In Europe

cent in 1914. Between 1860 and 1914, the number of university students grew from 5,000 to nearly 70,000, and the number of Russian newspapers from 13 to more than 850. Even the Russian
miri
, the village communes of peasant farmers, were opening up to the real world. But Nicholas had no eye for any of that.
    On Sunday, 9 January, 1905, his soldiers opened fire on a praying, kneeling crowd in St Petersburg. About 200 people were killed, hundreds more were wounded. The myth of ‘Papa Czar’ was shattered and the Russian people were furious, riots and disturbances broke out everywhere. Some 3,000 rural estates were looted. From the famous steps at the quayside in Odessa, soldiers fired on a crowd that was demonstrating in support of mutineers on the battleship
Potemkin
. More than 2,000 people were killed: shot, trampled or drowned. In late 1905, a revolt in Moscow was crushed at the last moment.
    A czarist countermovement arose: anti-liberal, anti-socialist, and above all anti-Semitic. Some 700 pogroms took place across Russia in the fall of 1905. In Odessa 800 Jews were murdered, more than 100,000 lost their homes. And rightly so, according to the czar. ‘Nine out of every ten of the troublemakers were Jews,’ he wrote contentedly to his mother on 27 October, 1905. To him, the pogroms were a clear demonstration of what an enraged crowd of loyal subjects could do: ‘They encircle the houses where the revolutionaries have sought refuge, set them on fire and kill everyone who tries to escape.’
    In 1905, the Russian Army was called in to crush a total of 720 major and minor revolts. An estimated 15,000 ‘politicals’ were executed, 45,000 sent into exile or to prison. Tens of thousands of farmers were flogged, hundreds of thousands of huts were put to the torch.
    A Russian friend of mine knew a very old woman who spent time in prison in those days. Her family sent her books, wrapped in white bread. ‘The guards brought them to her, watched as she unpacked the books – she pounced on them right away – and were all too happy to receive the bread in return.’
    In due course the czar announced a few reforms, but retracted them just as quickly. A new sense of uncertainty took hold of the moneyed classes. For the first time, the bourgeoisie had witnessed the destructive rage of millions of poverty-stricken Russians. And, after the violent repression of the revolts, the bitterness only increased. More than ever the farmers became aware of their own utter powerlessness and poverty, the strikes in the cities grew in frequency and intensity, the intellectuals began taking part as well, and a growing number of key administrators became disgusted with the rigid czarist court.
    Around the courtyards of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the citadel built by Peter the Great in 1703, one can still visit the dungeons in which revolutionaries were held in those days. A survey of those imprisoned here reads like a roll of honour: there were Decabrists, nihilists, populists, Marxists, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and, later, more Menshevik prisoners of the Bolsheviks, along with priests and royalists. By 1917 the average Bolshevik activist had spent four years in prison, an active Menshevik five. The rest of Europe had long embraced the liberal motto of ‘that which is not forbidden is allowed’, but in Russia it was just the opposite: ‘all that is not explicitly allowed is forbidden.’
    For many years, the final souvenir of that famous April night in 1917 stood before the Lenin Musuem: the antique armoured car in which Lenin was driven from Finland Station to Kshesinskaya Palace. Today both museum and armoured car have disappeared. In their stead, pride of place has now been given to the old equestrian statue of Czar Alexander III, an implacable bronze giant on a horse with legs like pillars, a caricature of the ponderous rigour of the czarist autocracy. The statue was so preposterous that the Bolsheviks only bothered to have it removed in the 1930s. The saying had it that the sculptor, Pavel Trubetskov, was not at all interested in politics, but had merely wished to portray ‘one animal atop another’. The citizens of Petrograd laughed about that.
    St Petersburg was obviously not the ideal capital for the last of the Romanovs. Their hearts lay further to the east and south; Moscow was the city of the Russian past, of devout farmers who bowed to church and czar. The ministries and palaces of St