In Europe

Peter and Paul Fortress Health Spa got off to a roaring start,’ the satirical magazine the
Devil's Peppermill
wrote in early 1918. ‘Government ministers, statesmen, politicians, elected officials, writers and other prominentfigures from the czarist regime and the provisional government, members of the soviets and the constitutional assembly, social democrats and social revolutionaries all arrived at this well known holiday resort with its illustrious therapies: cold, starvation and mandatory rest, punctuated on occasion by surgical procedures, bloodbaths and other exciting activities.’
    In the meantime, the old Russia was falling apart. On 3 March, 1918, the Bolsheviks and the Germans signed the ‘humiliating treaty’ of Brest-Litovsk. The Russian Empire lost Finland, Russian Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. Russia's ‘warm’ connections to Europe via the Caspian and the Black Sea were cut off. The country lost thirty-two per cent of its agricultural land, thirty-four per cent of its population, fifty-four per cent of its industry and eighty-nine per cent of its coal mines. The terms of the treaty were so humiliating that the party leadership almost decided to resume the war against Germany. Lenin was able to prevent that, but the motion was defeated by only a single vote. His German financiers had every reason to be satisfied. As a European power, Russia was finished.
    A series of famines broke out, and at the same time two civil wars were fought: the first between the Reds and the Whites (the latter including countless social democrats), and the second between central Russia and the warlords of the Ukraine and Caucasus. In southern Russia and the Ukraine, the Whites murdered at least 100,000 Jews between 1918–19. Kiev changed regimes no fewer than sixteen times between the end of 1918 and summer 1920. By 1921, the entire Russian production of foodstuffs had shrunk to half the level of 1913. Between 1917–20, the population of Moscow decreased by a half, that of Petrograd by two thirds.
    Lenin used the chaos to start immediately on a programme of agricultural reforms. ‘Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than a hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers,’ he directed in a letter to the Bolsheviks in a distant, troubled province. ‘Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: They are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks … Find some truly hard people.’
    As early as August 1918 he ordered the first forced-labour camps to be built, to accommodate ‘unreliable elements’. Four years later there were eighty-four of them, with more than 80,000 prisoners, more than hadever been arrested under the czar. During his time in power, Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, was probably responsible for some 200,000 executions. In 1922 the Cheka was renamed, but during that brief period ‘those two syllables’ – as Ilya Ehrenburg wrote – ‘summoned up so much fear and emotion in every citizen who had lived through the revolution’ that they were never forgotten. During the chaotic period between 1917–22, an estimated three to five million people were killed. This was how Russia separated itself from Europe.
    ‘Now I'm going to tell you a story from my own life,’ Yuri says once we are standing outside, in the square before the Winter Palace. ‘In the early 1950s my father was responsible for all technical matters in the Hermitage. During popular demonstrations in this square, it was his job to make sure those statues up there did not fall off the roof. And that huge pillar was to remain standing as well, of course. An accident like that would have been an absurd coincidence, but whenever something like that did happen it was called “sabotage”, and someone had to bear the blame. That person was my father, a scapegoat from the word go. That's the way the Soviet system worked.
    ‘My father would therefore climb up onto this pillar and onto the roof with the other man responsible, the head municipal architect, they would look around, mumble to each other about what a load of nonsense it was, and have a little drink together. That's the way the Soviet system worked as well.
    ‘Every year on 1 May and 7 November, a huge parade and demonstration was held here. There was no television at the time, so everyone wanted to be there. Thanks to his remarkable