The Russian Revolution

With erudition lightly worn, Harvard historian Pipes, in this massive, wonderfully vivid, gripping chronicle, stresses the role of liberals both in the Russian revolution of 1905, for which the Communists later claimed credit, and in the upheavals of 1917. He attributes the failure of the February 1917 revolution to Alexander Kerensky's rash actions, his doctrinaire vision of democracy and his dissolution of the police and the provincial bureaucracy, which plunged the nation into anarchy. He argues persuasively that the Bolsheviks' October 1917 putsch was not a true revolution, but a classic coup d'etat. His portrayal of the backward Russian peasantry, scarcely touched by westernization, and of the intelligentsia, "self-appointed spokesman" for over nine-tenths of the populace, lays the groundwork for his discerning analysis of how Lenin built a one-party dictatorship. No other book so brilliantly clarifies the inner dynamics of the Russian Revolution.

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The author, a distinguished Harvard historian, seeks to present a comprehensive view of the Russian Revolution, tracing its roots in the half century before 1917, a period he has already examined in Russia Under the Old Regime ( LJ 3/15/75). His new book, which will also be published in the Soviet Union, should provoke lively debate in the age of glasnost, for it is an unsparing indictment of Bolshevism. Wide ranging in its coverage, based on a profound knowledge of the Russian past and of relevant Western and Soviet scholarship, the work analyzes the direction of Russian development to the Revolution (without whitewashing prerevolutionary figures such as Nicholas II), then goes on to examine the origins and entrenchment of Bolshevism, which Pipes sees as a savagely amoral force. If Soviet power in its first years brought any benefits at all, they are, in this evaluation, insignificant compared to the ghastly price paid for them by the Russian people. This is an important book.

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