The Seeds of Repression

...Following a complex and subtle evolution, the two were separated beginning with the Roman Empire...

...Compared with Bolshevik "efficiency,'' Tsarist methods were a garden party...

...Still, there can be no denying that the germ of repression was planted in the Russian body politic by Tsarism...

...During man's early social development, authority over people and property was combined...

...the fear of Western ridicule...

...Striking out sharply against the overvaluation of ideas as the causes of human behavior, he argues, quite sensibly, that the roots of modern totalitarianism can better be found in the Tsarist institutional complex than in the mere theories of Rousseau, Hegel and Marx...

...This arbitrariness was a principal factor in Russia's "endemic lawlessness," and led as well to the "patrimonial mentality" that remains the hallmark of Russian life to this day...

...In Russia, however, where the division between the two kinds of authority occurred "very late and very imperfectly," dominion remained no more than an extension of ownership, and rulers tended to see themselves both as sovereigns of the realm and as its proprietors...

...Throughout the severe rule of Alexander III, moreover, a total of 4,000 people were merely detained and questioned in connection with political offenses-they suffered no further punishment...

...In the absence of a general contractual framework, freedom could be expressed only through brute negation-lesser nobles might, for instance, leave their princes, but they stepped, so to speak, into a void...

...As Pipes points out, it was the difficulty of maintaining such a governmental arrangement in the face of growing contact with the West that engendered the permanent internal tension within the country...

...To consolidate their rule, the princes arbitrarily increased their power, and the central regime that eventually emerged from all this became an unfettered absolutist apparatus, ever more dependent upon a pervasive police system...

...This meant, for example, that Lenin's mother went on drawing a government pension as a civil servant's widow even after one son had been executed for trying to kill the Tsar and two other children had been jailed for revolutionary activity...

...In this isolation, the Bolshevik party was capable of a terrorism the Tsarist bureaucrats could not even dream of...

...It required a regime with no links to the people, though, for it to come into full flower...

...At the same time, he demonstrates how a powerful mind, with seemingly effortless command of the data, can create a conceptual structure for an abundance of material without ever becoming overly rigid...

...Thus Pipes' notion of organic continuity in Russia appears a little flimsy...

...foreign travel...

...Tsarism was accepted with relative docility by 99 per cent of the population...

...In contrast, the post-Revolutionary escalation in the use of force has resulted in millions being wiped out by Bolshevism, and dissidents are treated with unrelieved harshness...

...Pipes further maintains that Alexander III, by signing a decree in the late 19th century maximizing administrative authority in capriciously defined emergencies, established the profile of the Bolshevik dictatorship and, for that matter, of all 20th-century dictatorial regimes...

...and especially the respect for private property...

...For as he himself indicates, the Tsarist police, though ubiquitous, meddlesome and brutal, were inefficient as well, and their entire operation was vitiated by what he calls "loopholes": the urbanity of the Russian elite...

...Indeed, since 1845, all Russian criminal codes-including the Soviet codes of 1927 and 1960-have contained a political "omnibus" clause worded so vaguely that a government could jail anyone on a charge of "weakening" or "undermining" public order, "arousing doubts" about it, etc...

...not many have managed to steer their way between the monumental tome and the snappy pamphlet...

...Pipes enunciates his central thesis at the outset...

...One might argue that Pipes seems on this last point to have succumbed to the penchant for a "pattern," something he opposes in others, particularly economic determinists...

...With his consciousness of historical continuity, Pipes also makes a plausible case for tracing Bolshevik tyranny back to the police system founded in the 1870s and '80s...

...But in Russia Under the Old Regime Professor Richard Pipes has succeeded brilliantly-producing a marvelously lucid, penetratingly intelligent, highly readable account of that vast and turbulent country from its origins to the period immediately before the Revolution...

...the tiny group of Bolsheviks, with their outsize schemes for social renovation, were obliged to regard the overwhelming bulk of Russians as their enemies (something, of course, that could never be admitted...

...From the outset, each struggle for political liberty was waged in precisely the way Burke thought these struggles should never be waged-in the name of abstract ideals...

...Yet in describing the interaction between the peasants, bourgeoisie, gentry, clergy, aristocracy, and autocrats, Pipes shows why every social group was inhibited from carrying on a broad battle for its own interests...

...Next came feudalism-a mixture of decentralization, vassalage and conditional land tenure-which embodied a social contract and provided a basis in the West for constitutionality and individual freedom...

...Reviewed by Joel Carmichael Author, "An Illustrated History of Russia," "A Short History of the Russian Revolution" Trying to write a history of a large society is notoriously tricky...