But there are other reasons for this hushing-up. The Russian authorities took the various “colour revolutions” of the 2000s, and in particular Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan movement, to be a direct threat. They would like to erase the very word “revolution” from the minds of the people. What’s more, in fighting back the memory of 1917, those in power are in fact assaulting the memory of 1991. After all, 1991 also saw a revolution: another bourgeois one, the antipode of 1917, reversing its poles. Today’s ideologists understand the collapse of the USSR as a “great geopolitical catastrophe”. But they cannot acknowledge themselves as the inheritors of the Red project, given the degree to which the country’s elites have enjoyed the economic advantages of capitalism. Their populism has led them into an ideological cul-de-sac.

In a January edition of his Russia Today TV show News of the Week, Dmitry Kiselev, the Kremlin’s chief propagandist, described October as “the continuation of a worldwide search for a better, fairer way of life.” But the reality of revolutionary commemoration in Russia is far from idyllic. To this day the population of Russia is divided into those who spent time in prison, and those who put them there (in Siberia and the Urals, where the gulag was largely located, this conflict is still a live one). The rivalry between “reds” and “whites” never really ended: in Russia it is simply not polite to speak about it out loud, since unlike in post-war Germany there is no culture of talking through trauma. The trauma has been buried in the subconscious.