Русская революция. Кн. 3. Россия под большевиками 1918-1924

If you had told me three months ago that when I finally finished reading all 500+ pages of this book about the Bolshevik rise to power, I would actually be sad that it was over, I would not have believed you. But, it’s true. I really, really, really liked this book. So much so that I found the author’s address so I can write him a letter, and I’m planning to actually purchase this book. Seriously.

Where to even begin? I read Mr. Pipes’s book 'The Three Whys of the Russian Revolution' first; it wa If you had told me three months ago that when I finally finished reading all 500+ pages of this book about the Bolshevik rise to power, I would actually be sad that it was over, I would not have believed you. But, it’s true. I really, really, really liked this book. So much so that I found the author’s address so I can write him a letter, and I’m planning to actually purchase this book. Seriously.

Where to even begin? I read Mr. Pipes’s book 'The Three Whys of the Russian Revolution' first; it was assigned reading for Tapestry. I was really impressed by the author’s ability to write about complicated situations and theories with clarity. I am no expert on Russia or her history, yet Pipes kept my interest throughout the entire book. More, he intrigued me and caused me to think about and reassess many of my views of Communism and Russia.

The book was brilliant all the way through. The beginning is a little rough, as he is describing Russia’s civil war between the Reds and Whites. There are a lot of names of people and places, and since they all look like Tzagoragphy, it gets a little complicated for English-speaking folks like myself. But once I got through that bit, things settled out with the main players and places, and it was much easier to follow.

Pipes doesn’t really limit himself to just the history of what was happening in Russia. My favorite chapter actually looks at the concept of totalitarianism: what it is and where it has existed in recent history. Throughout the chapter, Pipes compares and contrasts the regimes in Russia, Germany, and Italy. This is especially intriguing because Germany and Italy are always classified as fascist and put at one end of the political spectrum, while Russia is labeled communist and placed at the other. Yet Pipes argues that these “governments” had far more in common than most people credit, and he argues the point very well.

In that chapter, too, Pipes talks a great deal simply about the steps to totalitarianism, and how Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini all worked within and through their legal political systems to gain control. Fear, Pipes tells us, is the totalitarian’s best friend. Each of those three regimes chose a scapegoat (capitalists or Jews for example) and then built up fear of that group, until the population was willing to do whatever it took to protect themselves from this threat. Except there wasn’t really a threat and there wasn’t really a need for protection—but that realization came too late; power had already been given up by the people.

So I don’t know, it was just a lot of food for thought, looking at our government and the many wolves to which they point. Are the wolves real, or are they merely shadows being used as excuses to take more and more control of our lives?

Anyway, I couldn’t believe how easily this book read. So many books of this weight are written specifically for people who are already neck-deep in studying the topic, and thus are almost impossible for a newbie to the situation to understand. Example: I also checked out a book on Mussolini’s Italy. I gave it up after the first four or five chapters. The author assumed that I already understood exactly what was going on in Italy and who was in charge and why and how they got there. Pipes, on the other hand, manages to explain the background thoroughly but not overly, making the rest of what he has to say meaningful, relevant, and interesting.

If you ever have to do any studying of Russia from the point of the Revolution to Lenin’s death, I strongly recommend this book. If you don’t feel like reading all 512 pages, at least read chapter five, on totalitarianism, and the last chapter, which is a summary of the rest of the book.

This is one of the few non-fiction books that I’ve read lately that I see myself reading again in the future. . more

This book is a sequel to _The Russian Revolution_, and picks up where the previous book left - after the Bolshevik's seizure of power in the October revolution, and at the beginning of the long civil war between the Reds and the Whites. After a detailed account of that struggle, the book moves on to examine various facets of Bolshevik rule, concluding with the death of Lenin in 1924 and the ascendancy to power of Joseph Stalin.

This is a long book, and the first few chapters on the Civil War (alm This book is a sequel to _The Russian Revolution_, and picks up where the previous book left - after the Bolshevik's seizure of power in the October revolution, and at the beginning of the long civil war between the Reds and the Whites. After a detailed account of that struggle, the book moves on to examine various facets of Bolshevik rule, concluding with the death of Lenin in 1924 and the ascendancy to power of Joseph Stalin.

This is a long book, and the first few chapters on the Civil War (almost 150 pages worth of material) are pretty slow-going. But the book picks up steam as it moves along, and the chapters on culture, religion, and the relationship between Communism and National Socialism are both gripping and informative.

Of particular importance is Pipes' dismantling of the romantic myth of Lenin and Trotsky. Even today, too many people believe that the evils of communism were the product of Stalin alone, of a dysfunctional personality that happened to seize power and thereby derail a noble utopian experiment from its progressive path. In contrast to this myth, Pipes makes clear that Stalin merely inherited the system that Lenin built. And while Stalin certainly murdered a vastly larger number of people than Lenin, the institutions and principles on which he acted were already established and waiting for him by the time he took power in 1924.

As he himself boasted, and as his contemporaries could not fail to notice, Lenin was ruthless in his pursuit of power and showed no qualms in ordering the deaths of anyone who stood in his way. Under Lenin arose the dreaded Cheka, later to become the GPU, the NKVD, and finally the KGB. And Lenin was not long in putting this organization to use in the "Red Terror," designed to consolidate Bolshevik control against popular resistance. Thousands were shot in the basements and courtyard of the Lubianka prison and dumped into common graves. In the face of the famine of 1921-22 - a famine caused at least in part by the Soviet authority's draconian policy of forced requisition of peasants' crops - Lenin was indifferent to the suffering of his people, shipping grain out of the country while peasants starved to death, and cynically exploiting the famine to confiscate valuable property from the Orthodox church. "It is now and only now, when in the regions affected by the famine there is cannibalism and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses, that we can (and therfore must) pursue the acquisition of [church] valuables with the most ferocious and merciless energy, stopping at nothing and suppressing all resistance."

Nor was Trotsky any better, though with him even more than Lenin history has cast a favorable and romantic glow over his persona. As Pipes writes, in a passage worth quoting at length:

"There are many instances in history when the loser earns posterity's sympathy because he is seen as morally superior to the victors. It is difficult to muster such sympathy for Trotsky. Admittedly he was more cultured than Stalin and his confederates, intellectually more interesting, personally more courageous, and, in dealings with fellow Communists, more honorable. But as in the case of Lenin, such virtues as he possessed manifested themselves exclusively within the Party. In relations with outsiders as well as those insiders who strove for greater democracy, Trotsky was at one with Lenin and Stalin. He helped forge the weapons that destroyed him. He suffered the same fate that was meted out, with his wholehearted consent, to the opponents of Lenin’s dictatorship: the Kadets, the Socialists-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks; ex-tsarist officers who would not fight in the Red Army; the Workers’ Opposition; the Kronshtadt sailors, and the Tambov peasants; the priesthood. He awoke to the dangers of totalitarianism only when it threatened him personally: his sudden conversion to party democracy was a means of self-defense, not the championship of principle.Trotsky liked to depict himself as a proud lion brought down by a pack of jackals; and the more monstrous Stalin revealed himself to be, the more persuasive this image appeared to those in Russia and abroad who wanted to salvage an idealized vision of Lenin’s Bolshevism. But the record indicates that in his day Trotsky, too, was one of the pack. His defeat had nothing ennobling about it. He lost because he was outsmarted in a sordid struggle for political power."

As this passage indicates, Pipes does not refrain in this book from casting moral judgment upon the persons and events that he describes. Pipes' conservative inclinations manifest themselves throughout the book, from his scornful asides at the Enlightenment faith in the transformative power of reason, to his respectful and sometimes defensive attitude toward tsardom. But as he himself notes in his concluding chapter, it would be odd indeed to assume a guise of detached neutrality when surveying facts of such a monstrous nature. "The refusal to pass judgment on historical events rests on moral values, too, namely the silent premise that whatever occurs is natural and therefore right: it amounts to an apology of those who happen to win out." Pipes calls the Russian Revolution what it was - a colossal failure. It failed on its own terms, in its inability to spark a worldwide socialist revolution or to establish a successful centrally planned economy. But more importantly than this, the Russian Revolution was a failure on basic humanitarian and moral terms. The one thing the Bolsheviks managed to do well was to seize and hold power. But given the terrible means they needed to achieve and maintain that power, this is as damning as praise can be.