Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

In Harvard historian Pipes's judgment, Lenin, Trotsky and their fellow Bolsheviks were not utopians but fanatics. Seizing power in Russia as the springboard for a global revolution, they deceptively promised every disenchanted group what it wanted to hear, and manipulated the Soviets or workers' councils while consolidating their absolute power through the Party and secret police. In this sequel to The Russian Revolution , Pipes persuasively argues that Lenin's one-party dictatorship, through its terrorizing, suppression of the press, censorship and monopolistic control of cultural organizations, set the stage for Stalin's genocidal totalitarianism. His powerful narration, an essential source, bristles with fresh interpretations as it discusses the Russian civil war, anti-Jewish pogroms, famine, Moscow's vehement campaign against religion, the suppression of ethnic and national groups, and Lenin's short-lived, pro-capitalist New Economic Policy. Pipes shows how both Hitler and Mussolini drew on Lenin's tyrannical methods, and he perceptively analyzes the mind-set of Western fellow-travelers who wove fantasies of the U.S.S.R. as an egalitarian Eden while rationalizing its evils. Photos. (Mar.)