In Europe

more than eighty years later, Yuri Klejner shows me around the palace. For decades, his father worked here as head of the technical service. To him, the Winter Palace is like a second home. He shows me the sunny winter solarium with its view of the Neva, the hanging gardens on the roof (complete with trees), the immense marble throne room, the floors inlaid with dozens of types of wood, and the most ornate golden coach I had ever seen. The imperial eagles on the chandeliers survived the revolution, as did the iron coat hooks in the quarters of the czar's palace guards. ‘Very little has changed here since 1917,'Yuri tells me. ‘The palace was made into a museum almost at once.’ Picassos now hang in Nicholas II's private chambers. Some of the rooms have a splendid view of the square, the rest are low-ceilinged and plain.
    In the hall is a huge block of marble bearing the text: ‘In memory of the storming of this palace by the revolutionary workers, soldiers and seamen on the evening of 26 October …’
    Yuri takes me to a small set of stairs close to a side entrance. ‘If fighting went on anywhere, it was here. In all the Soviet films you see the soldiers running up the central stairway with lots of shooting and people taking cover behind the pillars. Those are the images that are burned into our collective memory. But in reality, none of that took place. There was no real storming of the palace. It all went very quickly. All of the central points in the city, the train stations, the electricity plant, the telephone switchboard, were already in the hands of the Bolsheviks. In the street, life went on as usual, the trams were running, the restaurants remained open. And there was no mass uproar. In the old pictures of the October Revolution you can see how few people were really involved.’
    Yuri stresses it over and over: the only real revolution in 1917 was the February Revolution, the revolt by the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries, Western-oriented intellectuals who hoped gradually to mould Russia into a European democracy. The Bolsheviks’ October Revolution (for Westerners it was actually in November, because of the different calendarsused) was in every way a forced and unnatural happening. Their coup would ultimately clear the way for a brand of Eastern despotism of which Czar Nicholas II could only dream, but then behind a socialist façade.
    ‘Look how easy it must have been: if there had been one man with a machine gun on those stairs, and another one on the landing, the Winter Palace could never have been stormed. But it was complete chaos. Kerensky had already fled the city. The rest of the provisional government was in the Winter Palace, without lights, without a telephone, with no idea what to do. The building was defended by a battalion of women and cadets. A couple of Bolshevik commissioners simply forced their way in through a side entrance, a few soldiers followed them, and the initial looting was stopped. Then the commissioners came back outside through the big front doors and told the crowd: “Go home, it's all over.”’
    But what about the world-famous cannonade from the cruiser
Aurora
, which supposedly signalled the start of the revolution? ‘That was just a single blank shell, it didn't mean a thing. There's still a replica of the
Aurora
in the Neva, you can see it from here. All fake. The Bolsheviks never cared about the substance, it was always the theatrics.'Yuri Klejner tells me how, in recent years, guides at the palace tried to tell the real story. They had to stop, because they received too many complaints. ‘These days they're back at the Jordanian Stairs again, up to their knees in blood.’
    He shows me the Malachite Room with its enormous green pillars and its view of the river. ‘This is where the provisional government met for the last time. The ministers were arrested afterwards in the private dining room next door. In the 1950s, an old man came to the palace and insisted on seeing this room. “You know, this is where they arrested me,” he said. “When was that?” “In 1917.” As it turned out, he had been the state secretary of railways in the provisional government, too insignificant a post to be killed.’ The clock in the side room has been stopped at the time the arrests were made, 1.40 a.m.
    The cabinet ministers of the provisional government were carried off, like so many others, to the Peter and Paul Fortress. ‘The winter season at the