The Russian Revolution
Pipe, Richard
In the early morning of July 17, 1918, in a basement in Ekaterinburg, members of the Bolshevik security police, the Cheka, murdered the ex-czar Nicholas II, his wife, their son and four daughters,...
...Beginning with the seizing of St...
...Pipes writes with forceful clarity, though The Russian Revolution lacks the anecdotal verve that launched Simon Schama's recent history of the French Revolution into bestsellerdom...
...Pipes re- about the future is defined by the past...
...The Chekists approached them with bayonets...
...To explain this novelty, Pipes looks to the influence of modern ideas...
...The Bolsheviks, it is sometimes said, were forced to use drastic measures to restore order to Russia in the chaotic years that followed the revolution...
...Elsewhere, however, Pipes emphasizes the radical novelty of the Bolsheviks, the "entirely new moral realm" they had entered...
...What held them together was not a program or a platform—these could change from one day to the next in conformity with the leader's wishes—but the person of the leader...
...n Russia," Pipes has written in 1 an earlier work, "the struggle for political liberty was waged from the beginning exactly in the manner that Burke felt it ought never to be waged: in the name of abstract ideals...
...It was more difficult work than expected...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991...
...The bodies were undressed, covered with sulfuric acid, and dumped in an abandoned gold mine...
...the czars, meanwhile, treated the country like a private estate...
...The present work ends around 1919...
...These vampires have gathered and continue to gather...
...his "Commissar of Justice" exhorted, "We must execute not only the guilty...
...In the opening chapters, Pipes describes the numerous skirmishes engaged in by the autocracy and the intelligentsia from 1906 through 1917 in the pseudo-parliamentary Duma...
...On page 799, regarding cer- czarist and Soviet Russia, responded to tain Bolshevik legal procedures, Pipes Pipes in a 1980 essay in Foreign Affairs writes, "Those living under Bolshevik entitled "The Mortal Danger: How rule found themselves in a situation for Misconceptions About Russia Imperil which there was no historic precedent...
...The Bolsheviks revived this ket economy it is difficult to say, but tradition...
...tality than to a modern mentality re- flunkyism and incompetence in the govgarding the status of man and the ernment: when one plays "If I Could world...
...For Pipes, Soviet totalitarianism is the product of a "patrimonial" political culture indigenous to Russia...
...A ccording to Pipes, the history of Russia is marked by continuity: the germinal totalitarianism of czarist Russia emerged, fully grown, in the Soviet regime...
...Finally, Trotsky's justification for the massacre, that it was needed to "shake up our own ranks," suggests to Pipes that the Bolsheviks had entered "an entirely new moral realm...
...rather, Pipes argues,it supplied a justification for his nihilistic and destructive impulses...
...Ruscentration camp . . . was Bolshevism's sians can nowadays be heard saying major contribution to the political that they want democracy, but not mulpractices of the twentieth century," on- tiple parties, or, for that matter, the prily to excavate on page 835 a czarist pre- vate sale of land...
...He defines the "culminating period" of the revolution as the quarter-century from the student revolts of 1899 to the death of Lenin in 1924...
...Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more...
...Nicholas II, determined to play the part of an autocrat but lacking the strength or talent to do so, repeatedly promised concessions, only to renege later...
...Marxism's appeal for Lenin lay not in its vision of a perfect future...
...The Cheka was founded in December 1917, before any organized opposition had emerged...
...years of Bolshevik rule and recommend War Communism resembled most the staying the course...
...With Lenin's enthusiastic support, it quickly became the dominant organ of the government...
...These spiders have grown fat at the expense of peasants...
...Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History at Harvard, doesn't buy it...
...Rusof medieval Russia...
...On page 832, Pipes tells us that viet Communism—raises doubts that "in its fully developed form, the con- liberal democracy will take hold...
...Lenin surrounded himself with like-minded fellows...
...To Russian as the reality of politics has plunged nationalists, he warns that there is pracinto depths previously unknown...
...In The Russian Revolution, Pipes arring a new wave of purges and harps once again on the patrimonial 17 repression, The Russian Revolution mentality of rulers and ruled...
...Only in the Russian case did the victims include the monarch's family and servants...
...Solzhenitsyn, who particularly in the final chapter, on the emphasizes the discontinuity between Red Terror...
...By 1919, its leader presided over the construction of a network of concentration camps...
...other Communists patrimonial regime (tiagloe gosudarstvo) hope for "democratic socialism...
...It's as if Pipes first tells us it is certain to bear little resemblance how horrible, how uniquely horrible, to liberal democracy as the West has the Bolsheviks are, then shrugs and come to know it...
...Then on page 800, regarding related Moreover, Pipes's emphasis on con-procedures, he writes, "These measures tinuity, on the Russians' undeveloped returned Russian judiciary procedures sense of property and law—not some-to the practices of the seventeenth cen- thing one is apt to cultivate under Sotury...
...The deed, perpetrated in the dead of night, resembled more a gangster-type massacre, than a formal execution...
...the promised sequel will continue Craig S. Lerner has written for Commentary and the New Criterion...
...In the book's final chapter, "Towards the Police State," Pipes argued that THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION Richard Pipes/Alfred A. Knopf/944 pp...
...Regicide was not unknown to Europe, says Pipes, but, "as is the case with so much that concerns the Russian Revolution, while the superficial features of events are familiar, all else is unique...
...Around the seventeenth century, he argues, thinkers ceased to content themselves with the mere contemplation of nature...
...Pipes first developed this thesis in Russia Under the Old Regime, the predecessor of the present volume, which traced Russian history through the late nineteenth century...
...Pipes reconstructs the mind of Lenin, focusing on hatred rather than idealism as his principal motivation...
...The Soviet Historical Encyclopedia, for example, writes that "War Communism," the attempt to introduce state control of the economy, was "dictated by the exceptional difficulties caused by the civil war [and] economic devastation...
...For its part, the intelligentsia would settle for nothing less than the institution of one-man, one-vote parliamentary democracy...
...After all, the "centuries of serfdom in his bones" or present debate within the Soviet Union his "primitive anarchism...
...The peasantry never acquired an understanding of property or law and was thus never fit material for citizenship...
...Unlike Charles I and Louis XVI, Nicholas was never brought to trial...
...But, in terms of murderous hatred, Lenin was simply in a class by himself...
...totalitarian overtones" were laid in the late nineteenth century...
...If you want to know what happened in Russia at the beginning of the century, read this book...
...If you want romance and adventure in a war-torn world, go to a video store and rent Reds...
...America...
...Under their influ- Communists, he suggests that Bolsheence, the goals of politics have soared vism was evil from the start...
...Their leader complained, "When one of the girls was stabbed, the bayonet would not go through her corset...
...Exactly what democedent: "Russian governments had an cracy would mean in the absence of old tradition of exploiting convict la- competing political parties and a mar-bor...
...To 1905: they simply wiped out the twelve intervening years of constitutionalism...
...Petersburg in October 1917, Pipes describes the Bolsheviks' almost immediate construction of a one-party state with a centralized economy and a terror apparatus...
...These bloodsuckers have waxed rich during the war...
...the be- will soon be appearing in translation in havior of the peasant is explained, often the Soviet Union, where it is certain to unpersuasively, with reference to the have a wide readership...
...Roughly the second half of the book covers the Bolshevik conquest of Russia...
...to 1924...
...perverted idealism, fanaticism, peculiarly Russian "patrimonial" men- and cowardice in the intelligentsia...
...peatedly identifies czarist precedents Hard-liners defend the seventy-five for Bolshevik actions, e.g., "inspirit...
...These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers...
...This is history without frills...
...Death to them...
...That such a form of government might be ill-suited to a country in which the vast majority of the population were illiterate peasants seldom intruded upon their consciousness...
...Because the nobility and bourgeoisie were never politically significant in Russia, it was left to an intelligentsia mesmerized by Western ideas to check royal power...
...He focuses on the great importance of Lenin to the Bolsheviks...
...Though Lenin had written in 1911 of the necessity of beheading "at least one hundred Romanovs," Soviet authorities to this day deny his responsibility for the executions, insisting that they were undertaken at the initiative of local Communists...
...Pipes shows that the Bolsheviks were themselves largely responsible for these "exceptional difficulties": their pricing policies curtailed the food supplies reaching the cities, and they intentionally wrecked the bourgeois economy with hyperinflationary monetary policies...
...merciless war against the kulaks...
...Unlike most historians," he wrote, "who seek the roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism in western ideas, I look for them in Russian institutions...
...The kulaks are the most beastly, the coarsest, the most savage exploiters," Lenin told a crowd of industrial workers in 1918...
...they sought to manipulate and exploit it to benefit man...
...One can perceive here, not only in principle but also in practical detail, Stalin's concentration camp empire: it differed from Lenin's only in size," writes Pipes...
...Others advocate a total within two weeks of the October coup break with the Soviet and Russian past marked a reversion to the autocratic and the adoption of liberal democracy...
...For Pipes, there is a profound significance to the events in Ekaterinburg...
...The easiest way to disabuse someone of his belief in a "humane" or "democratic" Leninism is to read him some words of the man himself...
...The Bolsheviks' early program was dictated not by circumstance, but by the deliberate application of violence and terror to secure power...
...Pipes credits him with the introduction of the vocabulary of pest control to political discourse...
...Have Been Born Anywhere," Pipes's These two lines of argument co-exist czarist Russia is not the sort of place uneasily in The Russian Revolution, that comes to mind...
...He occasionally sian nationalists, including Aleksandr resorts to his earlier thesis in its full- Solzhenitsyn, would jettison the whole blown form: "The system of govern- Soviet legacy and turn for guidance to ment which the Bolsheviks set in place Russian history...
...To un- tically nothing worth recovering in prederstand the Russian Revolution and revolutionary Russia...
...After a three-minute barrage at point-blank range, several of the victims survived...
...The chapter on the murder of the imperial family, one of eighteen in The Russian Revolution, is typical of Pipes's disdain for "ethical nihilism" and of his unfashionable willingness to pass value judgments...
...40 Craig S. Lerner THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 37 "the legal and institutional bases . . . says, "Well, they're just behaving like for a bureaucratic-police regime with Russians always have...
...Brutalizing squalBolshevism, according to this line of or and vast ignorance in the country-argument, one should look less to a side...
...This new philosophy inspired a brand of intellectuals, who first appeared during the French Revolution, intent on changing the world...
...regime that had ruled Russia before Pipes has bad news for everybody...
...In the early morning of July 17, 1918, in a basement in Ekaterinburg, members of the Bolshevik security police, the Cheka, murdered the ex-czar Nicholas II, his wife, their son and four daughters, three servants, and the family doctor...
Vol. 24 • April 1991 • No. 4
