This year’s centenary of the 1917 Revolution always had the potential to expose underlying but usually concealed friction within the ‘patriotic majority’ that is the bedrock of the Kremlin’s popular support. The memory of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II (1868-1918) particularly divides contemporary Russia’s ‘Reds’ from its ‘Whites’. (While the former take pride in the Soviet state inaugurated by the Bolshevik coup d’état of October 1917, its achievements and Communist way of life, the latter confess their loyalty to ‘God, Tsar and Fatherland’ and look to the restoration of the historical honour of ‘Old Russia’.