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Zusatztext “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 Informationen zum Autor Richard Pipes , Baird Professor of History, Emeritus, at Harvard University, is the author of numerous books and essays, including The Russian Revolution, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, and Property and Freedom . In 1981–82 he served as the Director of East European and Soviet Affairs on the National Security Council, and in 1992 he was an expert witness in the Russian Constitutional Court’s trial against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chesham, New Hampshire. Klappentext 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. 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. 1. Communist Theory and Program The idea of a classless, fully egalitarian society first emerged in classical Greece. Ancient Greece happened to have been the first country in the world to recognize private property in land and to treat land as a commodity, and hence it was the first to confront the social inequalities that result from ownership. Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer (seventh century b.c.), in the poem Works and Days extolled a mythical “Golden Age” when people were not driven by the “shameful lust for gain,” when there was an abundance of goods for all to share and mankind lived in perpetual peace. The theme of the Golden Age resounded in the writings of the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid; Ovid spoke of the time when the world knew nothing of “boundary posts and fences.” The ideal acquired its earliest theoretical formulation in the writings of Plato. In the Republic, speaking through Socrates, Plato saw the root of discord and wars in belongings: Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use of the terms “mine” and “not mine,” “his” and “not his.” . . . And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of persons apply the terms “mine” and “not mine” in the same way to the same thing? In The Laws, Plato envisioned not only a society in which people shared all worldly possessions, as well as their wives and children, but one in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions. Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, questioned whether such a communist utopia would bring about social peace, on the grounds that people who hold things in common are more prone to quarrel than those who hold them in private ownership. Furthermore, he argued, the root of social discord lies not in material belongings but in the yearning for them: “it is not possess...
