RESURRECTION: THE STRUGGLE FOR A NEW RUSSIA. By David Remnick. Random House; 385 pages; $25

HIS first book, “Lenin's Tomb”, the definitive account of the collapsing Soviet Union, was a product of David Remnick's four-year residence in Russia as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. “Resurrection” has been written on the basis of frequent visits. The difference in narrative structure reflects this change. “Resurrection” is closer to a collection of essays which have Russia as their common theme, but no real sequence and no common argument. There is no final vision of Russia's future. The author is as uncertain on that score as most other people, though more lucid than most about his reasons for hesitating.

The indecision is welcome, in its way. It means that Mr Remnick does not manage his material so as to prove that Russia is bound to succeed, or doomed to fail. He talks to dozens of people, comes back laden with excellent quotes, and lays his findings out for inspection. A chapter on writers is filled with delights. Aleksandr Terekhov explains his novels with the lapidary phrase, “My goal is to write about Russia after it has collapsed into freedom.” Dmitri Prigov, a poet, delivers a hypnotic reflection on Marxist slogans--“like little angels in hell, fleshless, but with tremendously suggestive, Platonic qualities hanging in the air.”

A chapter on Chechnya is the book's best. The war was a futile and horrible one, tolerated by Russia's new friends in the West (who went on sending money) on the grounds that it was an “internal matter”. The Russian army touched levels of brutality and incompetence that eventually shocked even its own political masters--but only after up to 80,000 Chechens had been killed for no purpose any sane person could explain. Mr Remnick's account manages to compress the salient aspects of the dreadful story into a few page that boggle the mind, and set the heart sinking. Yet it appears that those responsible for the worst excesses of the Chechen war--like those responsible for the worst excesses of Soviet repression--will go unpunished. Even in the “new” Russia, punishment is something reserved for the weak.