If you are a regular here at the KC blog, then you know full-well that I’ve been reading Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution and enjoying it immensely. Although it is an 800 page book, he covers a lot of ground and, therefore, must move along quite rapidly. Often, he presumes upon the reader to already know the basics of the history he’s interpreting. As I read, he progressed through the 2nd Russian Revolution too quickly for me. I got lost in the details. So, I decided to learn more.
In my research to acquire more info on the Russian Revolution, I came across the historian Richard Pipes. It turns out that everyone had heard of him except me. Sometimes that happens. Anyway, Richard Pipes is the Baird Professor of History, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He’s one of the foremost scholars on Russian communism, such that in 1992 he was called as an “expert witness in the Russian Constitutional Court’s trial against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
The book I’m reading now, Communism: A History, is 160 pages long. His Concise History of the Russian Revolution is about 400 pages long, and the non-concise version comes in 3 volumes. So, if you’re interested in finding out more about 19th and 20th Century Russian history, Richard Pipes is a solid place to start.
I would love to entice some of you to order, and subsequently read, more about 20th Century communism. The parallels between communism, fascism, and the democratic-socialism currently being preached from DC’s legislative and executive pulpits are much too similar to be accidental. Now would be a great time to buy a Richard Pipes book and assign it to your high-schoolers. Better yet, read through it with them. You have a first-hand experience with the Cold War and the fall of the regime. Pass along what you know. Show them what “Utopia” looks like if you start with man and end with man. Utopia looks like famine, murder, and despair. Tens of millions of people were murdered in the pursuit of this atheistic ideal. Don’t miss the chance to put the bad taste of communism in their mouth before some freshman English teacher at the local junior college tries to teach them otherwise.
Here’s a quote from Communism: A History, chapter 2, “Leninism”:
The coup took place on November 7 (1917) when pro-Bolshevik units took over the capital without firing a shot. There was some fighting in Moscow, but in the rest of the country the transition proceeded quite smoothly. Lenin later said that taking power in Russia was as easy as “lifting a feather.” The reason was that he had cleverly camouflaged the seizure of power by himself and his party as the transfer of “all power to the soviets,” which slogan promised grassroots democracy rather than dictatorship. Even Lenin’s socialist rivals, who suspected his intentions, were not terribly upset, convinced that a Bolshevik one-party dictatorship could not possibly last and would soon yield to a socialist coalition. They preferred to let him exercise power for a while rather than unleash civil war that would only benefit the ‘counterrevolution.’
As it turned out, the Bolsheviks would stay in power for seventy-four years. Communism thus did not come to Russia as the result of a popular uprising: it was imposed on her from above by a small minority hiding behind democratic slogans. This salient fact was to determine its course. (emphasis mine)
Democracy promised. Dictatorship provided.
The up-and-coming generation will probably not get a course in communism from their high school curriculum. You’re going to need to show them.
You can order the book here.
Here are some of my previous quotes and thoughts on Marxism and communism on KC:
Your Weekly Dose of Rosenstock
Rosenstock-Huessy on Tolstoi and Dostoevski
Lincoln, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Obama
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