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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, catastrop…

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

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

The mood grew ugly. Chernov shrank precariously back as suspicious men and women surrounding him jostled closer to where he balanced. A big worker pushed his way through and came up close and shook his fist in Chernov’s face.

‘Take power, you son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, in one of most famous p…