Books: Hate in a Cold Climate

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (301 pp.)—Alan Moorehead—Harper ($5)..

The drama of the Russian Revolution has usually been annotated by one of the actors, the actors' friends, or the jilted stage-door Johnnies who haunt the theater of history. Blame, guilt, hatred, self-accusation and self-aggrandizement taint most such accounts of revolution. Alan Moorehead's book is different. It is a clear-eyed rendering by an expert reviewer who makes the drama come alive again and establishes some new areas of truth. The ideological burdens the book carries belong to the narrative, not the narrator, and it contains no haunted...