Communism: A History

By 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 countryís 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 6, 2001
• ISBN: 9781588360960

Reviews for Communism

[martin1400 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Disappointing after his 'Russia Under the Old Regime', which is a model of deeply-informed objective analysis. No sane person could defend the record of communist regimes in practise, or suggest that there has been any indication at all in actuality that the communist ideal could ever be realisable. But the author's own prejudices unmistakably and increasingly emerge, resulting in an unevenness of description and analysis that somewhat undermine the book's authoritativeness as a concise guide to the most important ideological/social/political movement of our time. Nevertheless the author's analysis of the contradictions inherent to communist regimes is clear and straightforward, and his discussion of Lenin and Leninism leaves anyone pretending that everything was fine until Stalin took over with nowhere to hide.

[jahn_27 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A short overview of the history of communism around the world, though dealing mainly with the USSR. Straightforward, passably well written, deals with as much of communist history as you can expect within 170 pages, but without any explanation or characterisation you would feel obliged to underline, or even read twice.

[neurodrew · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of a series of Modern Library Chronicles, brief reviews of historical subjects. The format is like an extended essay focused on a single historical subject. This book covers Communism, and is written by the author of a history of the Russian revolution. It is excellently written, and has real insight into the failed experiment of the 20th century. Pipes describes the beginning of the theory, the development through the international movements, and the Russian revolution and Soviet state in the early part of the book. He then takes up the attempted spread of worldwide communism. He is relentless in his description of the failed logic of the communist system, and offers choice quotes and judicious comments on the historical record.

[orfishome · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very easy to read. A great critique of communism from a conservative, even Christian in some parts, point of view.