RED OCTOBER

Fifty years ago, come this October, the ""ten days that shook the world"" toppled the Kerensky government with victories of the Soviets of Petrograd and Moscow. Now it was the turn of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to rule Russia. This is an anniversary year of immensely portentous occurrence and we have in this short book an agreeable account, in an elevated version of the Jim Bishop genre, of the confusion, the passion, and the fumblings of ineffectual liberalism falling before disciplined totalitarianism. Contrary to the Marxist doctrine that a bourgeois phase must precede the proletarian take-over, Lenin and his followers realized that because of the prevailing superstitious nature of the vast Russian peasantry, a new theory of revolution had to be advocated. Chronicling the transition from the intellectuals surrounding Lenin to the street fighting that won the day, the story that the author tells is an exciting one that does nothing to diminish Lenin's gigantesque stature as the man who presided over the death of old Russia and the birth of the Soviet Union.