Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov is presented in this succinct yet substantial work of scholarship as a genuine revolutionary, not the cold-blooded totalitarian monster that has become all-too-common in accounts from both the Cold War and post–Cold War eras.

Lih is rather odd — an independent scholar who migrated from Washington State to Princeton to Montreal, who sometimes sings and performs in amateur Gilbert and Sullivan productions and iconoclastically labors to turn the old field of “Soviet studies” upside-down. A student of the honest and craftsman-like “Sovietologist” Robert C. Tucker (whose two-volume unfinished biography on Stalin has yet to be surpassed), he shattered myths about Lenin in his massive earlier volume, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context, and he continues that good work in this informative biography.