Top Dog

By Michael Demarest

THE MAN FROM ST. PETERSBURG by Ken Follett Morrow; 323 pages; $14.50

In the glorious spring of 1914, not all is dew-pearled. What with taxes, trade unions, the Irish and the suffragettes, England is going to the dogs. In Russia the throne is tottering and workers are out in the streets demanding democracy. In Germany, the Kaiser's men are oiling the guns of August. The Allies attempt to persuade Russia to engage the Boche on the eastern front. But the Bear hangs tough, and time is short.

This scenario is shrewdly amplified by an expert in the art of ransacking history for thrills. British Novelist Ken Follett, 32, rewrote World War II in The Eye of the Needle and reinterpreted Middle East tensions in Triple. In The Man from St. Petersburg, he recalls Russia and England during the days just before the Great War. As always, his plot is eerily plausible.

Though Prince Aleksey Andreyevich Orlov is only 30, he is the emissary whom his uncle, Czar Nicholas II, trusts with a secret task: extracting a stiff price for Russian commitment. Orlov has other credentials: another uncle is the Earl of Walden, a father figure to young Orlov since the boy's Oxford days. Together, the relatives negotiate the fate of their respective nations. It is not an easy matter. In Russia, revolutionaries are appalled at the prospect of war. Feliks Kschessinsky, a terrorist leader, fulminates, "Half the misery in the world is caused by nice young men like Orlov who think they have the right to organize wars between nations."

Feliks, the son of a poor country priest elects to assassinate Prince Orlov. The "anarchist chappie," as he is called, moves close to his prey by captivating the susceptible Lady Charlotte, the earl's young daughter. Follett makes good use of a taut if predictable double subplot to forward Feliks' machinations and throw Cabinets, kings and boudoirs into turmoil. The denouement, in which all the major characters and half the British constabulary descend on Walden Hall for the signing of the Anglo-Russian pact, is one of Follett's finest, with a staccato performance by the deceptively cherubic young Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Winston's connivance is echoed in a scene at 10 Downing Street, in which Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and his advisers pass "the Balkans around like a box of chocolates, help yourself, choose your favorite flavor." Even with anarchist chap pies on the loose, life was a whole lot simpler in those days.

-- By Michael Demarest

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