Isaac Don Levine had a remarkable track record of writing breakthrough books about the twentieth century, routinely missing the main point. His 1917 book on the Russian Revolution failed to mention Lenin and the Bolsheviks. His sequel, one of the earliest books about Lenin and the party he led, had nothing at all about Stalin. In 1931, he published the first English language biography of Stalin, but had nothing to say about Stalin’s early years as a possible spy working for the tsarist police. And a quarter of a century later, he published the “Eremin Letter” in Life magazine followed up by a book, Stalin’s Great Secret, which aimed to prove that Stalin was, in fact, a police spy. In 1964 he returned to Russia and this book describes his seach for evidence of Stalin’s betrayal of his comrades in the years before 1917. Levine had apparently abandoned the Eremin letter, which he now considered to be a fake, but he never mentions it in this book. He still believes that Stalin had been an Okhrana agent but fails to find a smoking gun. His book ends by declaring that Russia’s turn to the West under Khrushchev was irreversible. As Americans might put it, he was batting 1000. Levine was a terrible prophet, but he writes well and there are parts of this book that are somewhat interesting. But only to someone really dedicated to getting to the bottom of the mysteries of Stalin’s early years.