Lenin fought his special war quietly - no shots fired - but it wasn't all that private.

He enlisted his Commissar for War Leon Trotsky, his own future successor Joseph Stalin, and a bevy of somewhat ham-handed investigators from the GPU, one in a long line of secret police organizations that became the NKVD and finally the KGB.

Lenin's object: to get rid of important dissidents, nuisances more than threats. They were right-wing intellectuals, many of them devout Christians, lumped as "philosophers," although they included agronomists, economists, teachers, poets, journalists and other writers. Some were Socialists, former allies of Lenin, who may have had a soft spot for them though they were now denounced as counterrevolutionaries.

Instead of having them murdered, as were the czar and his family, Lenin had the "philosophers" rounded up, loaded into two comfortable excursion boats and packed off to Germany. There were about 220 including family members, author Lesley Chamberlain estimates in "Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia" (St. Martins Press, $26.95). They were warned they would be shot on sight if they turned up in Russia again.

A British writer on Russian cooking as well as philosophy, Chamberlain has put together a detailed account of a little-remembered but important episode of that consolidation.

She has found new material that the fall of the Soviet Union has made available.

Her book turns into a record of many other refugees and their ideas, including world-renowned figures who fled Russia about the same time. At one point, there were an estimated 360,000 in Berlin alone.

Novelist Maxim Gorky, long thought to have left in disgust at Communist persecutions, got a letter with a none too subtle threat that has been released since the Soviet collapse. It came from Lenin, his erstwhile friend.

"You're doing nothing to look after your health," Lenin wrote, "push off abroad. If you don't go then we'll have to send you."

Though no secret, news coverage of the shipment was meager, in part because most of the intellectuals were unfamiliar to the outside world. For the same reason, non-Russian readers may find the detailed description of their lives, conflicts and careers to be hard going.

But their fates are fascinating to anyone interested in the manipulations of the Communist leadership and the workings of its secret police.