Reviews"In the name of great good, Communism has brought great evil. . . . If you've wondered how your children and grandchildren are going to grasp this large and alien reality, a good move is to make sure they own this book." -The Weekly Standard "The publication of Richard Pipes' Communism: A History . . . is of signal importance. One cannot put it down without realizing, once and for all, that the road to utopia is paved with the bodies of the innocent-and leads nowhere." -Baltimore Sun "I wish every university student . . . would read this grim book." -Paul Johnson From the Trade Paperback edition., "In the name of great good, Communism has brought great evil. . . . If you've wondered how your children and grandchildren are going to grasp this large and alien reality, a good move is to make sure they own this book." -The Weekly Standard "The publication of Richard Pipes'Communism: A History. . . is of signal importance. One cannot put it down without realizing, once and for all, that the road to utopia is paved with the bodies of the innocent-and leads nowhere." -BaltimoreSun "I wish every university student . . . would read this grim book." -Paul Johnson, "In the name of great good, Communism has brought great evil. . . . If you've wondered how your children and grandchildren are going to grasp this large and alien reality, a good move is to make sure they own this book." - The Weekly Standard "The publication of Richard Pipes' Communism: A History . . . is of signal importance. One cannot put it down without realizing, once and for all, that the road to utopia is paved with the bodies of the innocent-and leads nowhere." -Baltimore Sun "I wish every university student . . . would read this grim book." -Paul Johnson
Series Volume Number7
Dewey Decimal335.43
SynopsisWith astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime's scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice. At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state. This is the story of how the agitation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two mid-nineteenth-century European thinkers and writers, led to a great and terrible world religion that brought down a mighty empire, consumed the world in conflict, and left in its wake a devastation whose full costs can only now be tabulated.