Roy Bainton's "A Brief History of 1917: Russia's Year of Revolution"

This was an interesting history on a scale small enough for light reading. It wasn't a standard academic history. Instead it was more of a personal view with a number of comments from elderly survivors that Bainton had interviewed.

There is nothing new or spectacular about this history. My only quibble is that while it notes the vicious killing that the Bolsheviks unleashed, it doesn't come down hard enough of them. At one point in this book he puts Stalin as a 10 on a scale of viciousness, Trotsky at 7, and Lenin at 5. To my mind they would all rank up there as 9s and 10s. These monsters murdered millions.