With a history like theirs, Russians should never have to fear the future

THERE’S a prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg.

It’s an old prison, used nowadays as a museum, called the Trubestskoy Bastion. In pre-revolutionary days in Russia, people convicted of political crimes endured all the usual hardships of prison in the fortress and the bastion, made worse by terrible winters. Peter the Great built the fortress, and had his own son incarcerated and tortured in it.

The bastion itself became known as the Russian Bastille, because of the number of political prisoners it housed. Dostoevsky served time there, as did Lenin’s older brother Alexander. Shortly before the Russian Revolution in 1917, Tito, who went on to become the leader of Yugoslavia, spent three weeks in the Bastion on a political charge.