In Europe

circumcised?”’
    ‘Racism’, however, is not a word Amayya uses lightly. ‘I'm still quite proud of the producer who took a chance on me. Where else in Europe would you see a TV anchorwoman with dark skin
and
a foreign accent? This has always been a tight-knit, homogeneous society. But they still have someone here like Lola Odusoga, an eloquent Finnish girl whose father came from the Ivory Coast. In 1996 she was the most popular Miss Finland of all time, a calm, hardworking kid from the countryside close to Turku, very sweet, and black as ebony.
    ‘The Finns actually remind me of the Bedouins, a people completely shaped by geographical extremes,’ Amayya says.‘They consider themselves unique, more than unique. Women play a major role. A lot of them have children without getting married. You sense that Christianity is only a thin veneer here, it's clearly something that's been imposed. Their pride comes from knowing that they can survive under extreme conditions. And just like the Bedouins, they feel threatened when other people think they can do that as well. It's understandable, really: the greater the isolation people live in, the more afraid they are when the world opens up.’
    The next day I take the Sibelius Express through the white coniferous forest to St Petersburg. We cross huge plains with no trace of human existence. Sometimes, after a few kilometres, there will be a wooden farmhouse with its windows lit up. After an hour, the gangways between the carriages are covered in powder snow, even the corridors are dusted white here and there. In the dining car they're serving salmon and mashed potatoes, twenty people at one big table, eating what the cook has to offer.
    Between Finland and Russia is an old-fashioned border with watch-towers, passport stamps and serious men. After that comes a debatablezone: do the telegraph poles here actually look a bit shoddier, the wooden houses just a little less neat? The snow still masks the differences. But half an hour later the train slowly pulls into a grey city. Men are fishing on the frozen river; behind them are towers with golden domes; in front of the station dozens of old women all try to sell their one jar of pickles, or two bottles of vodka, or a knitted sweater. Now we really have crossed the border, the only border that counts.
    ‘Everyone in our group sat glued to the windows,’ Nadezhda Krupskaya recalled. A few soldiers had boarded the train. Little Robert was sitting on the lap of a Russian war veteran, his arms around the man's neck. The man shared his raisin bread with him. The soldiers gave Lenin a few back copies of
Pravda
, Zinovyev reported, ‘he shook his head and threw up his hands in despair.’
    The group got off the train in Petrograd, at Finland Station. By then, according to the Russian calendar, it was 3 April. Nadezhda had been worried: if they arrived so late, how would they ever find a hansom cab to take them to where they were staying? They had no idea what awaited them.
    In those first weeks following the revolution it was customary to give all homecoming exiles a great welcome, and the Bolsheviks had gone all out for their leader. Even the Mensheviks took part in the celebration. Huge triumphal arches had been set up on the platforms. Banners bearing ‘every revolutionary slogan one could imagine’ hung above the honour guards from the various army units.‘The crowd in front of Finland Station blocked the entire square, you could barely move, and the trams were almost unable to get through,’ recalled the journalist Nikolai Suchanov, editor of Gorky's
Letopis
(Chronicle). The Ulyanovs were led into what had once been the czar's private waiting room. Military bands played the ‘Marsellaise’; the soldiers had not had enough time to practise the ‘Internationale’. Lenin made a couple of short speeches. Suchanov was able to catch only a few words: ‘Scandalous imperialistic massacre … lies and deception … capitalist pirates’. The crowd was ecstatic.
    The Bolsheviks had set up their headquarters in Kshesinskaya Palace, the enormous villa Czar Nicholas II had built for his mistress, the ballerina Matilda Kshesinsky. (‘I'm not a capitalist! I worked hard for this!’ was what she shouted at the first Bolshevik intruders.) A banquet hadbeen laid out in the huge halls and passageways, but Lenin hardly had a chance to eat. Everyone wanted to talk to him. Only past midnight did he begin his big speech.
    For two