Rating: 
Summary: Concise and Brilliant.
Review: Oscar Wilde said that the cigarette was the perfect type of pleasure, as it was exquisite but left one unsatisfied. The same can be said regarding Richard Pipes' Communism: A History. It is a concise work, and its 160 pages of narrative are perfect for those under time constraints, but when you're done, you'll wish there was another section hidden behind the index. To corrupt the words of Stalin, this book is an essential and short course on communism, which, in hindsight, can be defined as the desire of a government to destroy its own people.
Pipes had an ambitious task before him when he classified so much history into so little space, but the end product is first rate. His conclusion that, "Communism was not a good idea that went wrong; it was a bad idea" rings true to the majority who have studied it. Communism's survey is quite damning and leaves little room for exculpatory evidence for all the tragedies committed on the behalf of a pseudo-philosopher named Marx. Pipes visits the theoretical underpinnings of Marxism and finds every premise flawed. First, there has never been a society where man did not value his possessions. Even in the days of feudalism, the serf had his own plot of land he worked and was allowed to maintain. What he did not give to his lord he kept for himself. Communism pretends that man will productively work when he is inherently not vested in the results of his labors. This has never been the case. When one acknowledges this theoretical misassumption, the doom that flows from it is not surprising. Traditionally, the landowner and the tenant were partners, and the landowner could not profit without the tenant's successful tilling of the soil. With communism, no such interaction between citizen and bureaucrat was necessary. If the yields were low, only the citizens starved. The bureaucrats never did. In Russia , there was no motivation to work at all. As one peasant said, "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." Another said, "If you don't steal from your government, you are stealing from your family." If you get any time off over the summer and are at the beach (or even at a laundromat), I recommend reading or skimming Communism: A History. If nothing else, it helps us give thanks for all we've been given (and avoided) by living in the United States of America.
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: 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: 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!
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