In Europe

Petersburg were reminiscent ofParis or Rome, the city itself had European leanings, and no Orthodox Church could compete with that.
    The two cities reacted quite differently to the czar's power base. Inspired by the West, the aristocracy of St Petersburg tried to limit the power of the regime with legislative rules and bureaucratic models. In this way, despite all obstructions, a number of aristocrats were able to play a major role in the initial modernisation of Russia.
    And then one had the Muscovite model, based on the premise of a ‘spiritual communion’ between the czar and the common Russian folk. Power here was not an expression of law or popular will; it was, first and foremost, a matter of faith.
    The last czar saw himself as God's representative on earth.‘I regard Russia as one big estate, with the czar as its owner, the nobility as overseers and the working people as its farmers,’ he said in 1902. With the support of the common people – embodied by the farmyard stench of court clergy like Rasputin – he believed he could stand up to the power of the bureaucrats, the merchants, the intellectuals and revolutionaries. There was, in his eyes, no ‘social question’: peasants were no different from farmers.
    In the longer term, this dream vision collided so forcefully with reality that what the czar achieved was the very opposite of what he was aiming for: no power, but a black hole at the centre of the ruling system, a vacuum that would one day be filled by whatever revolutionary movement came along.
    The idea that Russia ‘groaned eternally under the czarist yoke’ is therefore incorrect. There was, of course, an active secret police and hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people were killed during the suppression of popular uprisings, but the prime characteristic of the czarist regime was its general want of sufficient administrative power to rule the Russian vastness effectively. Around the turn of the century there were only four civil servants to every thousand Russians. In Germany, it was one in twelve; in France, one in seventeen. A little over 8,000 policemen were employed for a total rural population of more than a hundred million souls. In other words, in addition to an enormous void at the centre of power, the Russian Empire in 1917 had almost no administrative infrastructure. Here too lay the fallow ground that the Bolsheviks would later cultivate in their own fashion.
    The countryside was rife with backward potentates. The village hovels, the medieval customs, the superstition, the barbaric punishments, the low value attached to human life, all this was largely due to that same lack of effective administration. So too the poverty in the cities: living conditions in St Petersburg under the czars were even more deplorable than those in Berlin or London. Between 1860–1900, the population tripled. According to the 1904 census, an average of sixteen people lived in each apartment, at least six in each room, twice as many as in Paris or Vienna. The drinking water supply was so inadequate that a cholera epidemic in 1908 killed 30,000 city dwellers. By 1917, the planned improvements had still never made it past the drawing board.
    Lured by government support, foreigners brought modern industry to St Petersburg. In Vyborg, Ludwig Nobel set up the giant Phoenix engineering works. The Russian-American ‘Triangle’ rubber firm had more than 11,000 employees. At least 5,000 workers were employed at the Nevsky docks. Vast, red-brick factory complexes were squeezed in everywhere amid the slums: no worker could permit himself the time or expense involved in moving to another neighbourhood. At the same time, this metropolis – just as in Moscow – retained something rural. The countryside was a palpable presence, on the markets, in the characters one saw on the street, in the way neighbours and colleagues interacted. It was something London and Paris had lost long before, the old
mir
, which was preserved even in St Petersburg.
    My friend Yuri Klejner takes me to the Museum of the October Revolution, now rechristened the Museum for Political History. The museum is housed in the same Kshesinskaya Palace at which Lenin arrived that first evening before delivering his fire-and-brimstone speech. Here, too, is where the first offices of
Pravda
were located. The old newspaper-office atmosphere of the lovely art nouveau villa has been minutely reconstructed, right down to the desks, typewriters, oil