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 hindsights.

The book is largely based on documents that came to light after World War II, when German archives fell into Allied hands, and on exhaustive studies by a research group under Dr. Stephan T. Possony, Georgetown University professor of international relations. Commissioned by LIFE (which also sponsored part of the studies), Australian Author-Journalist Moorehead (Gallipoli) has done an outstanding job of sifting the raw material and fashioning a coherent, exciting story.

Byzantine Bureaucracy. Says Moorehead about the struggles that preceded Russia's short-lived Constituent Assembly, when democracy went down to the whistles and catcalls of the Bolsheviks: "The field of action was now beginning to clarify itself somewhat in the manner of one of those Shakespearean battlefields where the opposing armies take up their positions in full view of one another, while the generals ride about from place to place making declamatory speeches."

Contradicting Communist myth, Moorehead recapitulates such things as the relative obscurity of Lenin in Marxist councils before the revolution, the fact that German subsidies were of great importance to the Bolsheviks, and the massive extent of the funds offered by the policy of "expropriations," meaning armed robbery; Stalin himself carried out successful heists. Moorehead evokes the strange quality of Russian life with its tone of "brittle lethargy," the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Czarist system and the paternal absolutism of the Romanovs, which was inherited by the Russian revolutionaries and became "the core of [their] mind." Finally, Moorehead stresses the importance of police socialism--the system by which police agents became party leaders and all lived in a "half world of bribery and twisted loyalties."

Full Cycle. With his journalist's eye, Author Moorehead does not overlook the story's gaudy set pieces, including the mass funeral of revolutionaries at which 1,000,000 people, or half the population of Petrograd, marched in silence (the dead were buried without religious services, but next day. in a shamefaced gesture, priests were brought to say prayers). And there is also the unforgettable picture of Lenin being transported--in Churchill's phrase "like a plague bacillus"--across Germany in the famous sealed train. Lenin made his associates retire to the train toilet to smoke--an autocratic gesture that should have given them pause.

Moorehead leaves his subject with a grim picture: the murder of the Czar and his family. The Bolsheviks later executed five responsible for the massacre, establishing a tradition--elimination of witnesses--that would cost many of the Reds their own lives. Concludes Moorehead: 'The wheel had now turned almost full cycle from [Czar] Nicholas to Lenin, from autocracy back to autocracy again . . . Bread and Peace' had been at the heart of the party's program from the beginning. What Russia was now about to receive was famine and civil war."

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