Breaking Stalin

Breaking Stalin

Chapter XXXII

XXXII
The train veered off to the side as it rounded a tight corner shaking the car like a bomb.  Soso’s eyes flashed open.  He looked around at his near empty car, at the few other prisoners, who perturbed were all closing their eyes again.  He closed his too.  Inevitability was the name of the final stop of the train, but Soso knew that it wasn’t the inevitable the Tsarist troops thought it would be.  No, he knew he was not going to his death.  Russian lives were too valuable at the moment, even a lowly prisoner like himself.  He was going to get conscripted with the handful of men that were with him.  The war was going extremely badly for the Tsar.  He needed more cannon-fodder.
But Soso already knew they wouldn’t find him fit for service.  He had an injury in his left arm from his youth when he had tried to play a game grabbing hold of the axles of carriages as they thundered past.  His mother had done her best to help him, but the wound had never healed, and as such he had always known he could never be the ideal Georgian warrior.  But from the tales of how many Russians had died in the war already, he decided he was better off not being that warrior.

The train thundered ominously onward, towards the south, and Soso fell back asleep.  He would soon fail his exam, and be left in southern Siberia until February.  But his fate was about to change.  The February of 1917 was the month that would rip Russia apart.  The powder keg was finally about to burst, and the revolution about to begin.

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