Communism : A History

Baird Professor of History Richard Pipes
Random House Publishing Group
 9780812968644
0-8129-6864-6

With 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..

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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."