A Concise History of the Russian Revolution

Pipes' masterly works The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime are regarded as the classic treatments of the seminal transforming event of the twentieth century. Pipes has now distilled that two-volume account into a brilliant new history that is likely to become the standard one-volume account of the Russian Revolution. Pipes argues that the revolution was an intellectual, rather than a class uprising; that it was steeped in terror from its very outset; and that it was not a revolution at all but a coup d'état. He examines the establishment in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1920 of a new type of regime: the world's first modern, industrial, totalitarian state. And he describes the Civil War, the attempts to export the revolution abroad, the militarization of politics and the solidification of the Communist state in the early 1920s, demonstrating persuasively how the resulting system owed less to the theories of Marx than it did to the character of Lenin and Russia's long authoritarian tradition.

"Despite its sadness, insight abounds in this history, [it is] among the most reliably researched and skillfully synthesized works ever written on the revolution."--Booklist

"A deep and eloquent condemnation of the revolution and its aftermath."--The New York Times

"A highly readable, succinct interpretation of the preconditions, events, and immediate sequelae of the Russian Revolution."--Book News


CONTENTS

Part One: The Agony of the Old Regime

1. Russia in 1900
A. The Peasantry
B. Official Russia
C. The Intelligentsia

2. The Constitutional Experiment
A. The Revolution of 1905
B. Stolypin

3. Russia at War
A. Her Prospects
B. The First Year
C. Catastrophe Looms

4. The February Revolution

Part Two: The Bolsheviks Conquer Russia

5. Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevism

6. The October Coup
A. The Bolshevik's Failed Bids for Power
B. The Coup

7. Building the One-Party State

8. The Revolution Internationalized
A. Brest-Litovsk
B. Foreign Involvement

9. War Communism
A. The Creation of a Command Economy
B. The War Against the Village

10. Red Terror
A. The Murder of the Imperial Family
B. Mass Terror

Part Three: Russia under the Bolshevik Regime

11. The Civil War
A. The First Battles: 1918
B. The Climax: 1919-1920

12. The New Empire

13. Communism for Export

14. Spiritual Life
A. Culture as Propaganda
B. War on Religion

15. Communism in Crisis
A. NEP--The False Thermidor
B. The Crisis of the New Regime

16. Reflections on the Russian Revolution

Glossary

Chronology