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Russia is both a great, glorious country and an ongoing disaster. Just when you decide it is the one, it turns around and discloses the other. For a hundred years before 1917, it experienced wild disorders and political violence interspersed with periods of unquiet calm, meanwhile producing some of the world’s greatest literature and booming in population and helping to feed Europe.

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Then it leapt into a revolution unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, a hundred years afterward, we still don’t know quite what to make of that huge event. The Russians themselves aren’t too sure about its significance. I used to tell people that I loved Russia, because I do. I think everybody has a country not their own that they’re powerfully drawn to; Russia is mine. I can’t explain the attraction, only observe its symptoms going back to childhood, such as listening over and over to Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” narrated by Peter Ustinov, when I was 6, or standing in the front yard at night as my father pointed out Sputnik crossing the sky.

Now I’ve traveled enough in Russia that my affections are more complicated. I know that almost no conclusion I ever draw about it is likely to be right. The way to think about Russia is without thinking about it. I just try to love it and yield to it and go with it, while also paying vigilant attention—if that makes sense.

I first began traveling to Russia more than 24 years ago, and in 2010 I published, a book about trips I’d made to that far-flung region. With the fall of the Soviet Union, areas previously closed to travelers had opened up. During the 1990s and after, the pace of change in Russia cascaded. A harsh kind of capitalism grew; democracy came and mostly went. Then, two years ago, my son moved to the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains, on the edge of Siberia, and he lives there now. I see I will never stop thinking about this country.

2 The city of St. Petersburg endlessly explains itself, in plaques and monuments everywhere you turn.

It still possesses the majesty of an imperial capital, with its plazas, rows of 18th- and 19th-century government buildings receding to a vanishing point, glassy canals and towering cloudscapes just arrived from the Baltic Sea. The layout makes a grand backdrop, and the revolution was the climactic event it served as a backdrop for.

A taxi dropped me beside the Fontanka Canal at Nevskii Prospekt, where my friend Luda has an apartment in a building on the corner. Luda and I met 18 years ago, when Russian friends who had known her in school introduced us. I rented one of several apartments she owns in the city for a few months in 2000 and 2001. We became friends despite lack of a common language; with my primitive but slowly improving Russian and her kind tolerance of it, we made do. Now I often stay with her when I’m in the city. When we first knew each other Luda worked for the local government and was paid so little that, she said, she would be able to visit the States only if she went a year without eating or drinking. Then she met a rich Russian-American, married him and moved to his house in Livingston, New Jersey, about ten miles from us.

After her husband died she stayed in the house by herself. I saw her often, and she came to visit us for dinner. The house eventually went to her husband’s children, and now she divides her time between St. Petersburg and Miami.

I have more phone numbers for her than for anyone else in my address book. The courtyard of the Peter and Paul Fortress, St.

Pmp Fastrack V8 License Serial Number. Petersburg’s original citadel and, in the early years of Bolshevik rule, a prison complex and execution ground. (Olga Ingurazova) Her Nevskii apartment’s mid-city location is good for my purposes because when I’m in St. Petersburg I walk all over, sometimes 15 miles or more in a day. One morning, I set out for the Finland Station, on the north side of the Neva, across the Liteynyi Bridge from the city’s central district. The stroll takes about 20 minutes. As you approach the station, you see, on the square in front, a large statue of Lenin, speaking from atop a stylized armored car. One hand holds the lapel of his greatcoat, the other arm extends full length, gesturing rhetorically.

This is your basic and seminal Lenin statue. The Finlandskii Voksal enters the story in April of 1917. It’s where the world-shaking, cataclysmic part of the Russian Revolution begins. ********** Most of the hard-core professional revolutionaries did not participate in the February Revolution, having been earlier locked up, exiled or chased abroad by the czar’s police. (That may be why the vain and flighty Alexander Kerensky rose to power so easily after February: The major-leaguers had not yet taken the field.) Lenin was living in Zurich, where he and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had rented a small, disagreeable room.

Awaiting developments, Lenin kept company with other expatriate Socialists, directed the Petrograd Bolsheviks by mail and telegram, and spent time in the public library. He did not hear of the czar’s abdication until some time after the fact. A Polish Socialist stopped by and brought news of revolution in Russia in the middle of the day, just after Krupskaya had finished washing the lunch dishes. Immediately Lenin grew almost frantic with desire to get back to Petrograd. His wife laughed at his schemes of crossing the intervening borders disguised as a speech- and hearing-impaired Swede, or of somehow obtaining an airplane. Leon Trotsky, who would become the other major Bolshevik of the revolution, was then living in (of all places) the Bronx.

With his wife and two young sons he had recently moved into a building that offered an elevator, garbage chute, telephone and other up-to-date conveniences the family enjoyed. Trotsky hailed the February Revolution as a historic development and began to make arrangements for a trans-Atlantic voyage. Both Trotsky and Lenin had won fame by 1917. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, which emerged from the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, after splitting with the more moderate Mensheviks, kept its membership to a small group of dedicated followers.

Lenin believed that the Bolsheviks must compromise with nobody. Since 1900, he had lived all over Europe, spending more time outside Russia than in it, and emphasized the international aspect of the proletariat revolution. Lenin wrote articles for Socialist journals and he published books; many devotees knew of him from his writings. Trotsky also wrote, but he was a flashier type and kept a higher public profile. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in the Ukraine, he had starred in the 1905 Revolution: At only 26 he organized a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies that lasted for 50 days before the government crushed it. Lenin’s return to Russia required weeks of arrangements.

Through German contacts he and a party of other exiled revolutionaries received permission to go by train via Germany, whose government encouraged the idea in the hope that Lenin and his colleagues would make a mess of Russia and thereby help Germany win the war. In pursuit of their political ends Lenin and the Bolsheviks acted as German agents and their policy of “revolutionary defeatism” strengthened the enemy. They went on to receive tens of millions of German marks in aid before the Kaiser’s government collapsed with the German defeat, although that collusion would not be confirmed until later. The last leg of Lenin’s homeward journey led through Finland. Finally, at just after 11 on the night of April 16, he arrived in Petrograd at the Finland Station.

In all the iconography of Soviet Communism few events glow as brightly as this transfiguring arrival. Lenin and his fellows assumed they would be arrested upon stepping off the train. Instead, they were met by a band playing “The Marseillaise,” sailors standing in ranks at attention, floral garlands, a crowd of thousands and a searchlight sweeping its beam through the night.

The president of the Petrograd Soviet, a Menshevik, welcomed Lenin with a condescending speech and reminded him that all Socialists now had to work together. Lenin listened abstractedly, looking around and toying with a bouquet of red roses someone had given him. When he responded, his words “cracked like a whip in the face of the ‘revolutionary democracy,’” according to one observer. Turning to the crowd, Lenin said, Dear Comrades, soldiers, sailors, and workers! I am happy to greet in your persons the victorious Russian revolution, and to greet you as the vanguard of the worldwide proletarian army.the hour is not far distant when at the call of our comrade Karl Liebknecht, the people of Germany will turn their arms against their own capitalist exploiters.The worldwide Socialist revolution has already dawned.the Russian revolution accomplished by you has prepared the way and opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide Socialist revolution! A member of the Petrograd Soviet named Nikolai Sukhanov, who later wrote a seven-volume memoir of the revolution, heard Lenin’s speech and was staggered.

Sukhanov compared it to a bright beacon that obliterated everything he and the other Petrograd Socialists had been doing. “It was very interesting!” he wrote, though he hardly agreed with it. I believe it affected him—and all of Russia, and the revolution, and a hundred years of subsequent history—because not since Peter the Great had anyone opened dark, remote, closed-in Russia so forcefully to the rest of the world. The country had long thought of itself as set apart, the “Third Rome,” where the Orthodox Faith retained its original and unsullied purity (the Second Rome having been Constantinople). But Russia had never spread that faith widely abroad. Now Lenin informed his listeners that they had pioneered the international Socialist revolution, and would go forth into the world and proselytize the masses. It was an amazing vision, Marxist and deeply Russian simultaneously, and it helped sustain the despotic Bolsheviks, just as building St.

Petersburg, no matter how brutal the cost, drove Peter the Great 200 years before. After Lenin, Russia would involve itself aggressively in the affairs of countries all over the world. That sense of global mission, soon corrupted to strategic meddling and plain troublemaking, is why America still worries about Russia today. Lenin’s office inside the former mansion of the ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya is preserved as a part of the Museum of Russian Political History. (Olga Ingurazova) Making his ascension to the pantheon complete, Lenin then went out in front of the station and gave a speech from atop an armored car. It is this moment that the statue in the plaza refers to. Presumably, the searchlight illuminated him, film-noirishly.

As the armored car slowly drove him to Bolshevik headquarters he made more speeches standing on the vehicle’s hood. Items associated with this holy night have been preserved as relics. The steam engine that pulled the train that Lenin arrived in resides in a glass enclosure next to the Finland Station’s Platform Number 9. And an armored car said to be the same one that he rode in and made the speeches from can be found in an unfrequented wing of the immense Artillery Museum, not far away. Guards are seldom in evidence in the part of the museum where the historic bronevik sits permanently parked. Up close the armored car resembles a cartoon of a scary machine. It has two turrets, lots of rivets and hinges, flanges for the machine guns, solid rubber tires, and a long, porcine hood, completely flat and perfect for standing on.

The vehicle is olive drab, made of sheet iron or steel, and it weighs about six tons. With no guard to stop me I rubbed its cold metal flanks.

On its side, large, hand-painted red letters read: VRAG KAPITALA, or “Enemy of Capital.” When Lenin mounted this metal beast, the symbolic connection to Peter the Great pulled tight. Falconet’s equestrian Peter that rears its front hooves over Senate Square—as it reared over the dead and wounded troops of the Decembrists in 1825—haunts the city forever. It’s the dread “Bronze Horseman” of the Pushkin poem. Gesturing dramatically from atop his armored beast-car, Lenin can be construed as re-enacting that statue, making it modernist, and configuring in his own image the recently deposed Russian autocracy. Alone with the beast in the all-but-deserted Artillery Museum, I went over it again.

At its back, on the lower corners on each side, two corkscrew-shaped iron appendages stuck out. I could not imagine what they were for. Maybe for attaching to something? But then why not use a simple metal hitch or loop? I still don’t know. And of course the appendages looked exactly like the tails of pigs.

Russia is an animist country. In Russia all kinds of objects have spirits.

Non-animal things are seen as animals, and often the works of men and women are seen as being identical with the men and women themselves. This native animism will take on special importance in the case of Lenin.

********** Bolshevik headquarters occupied one of the city’s fanciest mansions, which the revolutionaries had expropriated from its owner, a ballerina named Matilda Kshesinskaya. Malice aforethought may be assumed, because Kshes­inskaya had a thing for Romanovs.

After a performance when she was 17, she met Nicholas, the future czar, and they soon began an affair that lasted for a few years, until Alexander III died. Nicholas then ascended the throne and married the German princess Alix of Hesse (thenceforth to be known as Empress Alexandra Feodorovna). After Nicholas, the ballerina moved on to his father’s first cousin, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. During her affair with that grand duke, she met another one—Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, Nicholas’ first cousin. They also began an affair.

Such connections helped her to get good roles in the Imperial Ballet, although, in fairness, critics also regarded her as an outstanding dancer. Whom she knew came in handy during the hard days of the war.

In the previous winter the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, had been unable to find coal to heat his embassy. He even asked the head of the Russian Navy, who said there was none. While out on a walk with the French ambassador, Buchanan happened to see four military lorries at Kshesinskaya’s house and a squad of soldiers unloading sacks of coal. “Well, if that isn’t a bit too thick!” Buchanan remarked. Good contacts kept her a step ahead of events in 1917. Warned, Kshes­inskaya fled with her more portable valuables before the Bolsheviks arrived.

Later she and her son and Grand Duke Andrei emigrated to Paris, where she ran a ballet school and lived to be almost 100 years old. A movie, Matilda, based on her affair with Nicholas, is due to be released in Russia on October 25, 2017. Admirers of Nicholas have sought to ban it, arguing that it violates his privacy. The mansion, an example of the school known as Style Moderne, won a prize for the best building facade in St. Petersburg from the City Duma in 1910, the year after its construction. It sits on a corner near Trinity Square, and from a second-story French window a balcony with decorative wrought-iron grillwork extends above the street.

In Soviet times the mansion became the Museum of the October Revolution, said to be confusing for its many omissions, such as not showing any pictures of Trotsky. Today the building houses the Museum of Russian Political History, which tells the story of the revolution in clear and splendid detail, using text, photos, film, sounds and objects.

I have spent hours going through its displays, but my favorite part of the museum is the balcony. I stand and stare at it from the sidewalk.

Upon his arrival from the Finland Station, Lenin made a speech from this balcony. By then he had grown hoarse. Sukhanov, who had followed the armored car’s procession, could not tear himself away. The crowd did not necessarily like what it heard, and a soldier near Sukhanov, interpreting Lenin’s internationalist sentiments as pro-German, said that he should be bayoneted—a reminder that although “Bolshevik” meant, roughly, “one of the majority,” not many ordinary Russians, or a majority of Socialists, or even all Bolsheviks, shared Lenin’s extreme views. Lenin gave other speeches from the balcony during the three months more that the Bolsheviks used the mansion.

Photographs show him speaking from it, and it appears in Socialist Realist paintings. A plaque notes the balcony’s revolutionary role, but both plaque and subject are above eye level, and no passersby stop to look.

In fact, aside from the pope’s balcony in Rome, this may be the most consequential balcony in history. Today the ground where the listeners stood holds trolley-bus tracks, and cables supporting the overhead electric wires attach to bolts in the wall next to the balcony. I can picture Lenin: hoarse, gesticulating, smashing the universe with his incisive, unstoppable words; below him, the sea of upturned faces.

Today an audience would not have much room to gather here, with the trolley buses, and the fence enclosing a park just across the street. Like a formerly famous celebrity, this small piece of architecture has receded into daily life, and speeches made from balconies no longer rattle history’s windowpanes.

********** In the enormous three-ring shouting match and smoke-filled debating society that constituted revolutionary Petrograd during the months after the czar’s removal, nobody picked the Bolsheviks to win. You had parties of every political ilk, from far left to far right, and schismatic groups within them, such as the Social-Democratic Labor Party’s less radical wing (the Mensheviks); another powerful party, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, had split contentiously into Left SR’s and Right SR’s. Added to these were many other parties, groups and factions—conservatives, populists, moderates, peasant delegations, workers’ committees, soldiers’ committees, Freemasons, radicalized sailors, Cossacks, constitutional monarchists, wavering Duma members. Who knew what would come out of all that?

Under Lenin’s direction the Bolsheviks advanced through the confusion by stealth, lies, coercion, subterfuge and finally violence. All they had was hard-fixed conviction and a leader who had never been elected or appointed to any public office. Officially, Lenin was just the chairman of the “Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks),” as their banner read.

5 The oldest person I know was born before the Bolsheviks changed Russia to the Gregorian calendar. Lyudmila Borisovna Chyernaya came into the world on December 13, 1917—after the Bolshevik coup, and a week before the founding of the Cheka.

This December she will celebrate her 100th birthday. Lyudmila Borisovna (the polite form of address is to use both the first name and patronymic) is the mother of my longtime friend, the artist Alex Melamid. Halo Wars Pc Download Full Version Free.

I first met her 24 years ago when Alex and his wife, Katya, and I stayed in her apartment on my first trip to Russia. Last March I made a detour to Moscow, to see her again. For my visit to her apartment one Saturday afternoon I brought along my friend Ksenia Golubich, whom I got to know when she translated for me at a Russian book fair in 2013. Lyudmila Borisovna shows almost no disabilities of age.

In 2015, she published a much-praised memoir, Kosoi Dozhd (or Slanting Rain). Now she is working on a sequel. She talks quickly and in long, typographical paragraphs. I was glad I had Ksenia to help me keep up. On the wall of the apartment are paintings by Alex, and portraits of her late husband, Daniil Elfimovich Melamid, an author, professor and expert on Germany. She showed us photographs of her great-grandchildren, Lucy and Leonard, who are 5 and 2 and live in Brooklyn. They come to Moscow to visit her because at almost 100 years old she can no longer travel easily to America.

Lyudmila Borisovna was born in Moscow. Her parents had moved here, in 1914, to a pleasant, small apartment with five rooms on a classic Moscow courtyard.

They were educated people; her mother was one of the first women admitted to a university in Russia and later translated all of Stalin’s speeches into German for TASS, the Soviet international news agency. Lyudmila Borisovna first experienced the revolution, indirectly, at the age of 3 or 4; she had to give up her own room, the nursery, when their apartment became communal and two Communists moved in. Later more new residents took over other rooms, but her parents did not mind, because they believed in the revolution and wanted to do their part. Lyudmila Borisovna had a distinguished career as a journalist, author, translator and German-language counter-propagandist on the radio during the Second World War. Her husband, Daniil Elfimovich, was head of the counterpropaganda agency; she monitored broadcasts from Germany and refuted them in broadcasts of her own. Because of these, she was called “the Witch of the Kremlin” by Goebbels himself. Her discourse to us contained not very many pauses into which Ksenia could insert translation.

In one of the pauses, returning to the subject of the revolution, I asked her if she thought it had been for the good. “Yes, it was exciting for us to have people coming to Moscow from all over the world to learn about Communism,” she said. “The revolution made Moscow important to the world.” She seemed eager for us to have lunch.

Lena, her live-in helper, who is from Ukraine, brought out dish after dish that she had made herself—borscht, cabbage pies, mushroom pies, several different kinds of fish, salads, beef tongue; then strong Chinese tea, very large chocolates and an immense banana torte with cream frosting. Ksenia had to concentrate to continue translating as she and I ate and Lyudmila Borisovna watched us, beaming. Afterward I received an email from Alex: “I got a report from mama of your and your translator’s gargantuan appetites and the amount of food you both consumed.

She was proud of her feeding prowess.” He added that shortage of food had been one of his mother’s main worries throughout her life. Icons adorn another wall in her house. (Olga Ingurazova) I asked Lyudmila Borisovna what she considered the single highest point of the last 100 years. “March 5, 1953,” she answered, immediately.

“The happiest day of my life—the day Stalin died. All the Stalin years were bad, but for us the years 1945 to 1953 were very hard. After his death the country started to become better, more free. Today life in Russia is not wonderful, but it’s fairly good. People may complain, but I tell you from experience that it can get much worse than this.” At the door she helped us into our coats and bid us goodbye, with special regards to Ksenia, whom she had taken to. I’m of average height but as we stood there I realized I’m at least a head taller than she is.

She smiled at us, her blueish-gray eyes vivid, but neither warm nor cold. In them I got a glimpse of the character one needs in order to live through such a time, and for 100 years. ********** On my first Moscow visit, the man who drove Alex and Katya and me around the city was a wry and mournful fellow named Stas. He had a serviceable, small Russian sedan, not new, that he maintained carefully. One day he couldn’t drive us because the car needed repairs. When he showed up again I asked him how his car was doing now. “Is an old man ever well?” Stas replied.

At Lyudmila Borisovna’s, when I was having trouble dialing her phone, she corrected me. “He likes to be dialed slowly,” she said. When people showed me examples of Moscow architecture, the buildings usually possessed a person’s name indicating their particular era.

Instead of saying, “That’s a Khrushchev-era building,” my guides said, “That’s Khrushchev. That’s Stalin. That’s Brezhnev.” When I asked what the Russian for “speed bump” is, I was told it’s lezhashchii politseiskii, which means “lying-down policeman.” When a noise thumped in an apartment we were visiting, our hosts explained to me that it was the domovoi, the resident spirit of the apartment. Every house or apartment has a domovoi. An ancient enchantment holds Russia under its spell. Here all kinds of things and creatures are seen to be sentient and capable of odd transmigrations. In Yekaterinburg my son, while doing some babysitting for a friend, had this conversation: Six-year-old boy: “What are you?” Thomas: “I’m an American.” Boy: “Why are you an American?” Thomas: “I don’t know.

Because I come from America.” Boy: “Can you speak English?” Thomas: “Yes.” Boy: (after some thought): “Can you talk to wild animals?” The question is no less than reasonable in Russia, where even the doors in the most elegant room in the Winter Palace have the feet of birds. Russia, the country itself, inhabits a spirit as well. The visible location of this spirit’s existence in the world used to be the czar. The United States is a concept; Russia is an animate being.

I think Nicholas II understood this, and it’s why he believed so strongly that his countrymen needed the autocracy. Nicholas not only ruled Russia, he not only signified Russia, he was Russia. The month after the murders of Nicholas and his family an assassin shot Lenin twice as he came out of an event. One of the wounds almost killed him. When, after a perilous period, he recovered, many Russians started to regard him with mystical devotion. In order to stay in power Lenin had prostrated Russia before Germany with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia renounced claims on vast amounts of territory including the Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine. When Germany lost the war, and Russia got back all it had conceded, he began to look like a military-political genius, too.

Before his early death, from a series of strokes, in 1924, the person of Lenin had become interchangeable with revolutionary Russia, just as the czars had been Russia before the revolution. In a way Lenin’s physical death made no difference, because his body could be preserved indefinitely in a glass tomb in Red Square for all citizens to see. As the words of a Communist anthem put it, Lenin, yeshcho zhivoi! “Lenin, living still!” Historical sites are popular with newlyweds, like this couple posing in front of the State History Museum in Moscow’s Red Square. (Olga Ingurazova) One annual celebration the country loves is Dien Pobeda, Victory Day, celebrated on May 9, the day of the German surrender in 1945.

The Victory Day parade used to feature the predictable huge portraits of leaders, but for the past ten years its focus has been on the common soldiers who fought in the war. Today, on Victory Day, marchers show up in the hundreds of thousands in every major Russian city bearing portraits of their relatives who served. These portraits, typically black-and-white photographs, keep to a single size and are attached to identical wooden handles like those used for picket signs.

As a group the photos are called Bezsmertnii Polk, the Deathless Regiment. The portraits in their endless numbers evoke powerful emotions as they stream by, especially when you glimpse a young marcher who looks exactly like the young soldier in the faded photograph he or she is carrying. I attended the parade in Moscow in 2016, and as I watched the missiles and tanks that always have accompanied it, I wondered where the traditional giant portraits of The Leader had gone. As under the Soviets, Russia today is governed by what amounts to one-party rule, and again its leadership is more or less an autocracy. But inhabiting the role of Russia itself, as the czars used to do, is a demanding task.

Lenin solved the problem by being dead for most of his tenure. Yeltsin made a brave start, standing on the tank, but as he admitted when he turned his power over to Putin in 1999, he got tired.

And Putin seems to understand that huge images of the leader’s mug look corny and ­old-fashioned today. Which is not to say that Putin’s mug is not everywhere. It’s a common sight on our screens—today’s public forum—as well as in such demotic venues as the tight T-shirts featuring his kick-ass caricature that the muscular, pale, crew-cut guys who multiply on Russian streets in summer all seem to wear.

As an autocrat whose self coincides with Russia, Putin has grown into the job. Taking off his own shirt for photographers was a good move: Here is the very torso of Russia, in all its buff physicality. But Putin also impersonates a Russia for an ironic age, letting us know he gets the joke, playing James Bond villain and real-life villain simultaneously, having his lines down pat. After being accused of ordering the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent turned whistle-blower who was poisoned by a radioactive substance in London, Putin denied involvement. Then he added, “The people who have done this are not God. Litvinenko, unfortunately, is not Lazarus.” Barring major unforeseen changes, Putin will be re-elected in 2018, and initiate Russia’s transmogrified, resilient autocracy into its next 100 years.

* Problems left unsolved take their own course. The river in flood cuts an oxbow, the overfull dam gives way.

The Russian Revolution started as a network of cracks that suddenly broke open in a massive rush. Drastic Russian failures had been mounting—the question of how to divide the land among the people who worked it, the inadequacy of a clumsy autocracy to deal with a fast-growing industrial society, the wretched conditions of hundreds of thousands of rural-born workers who had packed into bad housing in Petrograd and other industrial cities, to name a few. But nobody predicted the shape that the cataclysm would take. The speed and strength of the revolution that began in February of 1917 surprised even the Bolsheviks, and they hurried to batten onto its power before it ran away from them. An early sense of unexpectedness and improvisation gave the February Revolution its joyful spirit.

Russians had always acted communally, perhaps because everybody had to work together to make the most of the short Russian growing season. This cultural tendency produced little soviets in the factories and barracks, which came together in a big Soviet in Petrograd; and suddenly The People, stomped-down for centuries, emerged as a living entity. One simple lesson of the revolution might be that if a situation looks as if it can’t go on, it won’t. Imbalance seeks balance. By this logic, climate change will likely continue along the path it seems headed for. And a world in which the richest eight people control as much wealth as 3.6 billion of their global co-inhabitants (half the human race) will probably see a readjustment.

The populist movements now gaining momentum around the world, however localized or distinct, may signal a beginning of a bigger process. When you have a few leaders to choose from you get sick of them eventually and want to throw them out. And when you have just one leader of ultimate importance in your whole field of vision—in Russia, the czar—the irritation becomes acute. Let’s think about ordinary folks for a change: That was the message of Lenin’s too-long pants, of the Bolsheviks’ leather chauffeur coats and workers’ caps, and of all Socialist Realist paintings. But it takes a certain discipline to think about People in general.

The mind craves specifics, and in time you go back to thinking about individuals. As Stalin supposedly said, “One person’s death is a tragedy, but the death of a million people is a statistic.” Czar Nicholas II was sainted not for being a martyr but for being an individual, suffering person you can relate to. It’s remarkable that Russia cares about the Romanovs again, having once discarded them so casually. Thousands of pilgrims come to Yekaterinburg every year to pray at the sites of the royal family’s murder and subsequent indignities.

Dina Sorokina, the young director of the Yeltsin Museum, told me that as far as she knows they don’t also visit her museum when they’re in town. Rocks in the center of the city, called stone tents, were once outside the border of Yekaterinburg. They were also a favorite place for revolutionaries to meet, since they were hidden in dense forest. (Olga Ingurazova) The worldwide Socialist revolution that the Bolsheviks predicted within months of their takeover proved a disappointment. In fact, no other country immediately followed Russia’s lead. During Stalin’s time the goal changed to “Building Socialism in One Country”—that is, in Russia.

Other countries eventually did go through their own revolutions, and of those, China’s made by far the largest addition to the number of people under Communist rule. This remains the most significant long-term result of Lenin’s dream of global proletarian uprising. Fifty years after the Russian Revolution, one-third of the world’s population lived under some version of Communism. That number has shrunk significantly, as one formerly Communist state after another converted to a market-based economy; today even Cuba welcomes capitalist enterprises from America.

The supposed onward march of Communism, so frightening to America in the ’60s—first Vietnam, then all of Southeast Asia, then somehow my own hometown in Ohio—scares nobody nowadays. But if Russia no longer exports international Socialism, it has not stopped involving itself in other countries’ internal affairs.

Which is not to suggest that other countries, including us, don’t sometimes do the same. But by turning the state’s secret and coercive forces actively outward, the Bolsheviks invented something new under the sun for Russia. It has found exporting mischief to be a great relief—and, evidently, a point of strategy, and of pride. On the street in Yekaterinburg, an older woman, recognizing Thomas and me as Americans, cackled with great glee.

“Americans!” she called out. We chose him!” In June, James Comey, the former director of the FBI, testifying before Congress, said, “We’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal.” The habit of Russian intrusion that Comey is talking about began at the revolution. Individuals change history.

There would be no St. Petersburg without Peter the Great and no United States of America without George Washington. There would have been no Soviet Union without Lenin. Today he might feel discouraged to see the failure of his Marxist utopia—a failure so thorough that no country is likely to try it again soon.

But his political methods may be his real legacy. Unlike Marxism-Leninism, Lenin’s tactics enjoy excellent health today. In a capitalist Russia, Putin favors his friends, holds power closely and doesn’t compromise with rivals. In America, too, we’ve reached a point in our politics where the strictest partisanship rules. Steve Bannon, the head of the right-wing media organization Breitbart News, who went on to be an adviser to the president, told a reporter in 2013, “I’m a Leninist.I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy today’s establishment.” Of course he didn’t mean he admired Lenin’s ideology—far from it—but Lenin’s methods have a powerfully modern appeal. Lenin showed the world how well not compromising can work.

A response to that revolutionary innovation of his has yet to be figured out.