“History’s Greatest Heist” is a comprehensive guide to the Bolshevik’s appropriation of state and private assets, their subsequent laundering by Swedish bankers and use as security to fund purchases of arms to enforce their will on a starving population. Academic in its depth and execution and cinematic in its scope, McMeekin’s work takes us through the first four years of Bolshevik rule, describing how a band of revolutionaries managed to establish rule over all of Russia.