A History of Twentieth- Century Russia, by Robert Service (Penguin, £11.99 in UK)
After the fall of the Romanovs in 1917 the consensus seemed to be that Russia would and should become a republic, as happened in Austria and Germany a year later. However, the Provisional Government was overthrown, against heavy odds, by the Bolsheviks, at a time when Lenin was widely regarded as merely a crank leader of a fanatical minority. The grim years of Stalin's rule are not shirked, and the paranoid revengefulness and sheer cruelty of his character is brought out, though credit is given for his considerable achievements in industrialisation. Khruschev is shown as a rather contradictory personality whose aspirations outran his intellectual capacity, while Brezhnev appears as power-hungry and self-aggrandising, almost in the Stalinist mould. Gorbachev, it is now generally admitted, released forces which he could not control. The contemporary period of imperial break-up and competing market forces is discussed soberly, and the closing pages of the book admit no immediate grounds for optimism.
Brian Fallon