I want to start with a quote.

The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul.

But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir but a pregnant widow.

Between the death of one and the birth of the other,

much water will flow by.

A long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

That is a picture by the Polish painter Malshevski, and it's about chaos, desolation, the confusion

between one epoch of hope and an interval of despair and confusion. As you see, out of the,

it's difficult to see, but at the far left, out of the painter's easel

is flowing all the desperate, disappointed, tragic ambitions of generation after generation of Polish

fighters for independence. And in the window staring sadly out is a black-clad widow perhaps a pregnant one.

Those anyway were words from Alexander Houttson, the Russian Democratic exile, and he wrote them

shortly after the failure of the 1848 risings and revolutions in Europe, the old empires

had reasserted control, but Hertzen knew that after 1848 their ultimate doom had been spelt,

even though it was not to come for another 70 years or more.

What that doom would be, and what kind of new order,

would replace the empire as he could only guess and fear.

Like a lot of things Hertzson said and wrote in his London exile,

that prophecy about the pregnant widow seems on the face of it to say quite a lot more about Russia than it does about Western or Central Europe. He once contrasted the traditions of the

Russian and Polish revolutionary emigres around him in London, and he said, the Poles looked back for inspiration to countless holy relics, but the Russians had only

empty cradles.

Even after the rise and fall of the Bolshevik revolution, which dominated our short 20th century,

...