The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

Release Date: 05 November, 1991

Edition: Paperback

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Comprehensive, deep, but uneven

This is an excellent overview of the Russian Revolution. Pipes does an excellent job of distilling the different factions involved, and constructing the worldviews of those involved. The dichotomy between the outlook of the aristocracy and peasants was particularly good--much of the revolution's course was explained there.

Throughout, I think Pipes did a good job of balancing the big picture with the details that are necessary to understand what was happening in such a large country at the time. His writing style varies somewhat throughout the different chapters, but on the whole was engaging and lively.

I have only two (minor) complaints, hence 4 stars instead of 5. The first complaint is that the book ends around a chapter too soon. The civil war is left out almost entirely, and in general the book ended with many loose ends, without even a quick summary of what followed in history. This is not a problem for the scholar, but to a casual reader (like myself) it feels a bit abrupt.

The second complaint, as others have noted, is Pipes' bias. When I got to Chapter 3 I started laughing out loud, and I wondered at first if it was written by someone else. Suddenly the objective writing style becomes full of venom for the "intelligentsia." Pipes' contempt is a constant theme throughout the remainder of the book, to the point where I wasn't sure how much I could trust some of his observations.

This is still a great book. But I do wish Pipes had remained more objective--the atrocious record of the Bolshevik party's early years speaks for itself.

A book to read twice

A review in simple words.
This book is worth to read it twice. I'm a history student and I found the book to be the best in the topic of the Russian Revolution. I lived under the communist regime and agree with Richard Pipes in many of his point of views, in fact many of my point of views about communism in Russia were reflected in the book. I have read other books about this topic, but this book is the best of all books about the Russian Revolution. The chapters "The October Coup" and "The Red Terror" are the most interesting chapters of the book. The whole Revolution was about that, a coup d'�tat to take power by Lenin and Trotsky and the later terror that kept communism in power for more than 7 decades in Russia. The book provided me with a good source for my seminars. I recommend the book to any history student who studies the topic.