In Europe

lamps and antique telephones. In the middle of the hall is a huge model of the emblem of the former Soviet Union, in shiny red and gold plastic. On the wall is a big map of Russia as it was in the year 1912.
    Yuri is a historian and a professor of English literature, and above all a fantastic storyteller. But here he is given no chance. The matron whosuddenly appears before us is seething with rage: we are not even allowed to whisper as long as the official guide is speaking. She wears her grey hair pulled back in a bun, in accordance with former Party fashion. When we refuse to be silent, she all but throws us out of the building.
    During those first few months, Lenin spoke to the masses from the balcony here on any number of occasions. His exact words are no longer known, but the scene itself was repeated later in countless Soviet films, played by actors who looked a little like Lenin. The action is always the same: Lenin walks out onto the balcony, and the crowd falls silent.
    ‘I always thought that was the way it went, too,’ Yuri whispers, ‘until I ran into an old woman in Estonia who told me she had worked as a governess in Petrograd in 1917. “Where did you live?” I asked her. “Beside the palace,” she said. “Did you see Lenin there?” “Of course I did.” “Did you ever see him speak from the balcony?” “Oh yes, I was standing on the next balcony.” This woman was in deadly earnest, the way all those Baltic people are. So I asked her: “How did that go?” “During those first few weeks there were usually a few hundred people in the crowd,” she told me, “and they were all shouting. And Lenin would start to speak and they would just keep shouting. Angry, approving, everything at the same time.” “Did they really shout that loudly?” “Oh yes, we were standing almost beside him and we could barely hear a word he said.”’
    On display here are the famous photographs of the massacre in front of the Winter Palace in January 1905, on Bloody Sunday. And the petition the crowd was trying to hand over: ‘We, the workers and citizens of St Petersburg, of the various estates, our wives, our children and our old, helpless parents, we come to you, Sire, looking for assistance and protection …’
    ‘1905 was a crucial year,’ Yuri says. ‘The Russians wanted to win a fast war in order to boost morale. They saw Japan as an odd little country they could knock over just like that. But the Japanese were definitely no backward orientals any more, and the Russians lost. Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed, famine swept the country. The movement that arose among the people then was, above all, a symbolic revolution. It was organised by a priest, Georgi Gapon, and meshed perfectly with the philosophy of the czar himself, of the father caring for his children. All the czar would have had to say was: “My children, I love you.” But hehad his soldiers fire on the praying crowd. No one forgave him for that. The czar himself laid the foundation for the communist revolution.’
    In the museum, as one would expect, there are dozens of portraits of famous and less famous revolutionaries. The striking thing is almost all of them have a particular look in their eyes.
    ‘Burning,’ I say.
    ‘Fiery,’ Yuri says.
    ‘Something mad,’ I say.
    Just as in Paris, London and Vienna, the cafés and salons of St Petersburg had witnessed one philosophical fashion after another. In 1840 it was Hegel, in 1860 it was Darwin, and in 1880 it was ‘almost indecent’ for a student not to be a Marxist. And the Russians dealt with the phenomenon of philosophy in an unusual way. Every doctrine was embraced as the absolute truth, a religion that allowed no room for even the slightest doubt. These religiously tinted feelings were, without exception, mingled with a sense of guilt. Almost all the radical intellectuals, after all, came from wealthy families; even Lenin lived for years from the proceeds from his grandfather's estate in Kazan, the whole time damning the practices of ‘rural capitalism’.
    The primal Russian revolutionary was more an anchorite than he was an intellectual, Yuri feels. Take Rakhmetov, the gruesome hero of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel
What Is To Be Done?
, which influenced whole generations. Rakhmetov allowed nothing to distract him from his political objectives, not even a beautiful widow who fell in love with him. He lived like a puritan, ate only raw beef and even slept on