Lenin, Trotsky and Karensky were the ideological driving force behind the Russian Revolution: but were they, as one of Roy Bainton's sources describes them, 'totally evil men'? Or was Lenin, as a Red Army veteran insisted, 'a good man who ran the country on a worker's wages'? Bainton's brief history approaches the revolution from the standpoint of the ordinary mass of Russians, describing both the bravado of the revolutionaries and a people punished repeatedly by circumstance.