The revolutionaries had agreed that the final assault on the Winter Palace would begin when his men raised a lighted red lantern on the fortress flagpole – and no one, it had transpired, had such a lantern. Hunting for one throughout the dark grounds of Peter and Paul, Blagonravov promptly fell into a mud-pit. When, dirty and sodden, he finally found a suitable light and hared back to raise it, he discovered, nearly out of his mind with frustration, that ‘it proved extremely difficult to fix it on the flagpole’. It was not until 9:40 p.m., almost ten hours after the original deadline, that he
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