SAVIOUR'S GATE

Leftists and Rightists battle for the soul of Russia, while Americans and Britons squabble over the bonesin a melancholy thriller by the author of Spy Shadow and The Spy In Question. In the Russia of not-far-enough-from-now, the disintegration of the workers' paradise has advanced so far that a pilot routinely flies from Moscow to Arctic Murmansk, rehearsing for the day when he will have to fly the leader out of the country to escape the snarling conservatives and the increasingly violent radicals. The pilot is the nephew of ``the envoy''the General Secretary's lifelong friend and confidant, a shadowy figure from the provinces who spends his life protecting the man who defended him as a miserable schoolboy. Nothing is stable. Nothing is safe. The radicals have abandoned nonviolence to begin a series of political assassinations forcing radical reform. The hard-line Leninists shape mass demonstrations to their own ends with live ammunition and military terror. Marcus, a British journalist who spies to the order of a man with no name other than ``Foreign Office,'' and Anastasiya, the General Secretary's beautiful assistant, seek such comfort as their masters and their loyalties may allow. An American intelligence agent at last displays his un-American heart. And the General Secretary's mother leaves her Transcaucasian farm for only the second time to see her son before it is too late. Appropriately bleak. Well done.