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When the followers of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin-wrested power from the feeble grasp of the Russian Provisional Government in 1917, the Western world duly noted the event with appropriate sentiments of incredulous outrage. That this "handful of madmen and fanatics," these "hare-brained visionaries" and "architects of ruin" (as the press organs of the democracies so picturesquely described them) would survive and even flourish in the arid political soil of Russia-the backwater of Western civilization-seemed remote indeed, especially after civil war and foreign intervention plunged the' country into fresh chaos. The Bolsheviks, as the so-called majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party came to be known in 1903, not only confounded the prophets of doom; their dogmatic but apocalyptic brand of Marxism has found a ready response in quarters which Lenin himself deemed the least promising, namely, the "semi-feudal," pre-industrial society of Asia. Communism as an international phenomenon has not yet found its historian, at least in any meaningful sense. (The pioneering effort of Franz Borkenau is dated but rich in insights on the 1920's and early 1930's.) Until the publication of the two works here under review,1 which will be examined in due course, the same could be said rather more