Book review: Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution, by Giles Milton

by Giles Milton
Bloomsbury Press
4 stars
Tish Wells

If you want some wonderful spy stories, and a lesson in 20th-century revolution, try Russian Roulette by Giles Milton.

Just under a century ago, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - better known today as Lenin - returned to Russia and swept away the old tsarist regime. His first speech to his followers was at a train station on April 16, 1917, and was monitored by three British spies.

Only one of the latter took him seriously.

The British government would soon take Lenin, Leon Trotsky and the other revolutionaries very seriously when they overthrew the regime, instituted communism and attempted to spread it worldwide.

Russian Roulette is a very readable book told through research, records, the spies' own accounts and archives. It is an entertaining one-stop-shop book that introduces readers to the turbulent years of the Russian revolution and the new "great game" of intelligence run by the British and the Soviets.