In Europe

the new future began. And here too, in February 1921, arose the first opposition to the Bolsheviks.
    The dam we drive across took years to build, and has created considerable problems for the Neva Delta ecosystem. Along the way we pass dozens of petrified projects: half-completed locks, bridges that end somewhere in mid-air, viaducts with neither entrance nor exit. Everything here is in one great state of incompletion. The island itself houses two centuries of military architecture: red arsenals, yellow barracks and elegant nineteenth-century officers’ messes, bullet holes from the 1920s and the Second World War, stark, rectangular neighbourhoods full of living quarters from more recent decades. Beside the huge Seaman's Cathedral lies Anchor Square, now empty and bare, but once known as the ‘Free University’ because of the fiery speeches made there.
    The sun is shining. Little groups of cadets stroll along the waterfront. With their black caps and gold clasps they look like fishermen from some Zuider Zee town. A little further along is a row of huge, grey warships, the remnants of a proud Soviet fleet. Encouraged by the sailors, I take a few pictures. Five years ago, that would have cost me a few months in jail. The rust and poverty aboard these ships are much greater enemies than any spy could ever be.
    In the car, the talk turns to leaving and staying. Yuri and his wife Irahave always dreamed of escaping the flat tyres and flaking concrete. Their son Sasha, a twenty-two-year-old law student, definitely wants to stay, as do his friends. ‘That's the striking thing about this generation,’ Ira says. ‘They love this city. They know that all kinds of things can happen, good and bad, from one day to the next, and they want to be around to see it.’
    Sasha says his friends all have their own reasons for staying. ‘A lot of people simply
can't
leave. Others stay for the scams. They see so much murky water to fish in, so many opportunities to make some fast money, you'd never find that in the neat, orderly West. And then there are the students, people like me. We think it's more exciting here. We don't feel like listening to the biased viewpoints of the Americans and the Europeans, the kind of people who think they know everything about Russian literature.’
    ‘We never used to have the feeling that this country was our country,’ Yuri says. ‘But now we do, no matter how miserably things are going. Under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the general feeling was that it was “them against us”. Now we know that we're ruled by a clique of bandits, but somehow it's still our regime.’
    Ira believes it's a bit more complicated than that. ‘Stalin and Brezhnev didn't cheat us. They didn't act as though they were anything but what they were. “Love us, or we'll have you shot,” they said. So we pretended we loved them. Now we have the right to respond. They cheat everyone, they buy people's favours, but you can still say: don't let yourself be bought. Now we truly have the government we deserve.’
    At that point, the Lada finally comes down with a puncture. Yuri stops in the middle of the road to change the back tyre, the traffic goes racing by on both sides.
    At last we arrive in the little village of Razliv, a group of wooden houses where Lenin, disguised as a worker, hid in a barn in 1917. A series of demonstrations had got out of hand, and the Bolsheviks could not avoid taking the blame. Lenin himself was on holiday at the time, and the ‘attempted revolution’ degenerated into a looting party. To make matters worse, the public's opinion of Lenin and his crew took a huge swing when the provisional government published evidence of German aid to the Bolshevik cause.
    Lenin had no intention of standing trial. His life and work were too important to him to risk playing the martyr, and he was less courageous in practice than he was in theory. So he took to his heels, along with his old friend Grigori Zinovyev. They spent four days in a barn, until a worker, Nikolai Yemelyanov, rowed them across the lake at Razliv and hid them for a while in a straw hut. After that the great leader went to Finland until the affair blew over. That's the whole story.
    The Bolsheviks, though, did have an excellent feeling for theatre, and knew that their ideology could only be made palatable to the Russian people by turning it into a new religion. As far as that went, Lenin's early hardships came as a godsend. In the Museum