The Last Romanov (Under Editing)

Pushback

Nadezhda stared at the newspaper that sat in front of her, shocked. That Romanov girl had reinstated the draft, and even as she sat in that basement somewhere in St. Petersburg, surrounded by some of the surviving members of the Bolshevik party, hundreds of thousands of young men were getting those damned envelopes from the Imperial War Office, inside of which the letter every family in Russia dreaded: the letter that told them the fate of their sons and their fathers. Many would go east to the killing fields the Imperial Army had turned the hills around Perm, some up north to the siege over in Murmansk; no matter where they went, though, the odds of those boys surviving weren't great.

She wanted nothing more than to take that paper, rip it to shreds, and throw it into the hearth, but she didn't. She just stared at that picture and that photo on the front of the paper, the one with the soldiers pulling a kid off of his mother to take him to boot camp. She'd seen that picture over and over again that day, but every time she saw it, she felt sick to her stomach. She knew in her heart that that would probably be the last time they saw those anti-empire things, that the people responsible for every detail of that newspaper would end up disappearing in the middle of the night without a trace, and that they would probably only hear about things supportive of that regime from there on out.

That was one of the hardest things to know: this would be the last incident to not be swept under the rug. From there on out, they would go from making excuses for why things were happening to saying that they weren't happening, at all.

At least the suffering of these boys was getting recognized. And having to think like that was so damned horrible and disgusting.

"Nadezhda, what do you think we should do?"

She looked up at the to people that sat around that ratty table with her. They were just kids, themselves. The cousins, Nikola and Nadya, were both looking at her expectantly, waiting for wisdom from the leader of their little movement.

Damn it! She was the leader of the movement, now, wasn't she?

Well, she wasn't a great one, that was for sure. She didn't know what to do. That had always been Vladimir's job, but now... well, he was gone, now, and somebody had to fill those shoes.

And it seemed like they'd picked her to fill those shoes.

"I don't know," Nadezhda said. "I just... don't know."

She put her head in her hands and sighed, her hair dangling in front of her face.

"Should we wait a little while longer, ma'am?" Nadya asked. "See what they plan on doing before we make our move?"

"We can't do that, can we?" Nikola asked. "Anastasia isn't going to wait, so why should we?"

"Because if we don't go in there with some sort of plan, we're going to get killed," Nadya said. "We aren't like the imperial army: we can't afford to go in there, guns blazing. If we take any more casualties, the entire movement is going to collapse."

Neither or them were wrong. They needed to take action against all of this, but she couldn't do that if it meant even more people getting killed for all of this.

She froze. Call it what you will – an epiphany, revelation – but she had one. And, frankly, it was probably one she shouldn't follow.

And, given other options, she probably wouldn't have even considered it.

"Are people protesting?" Nadezhda asked.

"Of course, they are," Nikola said. "They're all around the palace as we speak. Why do you ask?"