Vyacheslav Nikonov (41) will not be marching to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Great October Revolution in Moscow today. In that respect he is like most of his compatriots. As a political analyst he quoted opinion polls to prove it.
The revolution is considered a major historical event by 47 per cent according to the latest polls, 8 per cent think of it as a tragedy and the rest regard November 7th simply as a day off work. Hardly anyone wants another revolution.
Mr Nikonov knows about revolutionaries. His grandfather, Vyacheslav Molotov, was prime minister and foreign minister of the Soviet Union and was once Stalin's closest associate. He also bequeathed, indirectly, the term "Molotov cocktail" for a crude petrol bomb in a bottle.
Nikonov was 30 on November 8th, 1986, when his grandfather died. The two men were close and spoke regularly of the turbulent events through which the old man lived.
"He was a good grandfather. He even saved my life once when I fell into the Black Sea during our holidays in the Crimea. I was three then and he jumped to the sea and rescued me as I was sinking."
On a grim day 20 years earlier Molotov had signed a list which condemned 3,100 people to death. After his pen had erased those lives he and Stalin went out together to the cinema.
The family had its own tragedy, too. Molotov's wife, Polina, spent a year in the KGB prison in the Lubyanka in Moscow and a further three years in a prison camp in Kazakhstan. It was a form of hostage-taking, Nikonov says.
"That was the way he was kept in line. He wasn't the only one this sort of thing happened to under Stalin. Mikhail Kalinin's wife was locked away too and he was the president."
On the day in 1953 when Stalin died, Molotov, according to his grandson, went to the secret police chief Lavrenty Beria and said simply: "Please get Polina back." She arrived from Kazakhstan two days later.
Despite his grandfather's assurances that the pact he signed with Germany's Ribbentrop had helped the USSR win the war, despite the family's undying commitment to communism and despite Polina's continuing belief in Stalin's greatness even after her imprisonment, Nikonov is strongly anti-communist. He is described in the communist press as "the small grandson of the big grandfather".
"The revolution was like a tornado," he says. "They are not particularly good things, but tornadoes occur. We should mark the revolution of course. The French celebrate their revolution but that does not mean they celebrate Robespierre."
Russia is going the right way now, he believes. There was perhaps a tendency towards oligarchy but how could a country be described as an oligarchy when oligarchs can be summarily dismissed from government?
There was perhaps a tendency towards authoritarianism, he concedes, but a president who frequently disappeared for a month at a time could hardly be described as a hands-on dictator.
Russia was not on the way to becoming a western democracy. It was on the way to becoming a Russian democracy, and we would have to wait and see what that would be like. One thing was sure. There would be no return to communism.
Daria Mitina (24) disagrees. She didn't tell us so because she didn't turn up at the appointed time for her interview. It was pretty obvious, however, that she wanted the old ways to return.
She is a student at Moscow State University and a Communist deputy in the State Duma (Lower House of Parliament).
Pictures of three men hang in her office. There is the compulsory depiction of Lenin with the message: "we will arrive at the victory of Communist Labour."
Less prominent, but more chilling, pasted to the side of a filing cabinet, the face of Stalin peers from under the slogan: "for the liberation of the Soviet Union."
But the biggest space of all is reserved for a large full colour photograph of Alexander Lukashenko, the eccentric and authoritarian president of Belarus.
Deputy Mitina's secretary was profusely apologetic at the nonappearance of her boss. Not an eyelid was batted as she announced: "We cannot contact her. The comrade has switched off her mobile phone."
That evening, at a celebration for revolutionaries in the parliamentary centre on Tsvetnoi Boulevard, we caught a glimpse of the young high-tech communist in her black evening dress and pearls as Iosif Kobzon, the entertainer reputed to be closest to the Russian mafia, roused the audience with patriotic songs.
Alexander Alekseyev (93) was there too, his frayed jacket weighed down with medals. He was a boy of 13, a child worker in the Putilov railway plant in St Petersburg when the cruiser Aurora fired the first shots in the conflict which ultimately formed the Soviet Union. The communists would be back, he told the western press.
It was, he said, just a matter of time.
Dmitri Schmidt (12) in his uniform as a member of the young pioneers gave some substance at first sight to Alekseyev's assertion. He had defied his parents who were Yeltsin supporters and ignored the jeers of his schoolmates to join the Communist youth movement.
But just before the Internationale sounded and the crowd of about 2,000 stood to attention, he admitted he had joined for a selfish reason. "I like to collect badges," he said.
The October Revolution began in St Petersburg on October 25th, 1917, according to the Julian calendar then in force in Imperial Russia.
By the Gregorian calendar used in the rest of the world it was November 7th and it is on this date that the anniversary is now marked.