Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

by Richard Pipes

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Russia under the Bolshevik Regime is the sequel to Richard Pipes's classic The Russian Revolution, and covers the time from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918 to the death of Lenin in 1924, when all the institutions and nearly all the practices of future Stalinism were in place. In the first history of the period to make use of the recently opened Russian archives, the author traces the formative years of the Communist state, when the Bolshevik leaders - Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and others show more - put their stamp on a regime that was to hold power for the next seventy years. He describes the efforts of the Bolsheviks to defend and expand their dominion to the borderlands of Russia and to the rest of the world; the Civil War between Whites and Reds, the most destructive episode in the country's history since the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century; the devastating famine of 1921; Lenin's cultural and religious policies; and the crisis that engulfed the regime in the early 1920s as the result of political and economic failures. Richard Pipes shows that a great deal of what the Communists did had roots in Russia's historical experience and that both Mussolini and Hitler adapted, for their own purposes, the totalitarian techniques first developed by the Bolsheviks. Bolshevism, he says, was "the most audacious attempt in history to subject the entire life of the country to a master plan." "The tragic and sordid history of the Russian Revolution," he concludes, "teaches that political authority must never be employed for ideological ends." show less

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45+ Works 2,767 Members
Richard Pipes was born Ryszard Edgar Pipes in Cieszyn, Poland on July 11, 1923. Soon after German troops entered Warsaw, he and his family fled to Italy on forged passports in 1939. They reached the United States a year later. He was attending Muskingum College in Ohio when he was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1942. He was sent to study show more Russian at Cornell University. He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1946 and a doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1950. His dissertation became the basis of his first book The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923. His other books included Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905; Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944; U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente; Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future; Russia Under the Old Regime; The Russian Revolution; Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime; and Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. He served for two years as the director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs for President Ronald Reagan's National Security Council. He spent his entire academic career at Harvard University. He died on May 17, 2018 at the age of 94. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Belongs to Publisher Series

Harvill (240)

Common Knowledge

Classifications

Genres
History, Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, Politics and Government
DDC/MDS
947.0841History & geographyHistory of EuropeEastern European Counties and RussiaRussian & Slavic History by Period1855-1917-1953 ; Communist period1917-1924 (Kerensky, Lenin)
LCC
DK266.5 .P45History of Europe, Asia, Africa and OceaniaRussia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics – PolandHistory of Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet RepublicsHistorySoviet regime, 1918-1991
BISAC

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Languages
English, Italian, Polish
Media
Paper, Ebook
ISBNs
9
ASINs
2