This is a vast historical panorama, beginning with the old throne-and-altar Russian Empire and ending with the misery and ineptitude of Lenin's reign, when ideology cast out common sense or economic realism and the masses suffered not only tyranny, but starvation. One of the most remarkable aspects of the Revolution was its betrayal of the Russian peasants, who had played a leading role in its making yet were jettisoned ruthlessly and despotically for that idol of Marxist-Leninist dogma, the urban proletariat. The cast is a crowded one - the weak and vacuous Czar, his great Prime Minister Stolypin, Rasputin, General Brusilov of the famous 1916 offensive who ended up serving under the Reds, Kerensky the liberal windbag, Lenin himself, Trotsky (very dapper in his photographs), the "emancipated", colourful Alexandra Kollontai, Prince Lvov the first Prime Minister of the short-lived "democratic" Russia whose hair turned white in four months, and the various Civil War generals, Denikin, Kornilov, Kolchak, et alii. One of the many merits of this history is the exceptional quality - and number - of the photographs.B.F.