Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.

BOOKS IN BRIEF

WHAT did Chou En-lai think of the French Revolution, he was asked. "It's too soon to tell," he replied. It may be too soon to tell about the meaning of the second Russian Revolution but not for David Remnick, the Washington Post Moscow correspondent for the four crucial years of that revolution, and currently a New Yorker staff writer. His big book, a skillful narration of the beginning and end of that revolution, is to my mind the leading candidate for the non-fiction Pulitzer Prize, it's that good. The book's enormous documentation and historical background are fortified by hundreds of interviews not only with Soviet officials but with ordinary folk. Not all of Mr. Remnick's pages, however, contain revelations. After all, before Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost there was Robert Conquest's glasnost in the 1960s and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's glasnost in the 1970s. What distinguishes Mr. Remnick's book is a superb combination of controlled passion, reportorial skill, and an acute political intelligence which, for example, sees in Mikhail Gorbachev a foolish Soviet apparatchik who thought he could also be a politician. Perhaps the most interesting throwaway line in the book is by V.M. Molotov, who in his last days told an interviewer: "Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb."