Richard Pipes

From one of our greatest historians, a magnificent reckoning with the modern world's most fateful idea.With astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime's scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice. At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state. Drawing on much new information, Richard Pipes explains the countryis evolution from the 1917 revolution to the Great Terror and World War II, global expansion and the Cold War chess match with the United States, and the regime's decline and ultimate collapse. There is no more dramatic story in modern history, nor one more crucial to master, than that of how the writing and agitation of two mid-nineteenth-century European thinkers named Marx and Engels led to a great and terrible world religion that brought down a mighty empire, consumed the world in conflict, and left in its wake a devastation whose full costs can only now be tabulated.From the Hardcover edition.

Russian Conservatism and Its Critics provides the first account of Russia's immemorial commitment to the theory and practice of autocracy, the most formative and powerful idea in Russia's political history. Richard Pipes considers why Russian thinkers, statesmen, and publicists have historically always argued that Russia could prosper only under an autocratic regime. Beginning with an insightful study of the origins of Russian statehood in the Middle Ages, when the state grew out of the princely domain but was not distinguished from it, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics includes a masterful survey of Russia's major conservative thinkers and demonstrates how conservatism is the dominant intellectual legacy of Russia. Pipes examines the geographical, historical, political, military, and social realities of the Russian empire---fundamentally unchanged by the Revolution of 1917---that have traditionally convinced its rulers and opinion leaders that decentralizing political authority would inevitably result in the country's disintegration. Pipes has written a brilliant thesis and analysis of a hitherto overlooked aspect of the Russian intellectual tradition that continues to have significance to this day.

"Sergei Degaev (1857-1921), a leading political terrorist in tsarist Russia, disappeared after participating in the assassination of the chief of Russia's security organization in 1883. Those who later knew and admired the quietly learned mathematics professor Alexander Pell at the University of South Dakota never guessed this was actually Degaev, who had triple-crossed friends and associates while entangled in the revolutionary movement of his homeland. This book is the first in any language to tell in extensive detail the extraordinary story of one of the world's most intriguing revolutionaries, his role in building and betraying the earliest political terrorist network, and his subsequent conventional academic career in America."--BOOK JACKET.

"Sixteen-year-old Richard Pipes escaped from Nazi-occupied Warsaw with his family in October 1939. Their flight took them to the United States by way of Italy, and Pipes went on to earn a college degree, join the U.S. Air Corps, serve as professor of Russian history at Harvard for nearly forty years, and become advisor to President Reagan on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. In this book, the eminent historian remembers the events of his own remarkable life as well as the unfolding of some of the twentieth century's most extraordinary political events." "Pipes shows us the inner workings of Harvard University during its Golden Age, discusses the nature of Soviet Communism during the Cold War years, and describes from an insider's perspective the conflicts within the Reagan administration over American policies toward the USSR. He offers portraits of such cultural and political figures as Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Reagan, and Alexander Haig, as well as unique observations on his Polish homeland, Jewish heritage, and the process of assimilation into American culture. Perhaps most interesting of all, Pipes depicts his evolution as a historian and his understanding of how history is witnessed and how it is recorded."--Jacket.

Property, asserts Richard Pipes, is an indispensable ingredient not only of economic progress but also of liberty and the rule of law. In his new book, the Harvard scholar demonstrates how, throughout history, private ownership has served as a barrier to the power of the state, enabling the Western world to evolve enduring democratic institutions. However, he warns that contemporary trends in the treatment of property - in a century that, he suggests, has been unfavorable to the institution - threaten to undermine the rights of citizens. And he makes clear why he believes that excessive interference by government, even when intended to promote the "common good," could lead to a diminution of freedom.

Was Lenin a visionary whose ideals were subverted by his followers? Or was he a cynical misanthrope, even crueler than Stalin? This book, which contains newly released documents from the Lenin archive in Russia, lays bare Lenin the man and the politician, leaving little doubt that he was a ruthless and manipulative leader who used terror, subversion, and persecution to achieve his goals. Edited and introduced by the eminent scholar Richard Pipes, the documents date from 1886 through the end of Lenin's life. They reveal, among other things, that Lenin's purpose in invading Poland in 1920 was not merely to sovietize that country but to use it as a springboard for the invasion of Germany and England; Lenin took money from the Germans (here we have the first incontrovertible evidence for this); in 1919 Lenin issued instructions to the Communist authorities in the Ukraine not to accept Jews in the Soviet government of that republic; as late as 1922 Lenin believed in the imminence of social revolution in the West, and he planned subversion in Finland, Turkey, Lithuania, and other countries; Lenin had little regard for Trotsky's judgment on important matters and relied heavily on Stalin; Lenin assiduously tracked dissident intellectuals and urged repressive action or deportation; and Lenin launched a political offensive against the Orthodox Church, ordering that priests who resisted seizure of church property be shot - "the more the better."

America's foremost authority on Russian communism--the author of the definitive studies The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime--now addresses the enigmas of that country's 70-year enthrallment with communism. Succinct, lucidly argued, and lively in its detail, this book offers a brilliant summation of the life's work of a master historian.

Russia under the Bolshevik Regime is the sequel to Richard Pipes's classic The Russian Revolution, and covers the time from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918 to the death of Lenin in 1924, when all the institutions and nearly all the practices of future Stalinism were in place. In the first history of the period to make use of the recently opened Russian archives, the author traces the formative years of the Communist state, when the Bolshevik leaders - Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and others - put their stamp on a regime that was to hold power for the next seventy years. He describes the efforts of the Bolsheviks to defend and expand their dominion to the borderlands of Russia and to the rest of the world; the Civil War between Whites and Reds, the most destructive episode in the country's history since the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century; the devastating famine of 1921; Lenin's cultural and religious policies; and the crisis that engulfed the regime in the early 1920s as the result of political and economic failures. Richard Pipes shows that a great deal of what the Communists did had roots in Russia's historical experience and that both Mussolini and Hitler adapted, for their own purposes, the totalitarian techniques first developed by the Bolsheviks. Bolshevism, he says, was "the most audacious attempt in history to subject the entire life of the country to a master plan." "The tragic and sordid history of the Russian Revolution," he concludes, "teaches that political authority must never be employed for ideological ends."

Brent Runyon was fourteen years old when he set himself on fire. In this book he describes that suicide attempt and his recovery over the following year.

The theme of this book is the poliltical system of Russia. It traces the growth of the Russian state from its beginnings in the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth, and the parallel development of the principal social orders: peasantry, nobility, middle class and clergy. The question which it poses is why in Russia -- unlike the rest of Europe to which Russia belongs by virtue of her location, race and religion -- society has proven unable to impose on political authority any kind of effective restraints. After suggesting some answers to this problem, I go on to show how in Russia the opposition to absolutism tended to assume the form of a struggle for ideals rather than for class interests, and how the imperial government, challenged in this manner, responded by devising administrative practices that clearly anticipate those of the modern police state. --