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

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.

Kerensky’s only sop to the Soviet was the exclusion from his dictatorial Directory of any Kadets

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.

A political via negativa, an apophatic revolutionism

Lenin has fought a lonely battle insisting that the invidious demands be accepted