Volume 44, Number 10 · June 12, 1997
In the Center of the Earthquake
By Michael Ignatieff
Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg
by Joshua Rubenstein
BasicBooks, 482 pp., $35.00
Les Surprises de la Loubianka: nouvelles découvertes dans les archives littéraires du KGB
by Vitaly Shentalinsky, French translation by Galia Ackerman, by Pierre Lorrain
Laffont, 361 pp., FF149
On Christmas Eve 1918, Lenin was being driven in his Rolls-Royce on the outskirts of Moscow when four men flagged him down, pulled him out at gun point, and searched his pockets. Lenin shouted, 'Don't you know who I am?' 'I don't care,' replied the leader of the gang, one Jacov Kochelkov, also known as The Wallet. 'I'm the king of Moscow.' Seizing Lenin's identification papers and his Browning pistol, The Wallet jumped into the Rolls-Royce and roared off, leaving the leader of the Revolution, his bodyguard, and his chauffeur to tramp through the snow to a local Party headquarters to find a car to take them back to the Kremlin.
Review, 3007 words
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