Rasputin, causing him to have many visions of real people from the past, present, and future engaging in these acts. The dark thoughts, fears of being an evil person, and temptations followed him everywhere, making him succumb to them more and more often until he became a shameless womanizer. Occasionally, he was something worse.

All of this was shown to me in only one vision, for Rasputin confessed his deepest secrets to his greater confidant, his wife.

In 1886, Rasputin traveled to the small town of Abalak, where he met a peasant girl not much older than him named Praskovya Dubrovina. After a courtship of several months, they married the next February. Later on, Praskovya would permanently live in the village of Pokrovskoye throughout Rasputin's subsequent travels and rise to prominence, remaining devoted to him until his death despite being somewhat aware of his excesses. The couple had seven children in total, though only three survived to adulthood: Dmitri, born in 1895, Maria, born in 1898, and Varvara, born in 1900.

Oo

In 1897, Rasputin went through a profound spiritual awakening that led him to leave Pokrovskoye and go on a pilgrimage.

Rasputin had undertaken shorter pilgrimages before, but his visit to the St. Nicholas Monastery at Verkhoturye transformed him, for he met and was profoundly humbled by a starets known as Makary. Rasputin spent several weeks at Verkhoturye, where he learned to read and write, although he would later claim that some of the monks of this monastery frequently engaged in homosexuality. Still, he returned to Pokrovskoye a changed man, feeling as if there were hope for forgiveness from God, as if he had a purpose, as if perhaps his special gift could be used for more, something good. He became a vegetarian, swore off alcohol, and started praying and singing much more fervently than he had in the past.

Over the course of his travels, Rasputin came into contact with many religious traditions and even heretical sects that differed dramatically from Orthodox doctrine. Some of them were harmless, but the vastness of the Russian countryside used to harbor several dark cults of incredibly harmful beliefs. On one hand were the Skoptsy, a fanatical sect known for castrating men and performing mastectomies on women in accordance with their teachings against sexual lust, which they believed to have been the original sin. On the extreme opposite were the Khlysty, a perverse religious sect that sometimes took part in ecstatic rituals such as self-flagellation and wild sexual orgies during which no thought was given to morality or blood relation. The Khlysty members who participated in these rituals did so because they believed that salvation could be attained only by total repentance, which became far more achievable for the ones who had truly transgressed.

Rasputin didn't ever join a sect, any sect, not even the Khlysty, but he did acquire one or two beliefs from the latter. "Sin in order that you may obtain forgiveness" was a practicality that seemed to suit both his insatiable desires and his growing spirituality, which urged him to help others heal and find God and peace.

By the early 1900s, Rasputin had acquired a small circle of followers, primarily family members and other local peasants who prayed with him on Sundays and other holy days. The group held secret prayer meetings that were the subject of suspicion and hostility from the village priest and other villagers, as female followers ceremonially washed Rasputin before each meeting, during which strange songs were sang.

Despite rumors that he was having sex with his female followers, Rasputin gained the reputation of a wise starets who could help people resolve their spiritual crises and anxieties, even making a favorable impression on several local religious leaders who would indirectly influence the rector of the theological seminary at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery to arrange for him to travel to Saint Petersburg. This newfound good reputation was in no small part due to the fact Rasputin was said to be able to heal the sick and wounded. I still fail to be sure about whether this is true or not, but Rasputin certainly believed himself capable of healing people through prayer. On one occasion he was witness to an accident during which an ax fell straight into a man's leg. The victim was not expected to survive by anyone, but Rasputin prayed fervently beside him, suspiciously hopeful that his story hadn't yet ended, and just a few weeks later, as Rasputin had miraculously predicted, the wounded man made a full recovery. Did Rasputin have a gift for having his prayers heard? Was he a miraculous healer like the apostles were? Did he simply know who would heal thanks to his visions? Probably only God and Rasputin himself know.

Upon arriving at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, Rasputin was introduced to Theofan, the inspector of the theological seminary and a man who was well-connected with Saint Petersburg's society and would later serve as confessor to the imperial family. Theofan gained Rasputin entry to many of the influential salons where the local aristocracy gathered for religious discussions.

Many aristocrats were intensely curious about the occult and the supernatural, so Rasputin's ideas and strange peasant manners made him a subject of interest. The fascination only grew after Rasputin started "healing" common maladies such as headaches or the flu and mentioning details about people's personal lives that he had no way of knowing. He always did so before giving spiritual advice, urging the wealthy people he encountered to donate to charity, or predicting future events like conceptions, deaths, and marriages. Two of the aristocrats Rasputin had become acquainted with were the "Black Princesses" Militsa and Anastasia of Montenegro, the occult enthusiasts who had married cousins of Tsar Nicholas II and introduced Empress Alexandra to the infamous charlatan Philippe Nazier-Vachot. These women made it possible for Rasputin to be introduced to Tsar Nicholas II and his wife.

Rasputin first met Nicholas and Alexandra on November of 1905 at Peterhof.

Oo

By late 1905, Anna Alexandrovna Taneeva was a relatively new lady-in-waiting and an increasingly close friend to Alexandra. At 21, she was twelve years younger than Alix, who felt somewhat protective of her at times. The Empress would sometimes even refer to her lady-in-waiting as "fifth daughter" jokingly.

Anna, or "Anya", was a tall, plump woman of regular intelligence who didn't possess any remarkable or stunning features. Born the daughter of noted composer and Chief Steward to His Majesty's Chancellery Alexander Sergeyevich Taneyev, she was attached to the imperial court at an early age. She had two younger siblings, Sergei and Alexandra, and was a childhood playmate of Felix Yussupov, one of the sons of Grand Duchess Elizabeth's close friend Princess Zinaida Yusupova, the heiress to Russia's largest private fortune at the time.

The fun-loving and stylish Felix was not at all impressed with Anya. She was a naive, religious, and somewhat clingy young woman who quickly became mesmerized by the Siberian peasant known as Rasputin, thinking of him as a holy man. Due to her closeness to the Empress, Rasputin never tried anything untoward with her or the Montenegrin sisters, but their connection would give rise to many ugly rumors nonetheless.

No one could have foreseen that this unattractive and unremarkable girl would one day become perhaps the most intimate friend of the Tsarina and one of the greatest sources of gossip among St. Petersburg's high-class circles.

The day Nicholas and Alexandra met Rasputin, they were sitting comfortably on a cushioned sofa inside one of the many beautifully ornamented rooms of the Peterhof Palace. The couple had company, as they were having tea with Anya and the two Montenegrin sisters. Initially escorted inside by armed guards who had been expecting his presence, a new visitor entered the room. Nicholas and Alexandra's three guests had invited Grigory Rasputin to meet them.

The 36-year-old peasant greeted the imperial couple by dropping to his knees. "Little father!" He gasped in childlike awe, closing his eyes. "Little mother!" Grigori then began reciting a short biblical verse.

Despite being acquainted with what to some loyal peasants' was the proper way of showing respect and adoration to their Tsar, Nicholas looked baffled, as if surprised a man held in such high regard and spoken of as awfully wise would behave in such an expected way, if not more adoring than usual. Alexandra, on the other hand, merely smiled at Rasputin, something she rarely did as easily among strangers. She seemed to have been instantly endeared by his devotion and peasant simplicity. He was one of the people, one of the real Russians.

Rasputin joined the imperial couple, Anya, and the Montenegrin sisters at tea, and a long and engaging conversation ensued between the humble Siberian peasant and his aristocratic hosts.

He described his country life in the most innocent of manners, always thanking God for every blessing that had ever been bestowed upon him. Around the imperial couple, Rasputin always played his part to perfection. He was just a flawed yet deeply religious man doing his utmost best to live up to the epithet of "holy man." The extent of his genuine struggle with sin was constantly and carefully hidden.

"During summertime, the sun painted the sky light blue, warming me", Rasputin described, "and the birds sang their heavenly songs to God, did you know that? That God's creatures worship him too?" He asked, moving his hands and arms enthusiastically in order to stress what he was trying to communicate. "They do it in their own way." He smiled at Alexandra like a little boy recalling his playdate adventures, and Alix smiled back, probably endeared by such an apparently innocent, holy, display of faith. She had always loved animals. "Only the birds and the horses could be heard in the mornings", Rasputin continued. "As a boy, I often dreamed of God. My soul yearned for the outside world so much that I sometimes wept. I would then pray secretly. I was not a very happy boy, for I spent much of my time in contemplation, unable to find the right answer to many things. This made me very sad, so I began drinking and sinning, but God has delivered me from the darkness, only my faith in him worked to do so, and it did work, so it is very wrong to say prayer can't fix everything, because it always can as long as you have enough faith, but not the ordinary type of faith", he held his index finger up for emphasis, "it has to be childlike faith, blind, trustful, all believing, like that of your faithful subjects, those who work the land."

Alexandra nodded, mesmerized. "It feels good to hear you say this, as we… the country has gone through uncountable sufferings lately."

Nicholas cleared his throat loudly, staring at his wife with a slightly stern look. He clearly wasn't fond of the idea of even alluding to political matters in front of someone he and his wife had just met.

"Oh, Matushka!" Rasputin beamed. "You weep and suffer for your children, but the Almighty Himself has shown me that the bad times will come to an end!"

"He told me he had a vision of a calm, healthy, and strong Russia", Anastasia of Montenegro said as she looked at Alix, happy to share her increasing interest in the starets with the Empress.

"Full of selfless devotion to the crown", her sister Militsa added.

"Well said!" Anya clapped as she smiled at Rasputin.

"I am sure all we need is a healthy state of mind for the Tsar", Anastasia continued. "The sovereign having a great mind is the key to the well-being of Russia."

"No, Batushka!" Rasputin raised his voice, speaking to the Tsar directly now. "Where do you feel love? Where do you feel concern? In your mind or in your heart?" He touched his temple and then his chest.

"Here", Nicholas replied, touching his own heart.

Grigori nodded, suddenly turning serious. "Whatever you are going to do for the people of Russia, ask your heart, the part of you that loves, that loves your wife and children, you will soon understand it to be wiser than the mind. Your subjects are also your children. Deep down they love and need their father to guide them, but their father makes mistakes and fails to show them that he loves them, and so when they grow up to understand the nature of things better, they rebel, thinking themselves much more clever than their old papas. Every child has similar phase, and they often return to their parents, all that matters is that the parents see their children with their hearts and open them to what they need."

"Where exactly did you grow up?" Nicholas abruptly asked, clearly trying to change the subject.

"I live in a village named Pokrovskoye, where my wife and children also live", the peasant replied. "Do you know of it?"

"No, we do not", Alexandra turned to her husband.

"Near Tobolsk, is that correct?" Nicholas asked.

"Yes", Grigori replied. "I lived along the Tura River, where my brother Dmitri and my sister Maria died, which is why I named two of my children after them."

"Oh, my!" Alexandra covered her mouth with a hand. "I am so sorry to hear that! I also lost two siblings, you know?"

"They are all friends now, little mother, there are no rich or poor in God's kingdom, no frontiers either", the starets said, making Alexandra smile.

"Were you all young when this happened?" Anya asked.

"We were all children", Rasputin nodded. "Maria drowned and sometime later my brother met a similar fate. The water didn't kill him, but it was very cold, you see. I pulled him out in time, but he quickly fell ill and died days later."

"I am so sorry!" Alexandra exclaimed.

"God allowed it to happen for a reason."

Nicholas cocked his head, his expression conveying more interest in the wise man's words than before.

"I couldn't save them then, you see, I wasn't strong enough, or wise enough as a boy", Rasputin explained. "I didn't care for God back then, but after experiencing that loss, I started looking up to Him for guidance and comfort, and I dedicated myself to being a stronger man, a holy man of great spiritual power. I couldn't save my siblings, no, but I have since saved many men, women, and children like them with my prayers, childlike prayers of infinite faith."

"How lovely", Alexandra smiled.

"How long would you say you have had this… spiritual gift?" Nicholas played with his mustache, looking invested in the man's words, but also quite skeptical.

"Oh! Let's see… I think, in some ways, I was born with it", Grigori replied. "God knew I would need it someday, but it is my connection to Him that has helped me develop it. When I was just a boy, my father Efim had a horse stolen. As you may know, peasants don't take horse thievery lightly, not as city people would otherwise think. We don't have much, so losing even one is a terrible thing. One night, while I was sleeping, the Lord gave me strength and guided me. I saw the man's face, the man who had stolen the horse, in a dream. He was among the many villagers in our home, so I pointed him out!" Rasputin pointed across the room, dramatically reenacting the scene and causing Anya to let out a giggle. "My father was not convinced and neither were the others. As for the thief, he was was so angry that he made a scene, and that night, my father gave me a good beating for the embarrassment, as the man was a friend of his. But God didn't forsake me, and one night, the truth came out when he was followed home and two men who were spying on him saw him take out the horse for a ride in the forest. He had no choice but to admit to the crime and was swiftly punished." Rasputin smiled at the hosts. "My father never hit me as viciously again."

"You would make a good detective Grigori Yefimovich", Nicholas joked.

"Ah, yes! But I had a greater calling, one I don't regret one bit. I have spent months in monasteries, I have had visions of the Virgin Mary, I have wandered almost all over Mother Russia, I have gone on pilgrimages to Greece and Jerusalem, and now St. Petersburg has called me, telling me that I am needed here. I believe that God has blessed me with immense power, power that comes not from me but from Him. I can see the future and heal in the name of Christ. I can be of service to you and your children any time you are in need." Grigori fell to his knees before the imperial people, his forehead touching the ground. "The Lord has brought me here today to see you, Batushka, Matushka, our meeting is God's work."

"Come now, dear fellow, rise", Nicholas urged the man to stand up as he touched his back gently, looking visibly uncomfortable. He had never enjoyed having people kneel before him. "I would like to speak to you."

The Tsar led Rasputin out of the room to speak a bit more privately, or as privately as a palace with guards at every corner allowed.

"I saw the impression you produced on the Empress", Nicholas commented. "I believe you can help her, all of us. Our friends think that my wife is prone to mysticism, but the truth is..."

"The Empress has got a very keen mind", Grigori replied, "and she trusts God zealously."

"Yes", Nicholas nodded, "we both are very religious, but her soul is fragile. She is easily distressed by the circumstances surrounding us and suffers much as a result of this. You could support her, give her hope when she is too burdened, and help her confessor advice her spiritually. I could help you settle somewhere near."

"Thank you, little father, but I shall pray for you anywhere. You don't need me right now, of this I am certain, and I have been far from my wife and children for too long. The Empress will be fine with your support."

Nicholas looked baffled. The man in front of him had just refused a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The Tsar must have thought that whoever Rasputin was and whatever his intentions, he probably wasn't an ordinary man.

"Something horrible will someday happen", Rasputin added ominously, "that which you are fearing, and it will happen several times. Then you will immediately call me, and I will always be there to help you, in presence or in spirit."

Nicholas turned pale. "Go, Grigori", he tried to sound calm. "Call Anya here."

Rasputin did as he had been told, and soon enough Anya was curtsying to the Emperor. The starets left them alone.

"Your Majesty", Anya greeted Nicholas.

"Did you tell him?" He immediately questioned her. His tone was not accusatory, but it was clear to see that the Tsar was not exactly pleased to suspect that a total stranger was now aware of an important family secret.

"I did not tell him anything", the young woman opened her eyes wide. "I would never." She shook her head.

"He used some very strange words", Nicholas looked down in horror and disbelief, "'that which you are fearing'."

Anya nodded quickly, almost smiling. "You needn't tell him anything. He knows."

After Rasputin and the Montenegrin sister left, Nicholas, Alexandra, and Anya remained seated and caught up in an excited conversation for several minutes.

Alexandra, in particular, was grinning and noticeably taken with her first meeting with the starets. Nicholas sat back in his chair, puffing on a cigarette. The Emperor appeared to be both worried and modestly impressed by the man's possible allusion to Alexei's ailment, but he was still sizing up the rather curious fellow.

"He is just as you had described, Anya", Nicholas said. "Pale, long hair, unkempt dark beard, and the stench of a wild animal!" He joked.

"Oh, don't be mean, darling", Alexandra giggled.

"Not too offensive of an odor, I must admit, it could be worse."

Nicholas, Alexandra, and Anya laughed.

"Either way, what I liked about him was the purity of his faith and his simplicity, the way he speaks about God and nature most of all, but I agree that there is nothing remarkable about his appearance", Alix told her husband, "except for maybe his eyes."

"Yes madam", Anya agreed. "They are the most extraordinary eyes. Large, light, blue, and brilliant. It is as if he could see straight into your soul."

"Perhaps he can. He seems very perceptive. What I truly hope is that he will provide us with some insight into the lives of the common Russian people."

"I am so pleased you agreed to meet him, and indeed, he can help you in so many ways. When you or the children are ill, he can be a healer; when you find yourselves in trouble, he can also pray for you."

"Has he met any church leaders?" Nicholas asked.

"When he arrived back in St. Petersburg from his pilgrimage he was received by Father Kronstadt", Anya replied. "He now has the approval of Father Theophan and Bishop Hermogen of Saratov."

"Impressive credentials, but still… I worry. I have heard some rumors that he is a charlatan."

"Nicky, dear", Alexandra shook her head in disagreement, ready to persuade her husband to leave all doubts behind. "Don't you remember what our friend Philippe told us before leaving for good? He said that someday, we would have another friend like him who would speak to us of God."

Oo

The Tsar would go on to record the event in his diary, writing that he and Alexandra had made the acquaintance of a "man of God" named Grigori, who was from the Tobolsk province.

Rasputin would go back to Pokrovskoye shortly after his first meeting with the imperial couple, not returning to Saint Petersburg until July of 1906.

I know Rasputin was referring to one of Alexei's first hemophilia attacks when he spoke of this horrible thing that would happen, but I wonder if he was fully aware of every dreadful thing that would happen to the imperial family afterward too.

Did he hear the screams down in that cellar? Did he see the smoke? Did he hear the silence that came after? The silence that was only interrupted by pained sobs? Did he know that their downfall would someday be attributed to him?

Whether he saw the future or not, I have made up my mind. I don't want to see what happens next, I don't want to see. I have seen enough, the good and the bad. Their story is too tragic, too dreadful. It is over.

Batushka and Matushka are just other ways of saying "little father" and "little mother" respectively, that is how Rasputin often referred to the Tsar and Tsarina in Russian.

I used the thesis "The Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution of 1905" for the information in this chapter, as well as the thesis "The Black Hundreds in Odessa", and Wikipedia. Also, I am pretty much using a collage of Soviet leaders' lives to create Gleb's backstory by now lol.

I was once again inspired by the thread on the Alexander Palace Time Machine Forum where they discuss a hypothetical tv show about Nicholas and Alexandra (I may again in the future), and a Russian TV series named "Rasputin."

The timeline of historical events when compared to what happens to the characters + how everything is presented here might be just a bit off, mainly for creative purposes.

Also, many artistic liberties have been taken with Rasputin's character and life history in part due to the fact his "abilities" are very much real in this universe and even added to the ones he claimed to have had ("Supernatural elements" is well tagged here). About half of what I described has basis in reality.

Trigger warnings: Physical abuse of a minor, minors fighting (Child soldiers). Deaths of a few nameless extras, including children. Some light gore, not extremely descriptive but it is there. Explosions and shootings. There is also a bit of torture happening to a minor and mentioned period-typical antisemitism (Not much more than mentioned in earlier chapters). Sexual assault (Implied, and not of any main or even named character) is discussed to some extent.