The autumn of 1904 brought with it grim news from the front, but in Mikhail's St. Petersburg office, a different story was being told. Telegraphs from his managers in Volkovo and along the Trans-Siberian line spoke of record-breaking tonnage and production quotas being met and exceeded. The Northern Industrial Syndicate had become a behemoth, its furnaces devouring coal and iron ore to spit out the steel rails, shells, and engine parts that the war consumed. When a uniformed courier from the Ministry of War arrived, he no longer addressed Mikhail as 'Baron,' but as 'Commissioner,' his tone holding a deference reserved for men who could make or break a general's career.
In one of his now-regular meetings with Sergei Witte, the conversation turned, as it always did, to the two things Russia was running out of: money and hope.
"The treasury is nearly empty, Mikhail," Witte said, his heavy face etched with worry. "We are trying to secure new loans from bankers in Paris, but they see the unrest here, the failures in Manchuria... they are demanding crippling interest rates."
This was the opening Mikhail had been waiting for. He had spent weeks with Alistair's knowledge of 21st-century finance, adapting its principles to the realities of 1904. "Then we stop asking foreign bankers to fund our war," Mikhail stated. "We will have the Russian people fund it themselves."
He laid out his plan. It was audacious, unprecedented, and brilliant. He proposed the creation of a new, state-chartered private bank—the Russo-Imperial Bank—which would issue a new kind of financial instrument: "National Victory and Reconstruction Bonds."
"We market these bonds directly to our own people," Mikhail explained, his eyes alight with strategic fire. "To merchants, to prosperous peasants, to the gentry. We sell it not as a loan to the government, but as a patriotic investment in Russia itself. Each bond is a share in our victory and the industrial growth that will follow. It raises the capital we desperately need, but more than that, it gives the Russian middle class a direct, financial stake in the stability of the Empire. A man who owns a Victory Bond is a man who has no time for revolutionaries."
Witte was stunned. It was a plan that solved the financial crisis while simultaneously acting as a massive, nationwide antidote to revolutionary fever. It was a tool of finance and social engineering rolled into one. The bank, controlled by Witte and Mikhail, would become a new center of power, independent of the old aristocratic wealth.
The plan, however, was a direct threat to the last vestiges of Minister Plehve's power. A financially stable state, buoyed by popular support, was a state that had no need for his brand of repressive control. Plehve, cornered and desperate, prepared one last, vicious counter-attack.
The warning came, as always, from the terrified double agent, Tishchenko. He reported to Captain Orlov that Plehve was fabricating a new "terrorist conspiracy." Using his Okhrana agents, he was planning to plant bombs and link the plot to socialist agitators, who would then be tied through manufactured evidence to Mikhail's "allies" in the railway unions, and by extension, to Mikhail himself. The goal was to create a wave of panic so severe that the Tsar would grant Plehve absolute emergency powers to crush all dissent.
Mikhail reviewed the report in his office. Alistair's memory supplied a chilling piece of historical data: Vyacheslav von Plehve was assassinated in St. Petersburg on July 28, 1904, by a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's Combat Organization. The date was one week from today.
He was faced with a stark, terrible choice. He could use Tishchenko's information to expose the plot and warn Plehve, saving his nemesis's life but potentially allowing the man to gain the emergency powers he craved. Or he could do nothing. He could stand aside and let history run its bloody, pre-ordained course, knowing that the single greatest obstacle to his own plans would be permanently removed from the board.
There was no real debate in his mind. Plehve was a cancer on the Empire. His removal was a strategic necessity. Morality, in a game for the fate of a nation, was a luxury he could not afford. He burned Tishchenko's report and told Orlov to stand his men down.
One week later, on a sunny July morning, Mikhail was in his office reviewing production schedules when Captain Orlov entered without knocking.
"Baron," Orlov said, his face an unreadable mask. "Word from the city. A bomb was thrown at Minister Plehve's carriage on the Izmailovsky Prospekt. He was killed instantly."
Mikhail looked up from his papers, his expression calm. He felt no elation, no remorse. He felt only the quiet, chilling hum of a complex machine clicking into place. He had not ordered the assassination, but he had sanctioned it with his silence. He had allowed history to be his executioner.
The death of the iron-fisted minister sent the reactionary faction into leaderless disarray. The Tsar, shaken and deprived of his most ruthless advisor, was forced to lean more heavily on the technocrats and modernizers. The political atmosphere in the capital shifted overnight.
The final piece fell into place two weeks later. With Plehve's opposition gone, the charter for the new Russo-Imperial Bank was approved with stunning speed.
Mikhail stood with Witte on the steps of the nearly completed bank headquarters, a grand new building on Nevsky Prospect. The war in the East was still a bleeding wound, and the first stirrings of the 1905 revolution were beginning to tremble beneath the surface of Russian society. But now, his enemy was dead, and he held a new weapon in his hands—control over a vast new source of capital.
He had mastered industry, logistics, and now finance. He was no longer just influencing the war; he was preparing to profit from its end and to manage the chaos that he knew would follow. Plehve had been a gatekeeper to the old system. With him gone, Mikhail saw the path ahead clearing. The final gatekeeper was the Tsar himself.