Description

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 one of America s great historians (Washington Post Book World). The author has distilled his arguments concerning several key questions: Why did tsarism fall? Why did the Bolsheviks triumph? Why did Stalin succeed Lenin? The book, based on lectures given at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, has a nicely colloquial feel, clarity, and vigor. At the heart of the answers to the first two questions is Pipes s assertion that, far from being the product of large, impersonal forces of history, the fall of the tsar and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks (in, he reminds us, a coup d tat largely unsupported by the Russian people) were the result of the old regime s clear failings and Lenin s genius for manipulation and appetite for total power. Stalin succeeded Lenin, Pipes asserts, because Lenin had so successfully suppressed all elements of democracy that no alternatives were possible…. A concise and eminently straightforward summary of current research on the rise and nature of Communism in Russia. –Kirkus