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’.

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

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

he certainly emanates a vatic intensity reminiscent of its practices

In a portent to which they did not pay adequate attention, police reported that watching soldiers cheered the workers’ red banners

had shot demonstrators, and had spent the night gathered in their barracks in a long session of self-recrimination. Now its men confronted their captain, Lashkevitch, and declared expiatory mutiny. They would not, they told him, shoot again

What they shared was a certainty that change, a revolution, was necessary, and ineluctable. They were in a new city, in eruption, on Red Monday. The old law was dying, the new not yet decided.

most on the nascent Soviet commission had an analysis and sense that history was not yet theirs. That in this context there were, must be, limitations to and necessary brakes on their own role, their own power. As yet inchoate, this would be the start of a strange strain of self-limiting politics.

In he came, tense but confident, holding the attention of the room with a fervid speech begging the Soviet to acquiesce to this coalition

in essence Order Number 1 was a severe rebuke to traditional military authority – and it would remain so, as a clarion