One of those little footnotes to history that has always intrigued me is that the Bolsheviks planned and carried out the October Revolution in the palace of the Tsar’s mistress. The idea of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the rest of them strutting about the marble-clad halls and damask-swathed boudoirs of the great courtesan’s mansion in their cloth caps, smoking and plotting bloody mayhem, is grotesque but also somehow fitting when one considers the moral squalor and the shoddy grandeur of their political enterprise.
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