By the constant threat of reshuffles, he kept his last, etiolated Provisional Government in line

Some districts and representatives remained optimistic – Latsis, as ever, was positively boosterish – but many grew chary.

The guards were adamant they could not come in. It seemed as if after their heart-in-mouth journey, the officious defences of their own side might stymie them.

With all the seriousness in the world, like burnt-out matches telling grim stories of the conflagration they will soon start, the ashes of Russia’s Provisional Government debated which of them to make dictator.

Dictator Kishkin rushed to the military headquarters to take command. His first action was to dismiss the chief of staff, Polkovnikov, and replace him with Bagratuni. This provoked the first crack in his absolute authority: miraculously resistant to awe at Kishkin’s power, Polkovnikov’s associates resigned en masse in protest at his scapegoating.

Some made it through the perforated MRC defence and went glumly home. Some sat staring out of the windows.

Revolutionary government was proclaimed.

Revolutionary government had been proclaimed, and that was enough for one night. It would more than do for a first meeting, surely.

Exhausted, drunk on history, nerves still taut as wires, the delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets stumbled out of Smolny. They stepped out of the finishing school into a new moment of history, a new kind of first day, that of a workers’ government, morning in a new city, the capital of a workers’ state. They walked into the winter under a dim but lightening sky.