North of that area, the 40th Siberian Division had been landed on the coast at Toron and Chumikan, and it was to have pushed up the sandy and winding course of the Uda River to the Zeya River, but with no roads to speak of, only one regiment had made the long and arduous journey, establishing a series of frontier outposts behind it, and then returning to the coast. It was now evident to Karpov that getting inland from that wild and undeveloped coast would be a logistical nightmare. His airships were largely carrying the burden of moving supplies, but threats posed by the appearance of new German airships was cause for some alarm, and he was now being forced to keep at least three airships at Ilanskiy.
While Fedorov was off on his AWOL mission to that place, Karpov’s anxiety was very high. He fretted, paced, was constantly on the radio to his brother self, asking for news and berating Tyrenkov to bring the fugitive to justice one way or another. They had searched high and low for any sign of Irkutsk, with no results. Tyrenkov’s intelligence network kept an ear on the ground for any news of where it may have gone. It was suspected that the airship, and Fedorov with it, may have fled to Soviet Russia, but all his operatives there could produce no evidence that had happened. Not one among them had any idea that Fedorov was, at that moment, literally right beneath their feet in the very heart and center of Karpov’s web of security—Ilanskiy—only he was hidden by the shadowy cloak of 34 years of time, there but not there, like an unseen wraith or spirit haunting that railway inn.
When Mironov came down those stairs he had only one thing on his mind—escape. A fledgling revolutionary, he had already been arrested and imprisoned by the Okhrana for allegedly distributing propaganda materials. This very journey was an attempt to get as far from Tsarist authority as he possibly could, a journey east on the Trans-Siberian Rail. He had decided to visit relatives in Irkutsk, but after that, he had it in his mind to head west and south, to the Caucasus, a place he had heard much about as a boy, Vladikavkaz. It was a small town in the foothills of the mountains west of Grozny and south of the Terek River. There he would help organize the Bolshevik cells of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and work as a journalist.
In truth, his revolutionary spirit had been born much earlier, when he left the small boarding school of his youth and moved on to the Industrial Institute at nearby Kazan, in 1901. Then a lad of just 16 years, he experienced that flowering of his young self that comes to many at that age, becoming more independent and often questioning authority, while at the same time, sewing a few wild oats, as young men sometimes do. There he lived in a student hostel, rent-free, as a gift from one of the Society Board Members who approved his studies at the institute. That man’s wife ran the hostel, though young Sergei repaid that kindness by having an affair with her, the boy of 16 then summarily leaving the hostel to board in the town with two friends at the end of that year when he learned the woman was pregnant. She closed the hostel shortly thereafter, and later gave birth to Sergei’s illegitimate baby girl.
More than one young man has found himself in that sort of embarrassing situation, and more than one young man ended up doing what Sergei did after that—leaving the place and abandoning both the mother and child, never seeing them again.
Once he was reprimanded by a teacher for refusing to write an essay on scripture he did not believe in. Once, while touring a local factory, he had the temerity to directly question the owner’s right to a life of wealth, comfort, and security obtained on the backs of the workers who labored so hard beneath him. And so, from rebellious student questioning the established faith, to a young man questioning the existing social and economic structure of the world he was growing up in, Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov would soon find more than one place his feelings about these things could be expressed.
Two years later, in 1903, the students at the institute began to organize protests when one of their ranks was arrested by authorities and mysteriously died while in custody. Sergei fell in with the protestors, and was much influenced by the general anti-Tsarist sentiment simmering in the country. He graduated from the institute in Kazan in 1904, then went to Tomsk in Siberia to seek entry into the Tomsk Technological Institute for higher education. He was there when the Tsar’s police fired on citizens in St. Petersburg on January 22, 1905.
That incident became known as the Bloody Sunday Massacre, and did much to raise the temperature of the slowly simmering revolution. Sergei joined a sub-committee at the school to help organize a street protest to the event, which was widely reviled throughout Russia. The following month was just two days old when Kirov was arrested for the first time, taken into custody with a group of other students who were planning a further protest.
Young Sergei Kirov refused to cooperate with interrogators, or to implicate any other student he knew. He was eventually released in April, and went right on with his revolutionary activities, distributing fliers, meeting with worker groups, fomenting a strike among railway workers near Tomsk. By May of that year, Japan’s Admiral Togo inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Russian Navy in the Strait of Tsushima, which caused national uproar. Workers on the Trans-Siberian rail line staged strikes and walkouts all along the line, and the lad who would become Sergei Kirov was right in the middle of it all. So he was no stranger to that fabled rail line, and knew all the ins and outs of traveling there.
In 1906, with martial law declared when Kirov was 20 years old, he was arrested again in a Tsarist crackdown on all these revolutionary activities. They claimed he was running an illegal printing press, though it was never found. Instead they cited him for spreading hostilities between classes, and he was sentenced to 16 months in prison in Tomsk. He had only been released in June, 1908, when he started his journey east on that same rail line. For the next 18 months, almost nothing is known of his whereabouts, except that he eventually turned up in Irkutsk. No one knew of that fateful meeting he had at Ilanskiy with a man named Fedorov, or of the stairway at Ilanskiy where his curiosity saw him climb those stairs at a most opportune time.
And no one knew this time that he was about to have yet another meeting with Fedorov, only now the strange figure from the future was not there to deliver a warning that might one day save his life. This time Fedorov had come to end his story, then and there, as a desperate act to try and reset the world he had come from in 1942, and perhaps expunge the sins that now darkened his own soul, atoning for all he had done to give birth to that world.
While traveling east, Mironov stopped at Kansk, resolving to continue on the next train. He, too, wanted to see a bit of the Great Auto Race that was nearing that location. Then, on the day of the strange explosion and fire in the sky to the northeast, he had what he now believed was a very close brush with the authorities again. That strange man in the dining room, claiming to be a soldier, had aroused his suspicions. At first he had thought to share his table with the man, to make it seem that he was nothing more than an innocent traveler. But when the soldier made such a hasty retreat to the second floor of the inn, Mironov’s curiosity had been aroused. He wondered if the man was an agent of the Tsar’s dreaded secret police, sent to follow him now that he had finally been released from prison.
That’s what they would do, he thought. They release the little fox, but keep the dogs close at hand. My colleague, Popov, fled this way as well. I must get in touch with him one day, but not now. They will want to follow me, see where I might go, and to whom I might speak. Did they honestly think I would be so stupid as to try and contact fellow revolutionaries or other members in the party so soon after my release from that prison? No. The smart thing for me was to do exactly what I was planning—find relatives, find family. That would be the perfect cover for any travel I undertake, and then, when things settle down; when I’ve had time in Irkutsk to have a good look around and make sure no one is watching me, then I can contemplate another move.