Close thy Orwell, open thy Muggeridge.(Communism: A Brief History)

Communism: A Brief History, by Richard Pipes; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, $39.95.

HOW DO YOU REACH a sceptical generation convinced that the Cold War was simply another power struggle in which what was laughingly called "the free world" lost credibility when it called in the reactionary "McCarthyites" and religious "authoritarians"?

Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian who served as President Reagan's National Security Council adviser, has settled on one answer in his Communism: A Brief History. He ignores the role of the churches in the fall of communism and does not mention American anti-communists except in such throwaway lines as "there was never the slightest danger of a Communist takeover of the United States".

This approach imposes enormous handicaps. How do you treat the fall of communism without mentioning the Pope? How tell the story of communism without at least referring to, say, Ronald Reagan? But it also frees Pipes, in what is 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 claimed that taking power in 1917 was as easy as "lifting a feather"--although Pipes, like most of us, marvels at his audacity. He presided over civil war, the destruction of the economy, a famine which claimed over five million lives, and a massive terror. If, when he died in 1923, 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 which in ferocity and number of victims had no parallel in history, and inflicted on the Russian people what Alec Nove called "the most precipitous decline in living standards" ever recorded.

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