Little Reds Book.(Communism: A Brief History)(Review)

Communism: A Brief History, by Richard Pipes (Modern Library, 176 pp., $19.95)

A skeptical generation is convinced that the Cold War was nothing more than a traditional power struggle, and that the West's pretensions in calling itself "the free world" lost all credibility when it accepted the support of reactionary "McCarthyites" and religious "authoritarians" in the fight against Communism. How is a historian to restore a proper understanding of the moral importance of the Cold War? Richard Pipes, the Harvard professor who served as a national-security aide to President Reagan, has settled on one answer in his new book: He ignores the role of the churches in the fall of Communism, and does not mention American anti-Communists except in throwaway lines, e.g., "there was never the slightest danger of a Communist takeover of the United States."

This approach imposes enormous handicaps. How does one treat the fall of Communism without mentioning Ronald Reagan or John Paul II, Sidney Hook or Whittaker Chambers?

But it also frees Pipes, in a very short book, to concentrate on what really interests him in the big picture-Stalinism, the Comintern, and the Third World.

His theme is always the political, economic, and moral devastation that Communism inflicted on the world wherever it emerged, from China to Peru-and its ultimate failure.

Inevitably, half the book is about Russia (and its East European clones). It would be hard to find a better sketch of the rise and fall of Bolshevism. Pipes begins with the revolutionary formation of Lenin ("who arguably had a greater impact on twentieth-century politics than any other public figure"), tracing his passage from embittered terrorist to commander of a paramilitary party, funded at first by bank robberies and later by the German Embassy.

Lenin presided over civil war, the destruction of the economy, a famine that claimed over 5 million lives, and a massive state terror. If, when he died in 1924, he was, as Pipes claims, "haunted by a sense of failure," this nightmare never troubled his faithful disciple Stalin, who established a vast privileged and servile nomenklatura, re-enserfed the peasants, conducted purges that in ferocity and number of victims had no parallel in history, and inflicted on the Russian people what Alec Nove, a specialist on the Soviet economy, called "the most precipitous decline in living standards" ever ...