The tale of the encounter between Woodrow Wilson's United States and Lenin's newly triumphant Bolsheviks has been told many times before, but mostly as part of broader accounts. McFadden zeroes in on the curious, halting first steps toward some kind of relationship, a confused process featuring the improvisations of a half-dozen semiofficial American representatives in a remote, turbulent land. He does not change our understanding of history in any fundamental way, but he does fill in the details, particularly on the U.S. side, and the specialist will find the account rich and useful.