Comrades: 1917--Russia in Revolution

Moynahan's spellbinding chronicles of Russia in 1917--the year of Kerensky's fumbling provisional government and the Bolsheviks' October coup--ranks among the most vivid books to date on the Russian Revolution. Former London Times foreign correspondent Moynahan ( The Claws of the Bear ) describes his material in concrete, human detail: Kerensky's brilliant mocking of Lenin (``Karl Marx never proposed such methods of oriental despotism''); women lined up on icy nights from 3:00 a.m. until the shops opened at 9:00, after which they labored all day; Lenin, ``obsessed with violence,'' a thug full of hatred who dehumanized his enemies as ``harmful insects . . . bedbugs''; the 1916 murder of Rasputin, ``the Unmentionable''--his name seldom pronounced aloud for fear it would bring bad luck--by a young aristocrat who dabbled in transvestism and the occult. The author conveys the weft and warp of Russia's tattered social fabric as few others have done. He illumines the rottenness of the old regime and the evil brutality that replaced it, showing how the Bolsheviks ruthlessly crushed the centrifugal forces that reasserted themselves in 1991 to shatter the Soviet monolith. (Mar.)