In Victorian times it used to be said that the worst boss is the one who has been a worker. What has happened in Soviet Russia, and particularly in the arts, unfortunately bears out the perennial truth of this observation. There was of course plenty of warning – in the mid 19th century Chernyshevsky had already laid it down that art exists solely to serve the workers' interests – but he was intelligent, like most of those who made the revolution, and whatever he thought he meant by it he certainly would not have cared for what actually happened. Nor would Lenin and Lunacharsky and the poet Mayakovsky, all of whom with most of their comrades repeated the same thing.

Mayakovsky was not a worker; indeed it may be wondered whether a true poet ever can be: by the act of writing poetry he becomes intelligent, even though the intelligentsia of the time romanticised the working-class and attempted to identify with it. Zinoviev, the ex-professor of philosophy at Moscow University who wrote The Yawning Heights, really did come from the working class, and his views on what it has done to Russia are lengthy and vitriolic. Mayakovsky's father was