Chapter 46: The Qualifications of a Master

Trotsky, department head for Geneva, Okhrana Foreign Intelligence Directorate, Paris headquarters.

A truly ruinous and ghastly string of words, but this was Trotsky’s new identity.

Not that Trotsky had genuinely turned his coat, of course.

His real work was to track Russia’s currents from inside the Okhrana, and to keep the revolutionaries from running off the rails.

And in fact, now that he was out here, he could spot quite a few people abroad who, unlike those back home, had no grasp of reality at all.

“Sir, we have a report that remnants of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the ones who plotted His Majesty’s assassination, have drifted into Geneva.”

“Ah… I see.”

Socialist Revolutionary remnants, was it.

It was no exaggeration to say they’d been wiped out to the last seed inside Russia, so if the ones who’d fled abroad were still alive, that only proved how deep their roots ran.

“Anything unusual about them?”

“They scattered after the failed attempt on the Tsar, but we’ve picked up signs that they’re trying to form a single group in Geneva. It doesn’t look like organized activity just yet, though….”

“Driven out of Russia, so they mean to rebuild here. That’s the game.”

“Yes, sir. That’s our assessment.”

Trotsky quietly turned the pages of the report.

Even at a skim, the volume was considerable.

Names, movements, contacts, even the streets they frequented, all on record; the old Okhrana might have needed months to net intelligence of this caliber.

But things were completely different now.

Having absorbed the Gendarme Corps, seized investigative authority, and gained the use of the external counterintelligence network, the newborn Okhrana’s intelligence apparatus had utterly transformed even the Foreign Intelligence Directorate.

Working from the contacts and connections of revolutionaries arrested at home, it was rapidly mapping the contours of the organizations abroad, and the movements of the figures hiding in Geneva, Paris, and London were coming in almost in real time.

‘…At this rate, not even the comrades abroad can rest easy.’

If the Okhrana’s net was woven this tight, there was no guarantee anywhere that hiding in Geneva meant safety.

‘But the real problem lies elsewhere.’

Graver still than the Okhrana’s fine-meshed intelligence network was the comrades’ perception of things.

Inside Russia, heaven and earth are quite literally being remade.

While the Tsar purged the corrupt Grand Dukes, swept up even the far-right mobs who claimed to support him, and set about overhauling land reform and the labour laws, the citizens’ loyalty climbed to historic heights.

It is now a world where reporting a revolutionary on sight counts as patriotism.

As an Okhrana department head, Trotsky confirmed this reality every single day through the reports crossing his desk.

The Moscow reports alone showed voluntary tips from citizens up 7-fold over last year.

By next year, it would probably swell to nearly 10 times that, wouldn’t it?

People who had never been friendly to the revolutionaries, but had never bothered to denounce them either, were now racing one another to the Okhrana’s door.

From peasants determined not to lose the land the Tsar had given them, to factory workers enjoying the benefits of the labour laws, to ordinary townsfolk who could feel in their own skin how much safer the streets had become.

Every one of these people now saw the revolutionaries hostile to the Tsar as the enemy.

And yet the men holed up in Geneva and London knew this reality in their heads without feeling it in their bones.

“The day of revolution is at hand!”

“The Tsarist system is bound to fall!”

“We must not slacken in our preparations for armed uprising!”

All said, reportedly, at an émigré gathering in Geneva last week.

Reading that report, Trotsky could not contain his despair.

Never mind the day of revolution, the very embers of revolution were guttering out, and here they were prattling about armed uprisings and ending the Tsarist system.

If these delusional cases went berserk again, the entire revolutionary movement might follow the Socialist Revolutionary Party into the grave.

M’s warning rang in his ears once more.

If anything like the attempt on the Tsar happened one more time, the revolution would be finished forever… wasn’t that what he’d said?

Not a word of it was wrong.

‘Yes. The revolutionary organizations abroad must be rebuilt from the roots up.’

Trotsky spent the whole night writing a letter.

The addressee was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov of Geneva, Lenin.

[You do not know what is happening inside Russia right now.

You must accept that the revolution from below is effectively over, and that the citizens have turned their backs on us completely.

If we do not prune away those who refuse to face this reality, every one of us will be finished, so first, let us meet and talk.]

He knew it would not be easy.

Whether Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, or what was left of the Socialist Revolutionary remnant, those who cried the purity of the revolution while refusing to face reality were certain to push back.

They would brand him a turncoat.

But that would be nothing more than the howling of the ignorant.

Criticism from those of lesser intellect was something Trotsky could let slide right past him.

He was used to playing the villain, after all.

* * *

Once again, I barely made it back alive from Her Majesty the Empress’s chatter-storm offensive.

This time it took about 4 hours.

Last time it was 3 hours, so the scariest part is that the sessions keep getting longer and longer.

-She’s not building up your tolerance, she’s getting stronger. Were vocal cords always the kind of thing that levels up the more you use them?

My adoptive mother liking me too much… now there’s a variable I never once thought to plan for.

After barely fending off the Empress’s parting offensive urging me to stay for just one more cup of tea, I stepped into Director-General Yakov’s office, and the first thing to catch my eye was the mountain of paperwork piled on his desk.

And not just the desk.

The side table, the shelf by the window, even the floor was lined with rows of document boxes; calling this a records depot rather than an office would hardly have been an exaggeration.

“Director, you’re not looking well again today.”

“…Haha, is it that obvious?”

“How much sleep have you been getting lately?”

“Hmm. Five hours… or so?”

“That won’t do. I’ve heard you need at least seven hours to keep working over the long term.”

“But there’s so much here to review….”

Of course there was. The quality and quantity of authority being funneled into the Okhrana right now had blown far past anything resembling normal.

“Even so, this is a problem we have to think about long-term. If we need to, I’ll ask His Majesty to bring in more staff, so please get some rest.”

“Haha, understood. If the Young Master insists that strongly, then rest I shall.”

He looked reluctant, but honestly, the dark circles under Yakov’s eyes had already slid down to his chin.

Any further than this and a man simply dies.

And it was no wonder, given that the workload Yakov was shouldering right now was the kind that tests the limits of the human body.

Personnel reviews for all 7 national districts of the Gendarme Corps; reclassifying the political prisoner investigation files handed over from the Police Department.

Then the review of the third audit report on the Orthodox Church, the Foreign Intelligence Directorate’s weekly situation briefings, and on top of all that, directing criminal investigations under the newly acquired investigative authority.

An organization that had grown not severalfold but nearly dozens of times over, held together by one Director-General and a ten-year-old aide; that was the truly unrealistic part.

Even at my most optimistic, we’d need at least 1 year of overhauls at this intensity before any kind of system settled into place, wouldn’t we?

Extra staffing really was urgent.

After a long stretch of flipping through papers, reviewing the Gendarme Corps’ status district by district, I casually changed the subject.

“Director, come to think of it, how’s the Nobles’ Committee these days? Any movement worth noting?”

“I’ve actually been taking their reports as top priority, and it’s been uncannily quiet. Quiet enough to call it almost no reaction at all.”

“…Really? No reaction whatsoever?”

“Yes. Which, if anything, makes me more uneasy.”

Yakov’s eyes met mine.

There was no fool in this room who would read that as them doing nothing.

They’d tried to put on a dazzling sword dance at the hearing and gotten their wrists lopped off instead, so this time they weren’t rushing to make the first move.

Greedy as those bastards are, they’re not idiots.

“It would be right to assume they’re preparing something where our eyes can’t reach.”

“My thought exactly. Keep up the surveillance, but don’t provoke them. Let’s wait until the rats crawl out.”

With the nobles settled for now, I was digging through the backlog one document at a time when my eyes paused on the imperial household finance report sent over by the Ministry of the Imperial Court.

An annual state subsidy of 11 million rubles, drawn up by the Ministry of Finance… substantial.

Meanwhile, the income from imperially owned land and enterprises came to no more than a few million rubles all told.

Total income from both sides combined topped out at 16 to 20 million rubles, and once palace upkeep, court staff salaries, allowances for the entire Romanov clan, the costs of diplomatic functions, and imperial arts patronage were all added in, of course it ran a deficit.

The accumulated deficit over the past 10 years had even passed 10 million rubles.

-This is worse than I thought, isn’t it?

It really is startling. The supposed master of the Russian Empire, effectively leashed to a budget drawn up for him by the Ministry of Finance.

-That’s probably why Nicholas II got dragged around by his bureaucrats despite being the king.

Fair enough, whoever holds the purse strings has always been the one calling the shots.

And honestly, this wasn’t a problem unique to Russia.

In Britain, Parliament had held the royal budget by the throat for over a century, and France had gone ahead and taken the king’s head off entirely.

Asia or Europe, it’s the same in any society.

The authority of the head of the house can never last if the wallet doesn’t back it up.

“This definitely needs some fixing. Down the line, if the nobles and the Ministry of Finance put their minds to it, even a small tweak to the budget would immediately tie the imperial family’s hands. This could well be the nobles’ next target, actually.”

“Pressure through the finances…?”

“They’ll have learned that a head-on fight like the hearing won’t work. And if they squeeze purely through the finances, the imperial household as it stands has fewer ways to respond than one might think.”

Yakov set down his papers and nodded slowly.

“This ought to be reported to His Majesty directly.”

“I think so too. I’ll go and tell him myself, so please rest a little, Director.”

I gathered up the papers and headed for the Tsar’s study.

Nicholas II beamed and waved as always, and after paying my respects I went straight to the point.

“Your Majesty, I’ve been looking over the state of the imperial household finances.”

Spreading the report open, I explained the vulnerabilities the Director-General and I had gone over earlier.

In short, that the accumulated deficit alone had topped 10 million rubles over 10 years.

“Well, that’s… how it’s always been.”

“That’s exactly the problem, Your Majesty. You are the master of this Russia, and yet in the end you depend on a budget drawn up by the Ministry of Finance. In the long run, that’s not good for your prestige either.”

“My prestige… isn’t that worrying a bit much?”

“It’s not too much, Your Majesty. Things may be fine now, but the moment the country’s fortunes dip even a little, it opens the door to agitation that Russia is suffering this badly and yet the Romanov household still draws its money from the Ministry of Finance. And it’s not only revolutionaries who can run that kind of agitation. You must always keep in mind that the nobles can do it too.”

The Tsar’s expression stiffened slightly.

“Surely… the nobles would go that far?”

“Your Majesty, think back to the hearing. These are the people who fabricated evidence to try to bury the Director-General of the Okhrana. Going after the imperial finances is far easier and far safer than that. Agitation alone would do the job. No evidence to fabricate, even.”

“Hmm… true enough.”

After I reminded him at endless length of everything the nobles had done so far, Nicholas II at last folded his arms and let out a sigh.

The look on his face made it plain enough that he’d never once thought about it from this angle.

-He’s the Emperor. He’s always assumed the money just naturally shows up.

Fair, he’d probably never once actually been in a bind for lack of money.

But without a fully self-sufficient financial structure, there was no telling when or where this shackle would trip him up.

The law books could call the Tsar the autocrat of all Russia until they were blue in the face; in the age of capitalism, what power does an emperor without money really have?

“…Now that I hear you say it, it does worry me. But Misha, even if we set out to make money, a business isn’t something you can build in so short a time, is it?”

“You’re right. Usually, that’s true.”

“Usually? Then this time it’s different?”

Just as Nicholas II said, if long-term revenue sources came that easily, what royal house in the world would still be drawing its budget from the government?

But by a stroke of tremendous luck, it was worth remembering that a masterless land with colossal interests lying dormant had recently rolled right into our lap.

“Yes. Try to remember, Your Majesty. As it happens, the goose that lays the golden eggs, won through your great leadership, is waiting for your hand, isn’t it?”

“Ah… so you mean… surely not.”

The golden land whose dominion had been recognized in full as the prize of victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Manchuria.

The Grand Dukes had slobbered all over it, but since every one of those Grand Dukes had been brought down, the place quite literally still had no master.

“That land in the Far East must be made into the storehouse that will sustain Your Majesty’s authority from here on.”

A being that neither nobles nor government could bind by any means.

The Emperor would become the true master of Russia.

~~~

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