Long days, warm orgiastic nights. A sybariticism for the end of a world.

had at the start of the war inveigled royal permission to join the army

Troops radicalised or gave up hope or both in the grinding war. They wrote bitter, raging letters now to the country’s leaders. One soldier, Kuchlavok, and his regiment sent Izvestia a long, near-glossolalic sermon of despair that their revolution had been in vain, a deflected apocalypse, catastrophe without renewal.

Now another Saviour of the world must be born, to save the people from all the calamities in the making here on earth and to put an end to these bloody days, so that no beast of any kind living on the earth created not by princes and rulers but by God-given nature is wiped out, for God is an invisible being inhabiting whoever possesses a conscience and tells us to live in friendship, but no there are evil people who sow strife among us and poison us one against another pushing us to murder, who wish for others what they would not wish for themselves … They used to say that the war was foisted off on us by Nicholas. Nicholas has been overthrown, so who is foisting the war on us now?

The Bolsheviks took the hardest line: that the Provisional Government in toto could not be trusted

‘Without firing a single shot we were victorious,’ Kerensky wrote, ten years later. The ‘we’ was breathtakingly tendentious.