A constitutional monarchy? The mere insinuation provoked in Nicholas a kind of glazed satori of his own limits.

All the generals cursed the ‘bandits’ of the Provisional Government, excoriated their perfidy, railed against them – but, that denunciation done, they admitted they faced a fait accompli.

Sometimes political confrontation was obviated in a short-lived post-revolutionary burst of class camaraderie

Kerensky’s status as ‘minister-cum-democrat’, straddling government and Soviet, was more than mere addition, more even than synthesis. It was apotheosis.

There have been decades of debate about the aetiology of Stalinism, volumes of stories about the man’s brutality and that of his regime. They cast shadows backwards from what would come

They also mitigated Lenin’s typically splenetic denunciation of various enemies, including among liberals, the right, and non-Bolshevik socialists

a combination of misunderstanding of the Pravda edits and rather tendentious retellings

This was an ad hoc realisation of the traditional chiliastic yearning for equal shares of the land for all who worked it – ‘black repartition’, as this redistribution was known – and the freedoms that should ensue.

the careful prolixity of autodidacts

There were poems and prayers and imprecations.