Donald Rayfield
The Boy Scout & the Butcher
The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution
By Robert Service
Macmillan 282pp £25 order from our bookshop
Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait
By Victor Sebestyen
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 569pp £25 order from our bookshop
These two books, published to coincide with the centenary of the Russian Revolution, are linked by the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. This event forms the climax of Robert Service’s magnificent account of the Tsar’s last years and is just one of the atrocities to appear in Victor Sebestyen’s ‘Intimate Portrait’ of Lenin. But the only things that victim and murderer had in common were an inability to distinguish the trivial from the important and a conviction that they incarnated some non-human power: the Tsar believed that he had been anointed by God; Lenin regarded the Russian Revolution as the consequence of a Hegelian historical process.
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