IN THE VANGUARD OF REFORM: I am doing a late night perusal of the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune and in their Books section accompanying an article on the new Taubman biography of Nikita Khrushchev was a recommended reading list on Russia compiled by Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press. I cannot quarrel with any of the books he included on his list which contains authors such as Maxim Gorky, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Koestler and Robert Tucker but I was saddened to see nothing included by the late historian W. Bruce Lincoln whose book, _The Romanov's_ is a standard text in courses on Russian history. An unusually prolific scholar who wrote with a verve and power that rivaled the prose of David McCullough or Stephen Ambrose, Professor Lincoln was a rarity - an academic specialist who cultivated a popular audience without sacrificing accuracy or analysis. Interested laymen would be able to grasp much of the impact that modern history has left on Russia by reading Lincoln's _Passage Through Armageddon_ and _Red Victory_ which chronicled the suffering of war, Revolution and finally civil war and the accompanying political terror that marked the Soviet Union until 1953.

I cannot claim to have known Professor Lincoln well, having only spoken to him on a couple of occasions and sat through a few of his lectures but he left a mark upon his field that merits recollection  ¶ 8:47 PM