The Russian Revolution (1990) by Richard Pipes

Richard Pipes was a prominent scholar of Russian history at Harvard for nearly half a century. Born in Poland in 1923, he was a virulent anti-communist and served in the Reagan administration National Security Council in the early 1980s. The fact that he dedicates “The Russian Revolution” to “the victims” tells you all you need to know about his perspective on the subject.

“The Russian Revolution” is a monster of a book – 842 pages not including endnotes. Washington Post Book World hails it as a “gripping read.” I would tone that praise down a bit and call it “readable.”

Pipes divides the book in half. The first section, “The Agony of the Old Regime,” is a detailed chronicle of Tsarist Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. Pipes is fond of making comparisons to the French Revolution. For instance, he notes that Russia had the same proportional representation of peasants as did France in 1789. He claims that the Zemstvo Congress and Bloody Sunday of 1905 were the Estates General and Bastille Day, respectively, in the Russian Revolution. The Russian’s tried to limit the influence of the intelligentsia in the Duma the way the ancien regime sought to vitiate the power of the Third Estate. Alexandra for her part was a perfect stand in for Marie Antoinette, as was Lenin for Robespierre. Moreover, Russia was every bit as volatile and bloody as Paris in the early 1790s. For example, between 1906 and 1907 no fewer than 4,500 Russian officials were killed or maimed by domestic terrorists. Attempts at reforms were halting and half-measured, although Pipes writes glowingly of the reform-minded Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, “arguably the most outstanding statesman of Imperial Russia,” who was nevertheless assassinated by radicals in Kiev in 1911.

A key theme in Part One is that Russia before 1917 was governed much like an occupying imperial power. The peasant population was treated similarly to how the British treated Indians during the Raj or the French the Vietnamese in Indo-China. The masses were controlled and exploited. Moreover, they were despised. No degree of political liberalization was deemed safe or advisable. Reforms were made under duress only, and then only gradually and impermenantly.

Pipes argues that Russia was on the verge of political rebellion before the First World War, a conflict for which the country was unprepared on just about every level. According to the British military attaché in Moscow, the Russians were “just great big-hearted children who had thought out nothing and had stumbled half-asleep into a wasp’s nest.” The truly amazing thing is that the government didn’t collapse until 1917. From the outset of the war, the opposition and the government were unwilling to bury their differences. “The absence in Russia of an overriding sense of national unity was never more painfully in evidence,” Pipes writes.

When the end of the monarchy came, it came swiftly and suddenly. A three hundred year dynasty went up in a puff of smoke. “Russia in the spring of 1917,” Pipes says, “may well represent a unique instance of a government born of a revolution dissolving the machinery of administration before it had a chance to replace it with one of its own creation.” What was left was a vacuum that neither the Provisional Government nor the Petrograd Soviet did much to fill. “It was as if the greatest empire in the world, covering one-sixth of the earth’s surface, were an artificial construction, without organic unity, held together by wires all of which converged in the person of the monarch. The instant the monarch withdrew, the wires snapped and the whole construction collapsed in a heap.”

Part two, “The Boleshviks Conquer Russia,” concentrates on the Marxist revolution led by Lenin in October 1917. “Lenin’s dominant impulse was and remained hatred,” Pipes says, “His outlook on life was a mixture of Clausewitz and Social Darwinism.” Owing to Lenin, only the Bolsheviks had the chutzpah and fortitude to lead Russia out of anarchy.