In Europe

of Political History I had seen a huge painting of a room full of workers, right before the start of a strike. Their pose was that of the disciples in
The Last Supper
. At the Smolny Institute, Lenin's shirts are cherished as relics. And Lenin's official life story was moulded in the same way by Soviet writers to resemble that of Christ. Just as in the Gospels, Lenin's destiny was established at birth, and from that moment on everything went as it had been appointed. Never did he doubt, never did he make a mistake.
    Every religion, of course, contains the same particular episode: the prophet's flight from evil. Marxist-Leninism needed something of the sort too. The days at Razliv were made to fit the bill. Not long after Lenin's death, a monument was erected next to the little straw hut. A museum was built as well; it contained, among other things, Lenin's pillow and his feather bed (today there is a little sign beside those objects saying ‘Replica’). And so Razliv became a prosperous place of pilgrimage to which crowds of visitors came each year, and where the legend was sold in the form of books and souvenirs.
    Fifty years later, the original hut was absolutely rotten and worn out. In deepest secrecy, therefore, Lenin's hiding place was torn down in 1970. The whole thing was then rebuilt in the old style, but with new materials. In addition, a kind of glass box was erected around the hut, the kind one sees more often at sacred sites. Through it, we can view the interior: a table, a bed, a samovar, a chair at the window, a teacup with four dead flies in it, a stable with space for one cow. Lenin's stable at Bethlehem.
    Yemelyanov, the only real worker in the whole story, came to rue the day he rowed Lenin to the other shore. He was dragged from one prisoncamp to the next. ‘Stalin was in the rowing boat, too,’ the party chieftains maintained for years, but Yemelyanov knew that it had actually been Stalin's great rival, Grigori Zinovyev. That was enough to ruin the rest of the man's life. He died in 1958. Even after his death, he was still harassed. The workers from the nearby factory wanted to bear him to the graveyard on their shoulders, but for some reason the local party committee had decided he was to be buried in secret. A tug of war ensued, the police trying to shove his coffin into a truck, the workers pulling it out again.
    ‘Christ Almighty,’ says the neighbour who tells us the story. ‘It was no better than when Yemelyanov was still alive. Put him in prison, take him out again, put him back in. Good Lord, what a life!’
    In the woods around the little hut in the glass box, children are playing in the snow. Smoke curls from the chimney. We take a short stroll. Yuri tells me of his discovery, when leafing through the latest edition of the
Great Encyclopaedia of Russian Philosophy
last week, that Karl Marx was no longer stuck between McLuhan and Marcuse. ‘What, is Marx suddenly not a philosopher any more?’ he said. ‘I went back and took a good look at the list of editors who worked on the encyclopaedia. They're exactly the same ones who did it back in the days of communism. And they're still just as trigger-happy with the red pencil!’
    The parking lot is crowded with the Mercedes and American jeeps of the modern-day residents of Razliv. Until the 1980s, the little straw hut was taken down in winter and then set up again each spring. But after perestroika it was burned down so often that they stopped trying. Unbelief had become the order of the day.
    The heart of the
ancien régime
was the Winter Palace. With its 1,057 crystal rooms and 117 golden stairways, it was a gigantic beehive where some 4,000 courtiers lived and schemed as they swarmed around the absolute centre of power, the czar. It was the stage of Russian power, and in 1917 it was, of course, the stage for the revolution.
    For one whole summer the palace housed the provisional government led by Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. The gilded chambers were the scene of endless meetings. Kerensky's secretary at the time. Pitirim Sorokin, described the prime minister as a man with ‘a terrible aversion to authority,force and cruelty … He believes it is quite possible to govern by means of kind words and noble sentiment. A good man, but a weak leader. In essence, the very picture of the Russian intelligentsia.’ For the Bolsheviks, the Winter Palace was the grand prize,
the
symbol of everything that was wrong with Russia.
    Today,