He populates his city by fiat, ordering merchants and nobles to relocate to the nascent metropolis

he becomes ‘Tsar of All Russias’, head of a colossal and multifarious empire

it is not their softening hearts that drives this. It is anxiety at waves of peasant riots and rebellions, and it is the exigencies of development

poverty drives them to seasonal labour in construction, mining, industry and commerce legal and illegal. Thus they become imbricated with the country’s small but growing working class.

The Marxists are a gaggle of émigrés, reprobates, scholars and workers, in a close weave of family, friendship and intellectual connections, political endeavour and polemic. They tangle in a fractious snarl.

They have come up against a conundrum of left catechism: how does a movement go about being socialist in an unripe country with a weak and marginal capitalism, a vast and ‘backward’ peasantry, and a monarchy that has not had the decency to undergo its bourgeois revolution?

They are a close, loving family, and, given the tsar and tsarina’s obdurate myopia, they are utterly doomed.

In 1902, a police-union strike takes over the whole city of Odessa. Similar mass protests spread throughout south Russia the following year, and not all under the aegis of the authorities’ puppet bodies

But various fits of huff and dudgeon ensue on other issues

It is in the twenty-second session of that gathering that a chasm opens between the delegates, a split remarkable not only for its depth, but also for the seeming triviality of its catalyst. The question is whether a party member should be one who ‘recognises the party’s programme and supports it by material means and by regular personal association under the direction of one of the party organisations’, or ‘by personal participation in one of the party organisations’. Martov demands the former. Lenin stakes all on the latter

Relations between the two have been cooling for some time. Now after an intense, vigorous debate, Martov wins, twenty-eight to twenty-three. But various fits of huff and dudgeon ensue on other issues, and by the time the party leadership is to be decided, walkouts by the Jewish socialist group the Bund and by the Economist Marxists mean Martov has lost eight of his original supporters. Lenin manages to push through his choices for the Central Committee. Minority in Russian is menshinstvo, majority bolshinstvo. From these words the two great wings of Russian Marxism take their names: Martov’s Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

That evening, Gapon, his world view shattered, ‘red hot’, Krupskaya will recall, ‘from the breath of the revolution’, fulminates to a crowd of survivors: ‘We have no Tsar!’

Prominent in the Zhitomir attack were the Black Hundreds, an umbrella name for various cells of proto-fascist ultra-reactionaries, which sprang up out of authoritarian outrage at the 1905 revolution. They are apt to sprinkle a few populist calls, such as for land redistribution, atop fervour for an autocratic tsar – Nicholas II is an honorary member – and murderous spite against non-Russians, most particularly Jews [...]

directing the enthusiasms of Orthodoxy against ‘Christ-killers’, fever dreams of blood-drinking Jews, icons and eschatology and mysticism in the service of depravity

The Bolsheviks, by contrast, contend that in the context of pusillanimous liberalism, the working class itself must lead the revolution, in alliance not with those liberals but with the peasantry

In a fillip to Russian liberalism, Nicholas concedes the principles of legislative powers for the Duma and limited suffrage for urban male workers.

A trenchant sense of culture, discipline and consciousness, of outright irreconcilability with the bourgeoisie

In this fraught and protean political culture, the pride and shame of the oppressed are inextricable.

he Orthodox Church propagates its lugubrious and ornate moralism – against which chafe dissenting sects, minorities, sexual dissidents in the cities’ queer hinterlands, radicals.

Cities full of cutting-edge industries imported from Europe punctuate a vastness where four-fifths of the people are peasants tied to the soil, in near-feudal abjection.

They want increased pay, the dismissal of hated supervisors and – again that copula of economic and political demands – the eight-hour day

In August 1914, the name of St Petersburg itself is changed to the more Slavonic Petrograd: in semiotic rebellion against this idiocy, the local Bolsheviks continue to style themselves the ‘Petersburg Committee’.

Liberals now pledge themselves again to the sclerotic regime the modernisation of which is their notional raison d’être. ‘We demand nothing’, simpers Milyukov, ‘and impose no conditions.’

Lenin will not call him comrade, will not shake his hand. Lenin damns his old collaborator with remorseless cold invective.

But the country’s armed forces, albeit somewhat modernised since 1904, are still in a parlous state.

he certainly emanates a vatic intensity reminiscent of its practices

Nicholas receives word after desperate word that he must alter course to survive. The British ambassador transgresses protocol to warn him he is on the brink of 'revolution and disaster'.

Nothing seems to stir behind those placid tsarry eyes.

The tsarina is overcome with pious grief. The right are delighted, hoping Alexandra will now repair to an asylum, and that Nicholas will magically gain a resolve he has never had. But Rasputin, colourful as he was, was only ever a morbid symptom. His murder is not a palace coup. It is not a coup at all.

What will end the Russian regime is not the gruesome death of that pantomime figure too outlandish to be invented; nor is it the epochal tetchiness of Russian liberals; nor the outrage of monarchists at an inadequate monarch.

What will end it comes up from below.