Lara’s disclosure to Yurii that Strelnikov is her husband, Pavel Antipov, transforms a political identity into a painful family truth. She connects the commander Yurii encountered with the Pasha she had searched for at the front and refused to believe dead, then describes the costs of his assumed name and revolutionary discipline: he has fought without openly seeking her, avoided his father, and kept private ties subordinate to his public role.

The identity revealed

The conversation begins with Lara’s direct confirmation that Strelnikov is Pasha, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, her husband. She had gone to the front looking for him and had refused to accept the reports of his death. Yurii says he had heard the rumor linking the two men but dismissed it; his own encounter with Strelnikov had made the identification difficult for him to imagine.

Lara insists that the identity is true, not merely a rumor. Strelnikov is Antipov’s revolutionary pseudonym, an assumed name used in active political work. Their daughter Katenka knows that Strelnikov is her father and is proud of him. The revelation thus joins the public revolutionary figure, the absent husband, and the father known to a child, while showing how an alias has divided those roles in practice.

A commander who keeps his distance

Lara recounts that Strelnikov took Yuriatin and shelled the town despite knowing that she and the others were there. He did not try to learn whether they were alive, because doing so might have exposed his identity. Lara accepts that this was his duty and says she herself would have urged him to act that way. She can interpret her safety and the Town Soviet’s provision of a reasonable place to live as signs that he was looking after them indirectly, but she cannot reconcile that possibility with his having been nearby without trying to see them.

Her account stresses the gulf between personal attachment and political conduct. She calls his restraint unnatural to her, even while acknowledging its logic within his assumed identity and obligations. She also tells Yurii that they understand one another over less consequential, intangible choices, but differ over major questions of outlook. The disclosure therefore does more than solve a mystery: it exposes a disagreement about whether private bonds can survive the demands of revolutionary action.

The front and the old friendship

Lara says Strelnikov is now in Siberia, commanding one of the revolutionary forces’ advanced positions and fighting Galiullin. The two men had been childhood friends and comrades in the German war. Galiullin knows Strelnikov’s identity and knows that Lara is his wife, yet has never invoked that knowledge to her, a restraint Lara values even though Strelnikov’s name enrages him.

Before Strelnikov went to Siberia, he had spent a long time in the railway car where Yurii saw him. Lara hoped to encounter him by chance as he went to and from headquarters. The headquarters occupied a building that had once housed Komuch, the Constituent Assembly Army; its entrance lay through the wing where Galiullin used to see her. Lara had repeatedly gone there to ask Galiullin to help someone or stop abuses. These overlapping routes brought her near her husband without giving her a legitimate way to claim him: she did not force her way in or announce herself as his wife, and their different names made that connection hard to establish.

Revolution’s public violence and private costs

Lara recalls seeking help amid abuses that accompanied the fighting. At a military academy, cadets ambushed and shot an instructor they disliked, accusing him of being a Bolshevik sympathizer. In another episode, Jews were attacked. Lara connects the latter violence to the disquiet of educated townspeople whose friends included many Jews: sympathy and indignation were accompanied by shame and a sense of division, rather than uncomplicated solidarity.

She also describes the headquarters as a place whose political purpose had changed with the regime. The former Governor-General’s office now bore a notice reading “Complaints.” People waited in line outside; across the wooden-block-paved square stood a park with maples, hawthorn, and honeysuckle. The setting gives concrete shape to Lara’s efforts to intervene in public affairs, but the notice offers no assurance that a complaint can overcome revolutionary authority or its priorities.

Discipline, family, and the limits of appeal

Lara explains that even proof of marriage might not have helped her. Strelnikov’s father, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, was nearby in a settlement along the highway, where he had lived as a political exile. His friend Tiverzin was there too, and both men served on the local revolutionary court. Yet Strelnikov had neither visited his father nor told him who he was. The father accepts his son’s wish to remain unrecognized and does not take the absence as an insult.

To Lara, this discipline makes both men seem almost inhuman: the father accepts separation, and the son puts his assumed identity and revolutionary commitments ahead of recognition by wife or parent. She contrasts those intimate claims with the movement’s vast aims, such as remaking the world, and with a political order in which an individual wife carries little weight. The scene closes not with a reunion but with the cost of a truth finally spoken: Yurii now knows who Strelnikov is, while Lara’s knowledge has not restored the family life that the alias and the revolution have displaced.