Rating: 
Summary: A tour de force, breathlessly written
Review: The Modern Library is to be congratulated on its short, authoritative summaries of historical research by outstanding historians. I refer not only to its volume by Richard Pipes, "Communism," but also to its altogether excellent "Hitler and the Holocaust" by Robert S. Wistrich. The Pipes volume, as is to be expected from Richard Pipes, is a tour de force of historical summary and interpretation. It is one of those books that can be given to a teenager for a quick introducction to an importatnt subject, and can also be read by knowledgeable adults for its often new and striking insights. But excellent as it is for its overview -- particularly in its introductory and concluding chapters -- this book also shows signs of haste in its composition. Its weaknesses, as I see them, are four: 1) The tone is often overbearing, opinionated, arrogant. Reasonable people can have different views on many of the issues that it discusses, but Professor Pipes shows little patience to entertain any such dissent. 2) In his apparent haste to do this overview, too many topics that should have been included are not. The important French, German, and American Communist leaders, for example, cannot be found in the index. 3) The Suggestions for Further Reading, which should be so important in a work of this kind, are inadequate. 4) There are more errors than can be justified. It is not true that Lenin's Council of People's Commissars consisted "exclusively of Bolsheviks," as is claimed on page 40; on page 45, a non-Bolshevik on this Council is quoted and named. It is not true that Djilas was the first to speak of a new Soviet exploiting class (p. 167). This had been done many years earlier by Bruno Rizzi, James Burnham, Max Shachtman, and others. It is not true that Lenin was unaware of the negative aspects of Stalin (p. 57). In fact, Lenin had warned against Stalin in his famous "Testament." A more leisurely writing and a more careful editing could have eliminated such howlers. Nevertheless, overall, this is a very valuable summary statement of what Communism was like.
Rating: 
Summary: A masterpiece
Review: This book is simply brilliant.Richard Pipes has put the entire history of Communism into a short, handy book well under 200 pages in length. If you're unclear on the differences between socialism, Marxism, Bolshevism, Leninism, and Communism -- that's all very clearly explained. Pipes also demonstrates that the history of Communism begins with Plato and his dialogues on the ideal state. This "ideal" of an absolutely ruthless egalitarian society has been around for thousands of years. What Marx and his followers brought was a theory which supported a "practical program" to put this "ideal" into practice. Result? The worst mass-murders in human history. This book (along with a similar book on evolution) should be required reading in schools around the world. But then again,
as Pipes points out, at the same time as he is writing the history of communism, he is also writing its obituary. I hope he's not mistaken, and that this ghastly beast is in fact dead and buried. Highest possible recommendation!!
Rating:
Summary: Biased, Horrifying and Fascinating
Review: This short little book really packs quite a punch; Pipes begins by writing that it is not merely a history of communism, but also "its obituary." Given that statement, it is worth noting that Pipes is no friend of communist thought: it was not a good idea gone bad but was, instead, a bad idea from the beginning. Pipes traces communal-utopian ideology back to its beginnings in Plato and early Christianity, but writes that Communism is not merely some sort of secularized Christianity. Pipes then blazes through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Enlightenment before getting to Karl Marx, whose writings were - and are - the ideological foundation of Communist thought. He notes that liberal and communist thought both rest upon the same presuppositions, which Pipes considers to be naive and fundamentally incorrect: that people are basically good and that, if given the opportunity and the education, they will denounce capitalism and create a utopian society. It is worth noting that the history Pipes deals with here is the history of Marxist thought as it developed in Eastern Europe and Russia; it would be accurate to note that this is the "cold current" of Marxist thought. The "warm current" is what developed in Western Europe and never took on the violent and revolutionary tendencies that Lenin and his followers advocated. Lenin is the principle "bad guy" in Pipes' book, for Pipes spends more time on him than on anyone else. He has no lack of nasty words to describe Lenin or Stalin but his favorite seems to be "megalomaniac". Pipes' view is that since the USSR closed itself off to foreign influence, its leaders, despite their murderous habits, ended up being deified - to their own egotistical destruction. It's an interesting argument that could - should? - probably be debated, but it's also insightful. Pipes then follows the history of Soviet Socialism, giving rather short attention to the Cold War and the Soviet Union's collapse. He concludes by noting the various Marxist/Leninist/Communist [frustratingly enough, he fails to really distinguish between them] totalitarian regimes that existed around the world, some of which were Marxist/... in name only. Pipes' books is well worth reading, despite his biases. His claim to have written Communism's obituary seems a bit overblown, but he certainly points to its eventual death, hoping that it will never return but exist only in nightmares and memories.
Rating:
Summary: Anatomy of a Nightmare
Review: After you read books like this, you are left wondering why humanity is still a species on this Earth. Our ability to jump on any bandwagon that promises golden days, then sit back and watch the system we support slaughter millions is truly astounding. Pipes has written a very effective look at the history of communism. The crimes of the system are laid out, its repression of political thought, its countless murders, its wanton destruction of native culture. Along side is a running explanation of the "ideology" behind the madness. You'll see how truly evil men, Lenin included, can pray on human weakness to their own personal benefit. Meanwhile, you can almost laugh at the lies they spread worldwide, through the Comintern. Not so funny is the amount of people, including some of the Western's world most brilliant scholar, who bought into it's devious arrangement. There are better books out there about Communism, its effects and its crimes. But if you are looking for a good read or an introduction, Pipes comes through.
Rating:
Summary: Communism with warts and all...
Review: This slim study by a distinguished and prolific historian of Soviet Russia joins the publisher's "Chronicles" series aimed at a popular audience. Tracing the roots of communism back to Aristotle and Plato and rapidly sweeping through the centuries to Marx and the modern socialists, Pipes provides tremendously compressed overviews of Lenin and the early Soviet era, of the Stalinist decades and beyond to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Short chapters are also devoted to the reception of communism in Western Europe, and to the Third World experiments in China, Cuba, Cambodia, and elsewhere. However, the highly condensed nature of this volume necessarily leads Pipes to debatable overgeneralizations and to skip numerous details and nuances. His sweeping, highly partisan but beautifully written judgments (which he would certainly avoid in writing for a more academic audience) will inevitably appear as definitive pronouncements in numerous undergraduate papers. The volume contains an extremely brief select bibliography. B.
Rating:
Summary: Biased, Horrifying and Fascinating
Review: This short little book really packs quite a punch; Pipes begins by writing that it is not merely a history of communism, but also "its obituary." Given that statement, it is worth noting that Pipes is no friend of communist thought: it was not a good idea gone bad but was, instead, a bad idea from the beginning. Pipes traces communal-utopian ideology back to its beginnings in Plato and early Christianity, but writes that Communism is not merely some sort of secularized Christianity. Pipes then blazes through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Enlightenment before getting to Karl Marx, whose writings were - and are - the ideological foundation of Communist thought. He notes that liberal and communist thought both rest upon the same presuppositions, which Pipes considers to be naive and fundamentally incorrect: that people are basically good and that, if given the opportunity and the education, they will denounce capitalism and create a utopian society. It is worth noting that the history Pipes deals with here is the history of Marxist thought as it developed in Eastern Europe and Russia; it would be accurate to note that this is the "cold current" of Marxist thought. The "warm current" is what developed in Western Europe and never took on the violent and revolutionary tendencies that Lenin and his followers advocated. Lenin is the principle "bad guy" in Pipes' book, for Pipes spends more time on him than on anyone else. He has no lack of nasty words to describe Lenin or Stalin but his favorite seems to be "megalomaniac". Pipes' view is that since the USSR closed itself off to foreign influence, its leaders, despite their murderous habits, ended up being deified - to their own egotistical destruction. It's an interesting argument that could - should? - probably be debated, but it's also insightful. Pipes then follows the history of Soviet Socialism, giving rather short attention to the Cold War and the Soviet Union's collapse. He concludes by noting the various Marxist/Leninist/Communist [frustratingly enough, he fails to really distinguish between them] totalitarian regimes that existed around the world, some of which were Marxist/... in name only. Pipes' books is well worth reading, despite his biases. His claim to have written Communism's obituary seems a bit overblown, but he certainly points to its eventual death, hoping that it will never return but exist only in nightmares and memories.
Rating:
Summary: Suddenly optimistic about the world.
Review: As one of many inspirees of Ayn Rand, I years ago latched onto a concept of limited government that fueled my pursuit of political knowledge and allowed me to emerge from my apathetic isolation. That conversion story told, I have still never felt quite sure of my own convictions about communism without having more knowledge of economics, built in my own mind, with my very own synapses. Over the years since, I've read many books on the issues of government, property, law, philosophy. This small volume, which I decided to read in a three-hour sitting when it arrived, merely to get it out of the way and make room for the dozen other books I'm wading through, has done a peculiar thing to me. It's explained in the simplest logic, minus emotional rhetoric or flowery slogans, why communism must fail whenever it is attempted. A sense of hopelessness used to pervade my thinking about the world until I made the right connection, during the final section of this book. No pleas, no persuasion, just data organized and presented in an eminently readable form. Click! This isn't necessarily the most useful review to you, and you ought to read many of the others; it is more like a thank-you note to the author for the voluminous research and lucid prose with which he has taught me, with even my short span of attention, the critical details of this political phenomenon. Somehow in presenting the facts, he has allowed me to view this vampiric philosophy, with its millions of casualties, as nevertheless merely a rabid dog in a huge garden of freely traded ideas and resilient human beings. This thing can be fought. Thanks, Richard Pipes!
Rating:
Summary: Love it!
Review: This a great book! I love every word of it. It begins the history of Communism from Antiquity. Very entertaining and educating!
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely compelling and brilliantly written!
Review: Richard Pipes is the expert on communism and the Soviet Union. No one else could have written this book on communism but him. He succinctly presents a complete and comprehensive historical overview of communism and the devastation that followed in its wake. Unlike so many others in academia, Pipes does not idealize communism or socialism and make excuses for it. Using documents once unavailable, he explains in no uncertain terms the terror of the communist regime in the Soviet Union while providing unparalleled insight into communism's spread across the globe, its intrigues with Nazism and Fascism, and its eventual decline and collapse. This book is timely. To many coming of age today, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall are but memories. Lest we forget the toll of communism on humanity and once again get seduced by the communism's siren call of equality and freedom share this book. The immorality of the communist era should not be forgotten.
Rating:
Summary: Best Short History of Communism: Required Reading
Review: Dr. Richard Pipes has condensed the history of an evil ideology and of evil regimes in a short, readable book. Should be required reading in high school/college. Read this book along with his autobiography, VIXI.
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