Joe

Inside of you are two wolves, a white one and black one. Or are there?

The topic is ambitious and the revolution’s early intellectuals generated enough material to entice any historian into a bog of trivia. Figes tells the story with both alluring passion and magisterial grasp. By the end, you gain a sense that Dostoyevsky merits a back seat to Lenin in authoring a profound Russian tragedy.

Half the hand-wringing about the book’s totalized society evaporates when one reads it alongside the acid trip of Moon Is A Strange Mistress. Like the Beatles, the wonder is that the same middle of the 20th Century could hold such a centrifuge within itself.

Why society is a whole cloth not frivolously mended