In Europe

a bed of nails when his sexual urges threatened to get out of hand.
    Yuri tells me about one of his grandmother's friends, another of these early revolutionaries. ‘He was arrested, but refused to talk. Then the secret police played a nasty trick on him: they just let him go. His revolutionary comrades of course thought he had told them everything. They lured him to a remote place, had him sit down, poured a bottle of acid over his head and ran away. He was blinded, and wore a mask for the rest of his life. But the worst thing, he wrote later, was that his comrades never asked him a thing, they simply assumed that he had betrayed them, the truth did not interest them at all.’
    On Sunday evening, 17 September, 1916, the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue was present, as was his custom, at the opening of Petrograd's new theatre season. In his journal he describes his impressions of that evening. In the Marunsky theatre one saw the loveliest of jewels and gorgeous wardrobes, and everywhere there were young beauties, ‘their bright eyes … sparkling with merriment’. The enormous hall with its blue and gold tapestries was filled to the rafters. ‘From the stalls to the back row of the highest circle I could see nothing but a crowd of cheery, smiling faces.’ Still, the ambassador also felt the approach of something ominous. ‘There was something blithe and unreal to it all,’ he wrote.
    That applied to the whole city. Everyone was talking about the ‘German’ Czarina Alexandra – Alice of Hesse – and her protégé Rasputin, who had reportedly committed treason. A palace coup had failed – on 16 December, Rasputin was murdered (albeit with great difficulty) and his body thrown into the Neva by the clique surrounding Prince Yusopov. The czar only grew more recalcitrant. The town was buzzing with the word ‘revolution’. The wealthy gambled away their fortunes, drank their cellars dry and threw one wild party after another. ‘More and more people are behaving like animals and madmen,’ Maxim Gorky wrote to a friend in November 1915. And, in that same month, to his wife: ‘We will soon have a famine. I advise you to buy ten pounds of bread and hide it. In the suburbs of Petrograd you can see well-dressed women begging on the streets. It is very cold.’
    The Great World Revolution finally began on Thursday morning, 23 February, 1917, in Petrograd's Vyborg district. A group of housewives had been waiting in vain to buy bread. It was the first mild day after three months of bitter cold. The women grew unruly. There were a few minor disturbances, and then the workers from the nearby factories joined in. That same afternoon, 100,000 workers, women and children marched on Nevsky Prospect, chanting slogans such as ‘Bread!’ and ‘Down with the czar!'Two days later, on Saturday, 25 February, the city was shut down by a general strike.
    The Cossacks were called in against the strikers. When the cavalrymen had assembled for the charge on Nevsky Prospect, a young girl left the crowd, walked up to the commanding officer and, amid a breathlesssilence, handed him a bouquet of red roses. The man smiled, accepted the roses and bowed. A thundering cheer went up from both demonstrators and soldiers. ‘Our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers are crying for bread,’ a young sergeant shouted. ‘Are we going to kill them?’ This would not be another 1905. Czar Nicholas II's fate was sealed. On 2 March, he abdicated, leaving the throne to his younger brother, Grand Duke Michael. The next day, Michael decided not to accept. That was the end of the Romanov dynasty, which had been in power for more than three centuries.
    Six months after the opening of the theatre season, on 7 April, 1917, Paléologue went to the Marunsky again. ‘All of the imperial coats of arms and the golden eagles have been removed. The box attendants have exchanged their sumptuous court liveries for miserable grey jackets. The theatre was filled with an audience of bourgeois, students and soldiers.’ The stately dukes had been arrested, the aides-de-camp in their gaudy uniforms had been shot, the rest were fleeing for their lives. In the box formerly reserved for the czar there were now deportees, just back from exile in Siberia. They stared at the crowd in wonder and awe. That was the end of the 1916–17 season.
    The Marunsky still stands. The ‘Mari’, as the people call it, is a classic Eastern European theatre. One Saturday evening I