In Europe

go there and watch a performance of
Boris Gudonov
, from the gallery. In my row are two old ladies in floral dresses and five schoolgirls wearing starched white blouses, there are twenty sailors in the row in front of me. Nothing seems to have changed since the days of the czar. The Marunsky is a temple; ballet and theatre are its perfectly performed rituals.
    The next morning I leave for a day trip with Yuri's family, all packed into his long-suffering Lada. The stamina of this country, even of its objects of daily use, is impressive. The poor tyres bash constantly through holes in the asphalt, the shock absorbers, frame and differential groan, and it all keeps working.
    First we stop in to see Grandma, Yuri's great-grandmother. Alexandra Vasilyeva, a retired theatre director, is lying under a red chequered blanket, her little face white amid the fluffy pillows. She is 102.
    Alexandra was once one of those young beauties the French ambassador saw at the Marunsky, ‘sparkling with excitement’. ‘Oh, were youthere last night?’ she warbles from her bed. ‘I used to go there all the time, I got free tickets from a merchant friend.’ She giggles. ‘I would sit there in all my plainness, amid all that gold and jewellery. And then came the revolution. Those were exciting days! And dangerous! My husband was a very fussy dresser, and whenever we were stopped somewhere we always trembled in fear at the thought that we might look too neat and capitalist. He could have been shot right there on the spot, in those natty clothes of his! Fortunately he worked in the movies, and he always carried a letter from the film company. Those soldiers and bandits thought a film star was fantastic, they wouldn't shoot someone like that.’
    Her voice trails off; she has fallen asleep again.
    She went on directing plays all her life, Yuri whispers. Even now, she continues to do so. She talks in her sleep, giving instructions on the lighting, directing the actors. In her dreams she is always at work, in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, St Petersburg, everywhere.
    We drive down Ulitsa Sovyetskaya. The façades are a brownish-grey, just like the clumps of snow still lying in the street. The only colour comes from the red traffic light. This street was where the idealistic sisters Anna and Nadezhda Alliluyeva once lived. Their house was a major nest of revolutionaries in 1917. A stern-looking woman opens the door. The apartment has been maintained as a revolutionary relic, completely intact, spacious and bright with sunny rooms, a cupboard full of books, a samovar for tea, a piano to sing songs to. Sergei Alliluyev, the girls’ father, was a worker who must have earned a decent salary: in the Soviet era he could never have afforded a house like this for his daughters.
    The Alliluyevas, with their unadulterated working-class background, were an exception in the little world of the Bolsheviks. The interiors here speak of a desire for order and bourgeois comfort, something a ‘damned’ revolutionary did not strive for. Nevertheless, during the brief period he spent here hiding from the provisional government, Lenin was all too willing to put up with the girls’ bourgeois respectability. I gaze in awe at the plain zinc bathtub in which the great leader once scrubbed his back.
    Stalin was a frequent guest here as well. He had his eye on the younger sister, Nadezhda. She was seventeen, he was thirty-nine, and she fairly swooned at the sight of his revolutionary moustache. Rumour had it thatNadezhda was in fact Stalin's daughter; as a young man, he'd had an affair with Mother Alliluyeva. Five months after they married she bore him a son, Vasil, followed in 1927 by a daughter, Svetlana. In November 1932, Nadezhda, who contradicted her husband too often, was apparently driven to suicide. Her sister Anna was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1948, her brother-in-law was shot in 1938, her daughter Svetlana fled to the United States, her son Vasili joined the air force, ended up in prison for corruption and died a lonely alcoholic in Kazan. But the stern-looking housekeeper tells us none of that.
    As we drive out of town, the tyres of our Lada are put through a living hell: the worn and mangled road to the island fortress of Kronstadt. Until only four years ago this area was off-limits, but this Sunday afternoon we can drive right in. Here lay the heart of Petrograd's Bolshevik revolution. This was home base for the sailors of the
Aurora
. Here is where