October. There really couldn’t be a more appropriate time to visit a town as red as Novgorod.

Here in the main square, ‘October Man’ himself stands taller than any tree.

V.I. also features on the council offices. From his vantage point over the main entrance, he is able to monitor the orthodoxy of worker’s lunch breaks.

At the moment I’m still uploading from the Novgorod University hotspot. It has to be said that the University is a little bourgeois for my taste. True children of the revolution attend Novgorod’s Technical College, which is still as the red as the day it was built.

I was very pleased to receive an invitation to visit the College. It is really more like a factory, where you can play with lathes and do spot-welding and forging. The ‘classrooms’ have things like furnaces and anvils - everything in fact to make your very own hammer and sickle.

English and commerce is taught here, but both subjects are considered sissy and only girls sign up for English lessons. The focus is on agricultural studies and for practical work the boys go and help with the harvest, just like the old pioneers.

Inside the college is the museum dedicated to the young partisans - Lenya Golikov and his comrades. It’s crammed with little red books, heroic pictures and great patriotric exhibits - all collected and documented by the students themselves.

About those rusty things on the shelf. In WW2, nearly half a million soldiers were stationed near Novgorod. Every summer, the students go on a dig out in the fields and add to their wartime souvenirs.

‘It’s important to remember our victory over facism’, says one of the teachers.