Review of Communism:
A Brief History by Richard
Pipes (Wiedenfeld
and Nicholson, £16.99), Tribune, 18 January 2002
Richard Pipes, the veteran Polish-American historian of modern Russia, is dismissed by
many on the left as a right-wing Cold War fossil – he's been teaching at
Harvard since 1950 and was a member of Ronald Reagan's National Security
Council as director of Soviet and East European Affairs in the early 1980s.
But
he also has a deserved reputation for serious academic work on the last years
of Tsarism and the first years of the Soviet regime. And as recently as a
couple of years ago, his The Unknown
Lenin, an annotated collection of documents laying bare the fanaticism,
irrationality and lack of political judgment of the founding father of
Bolshevism, rightly won praise across the political spectrum for its
thoroughness and originality.
Communism: A Brief History, an 180-page introduction
to and obituary for the idea, programme and practice of its title, is, however,
unlikely to win many plaudits. Apart from a single chapter on the origins and
politics of Leninism, it is a lazy piece of work that offers insight into
little apart from the author's own ideological prejudices.
Pipes
is simplistic on the intellectual roots of the communist idea, plodding on
Stalinism, superficial on the reception of Soviet communism in the rest of the
world and utterly predictable in his conclusions. Yup, folks, in case you
haven't realised: "Historical evidence indicates that the liberties of
individuals can only be protected when property rights are firmly guaranteed,
because these rights constitute the most effective barrier to state
encroachments . . . the goal of Communism, the abolition of property,
inevitably leads to the abolition of liberty and legality." Oh no. Not
again!
Even
where he is right – for example on Lenin's responsibility for creating the
police state that Stalin developed into the epitome of terrorist dictatorship
– his arguments are flaccid and unconvincing. Definitely not his best work.
