Brad DeLong is annoyed with Richard Pipes:

I am sitting here, reading Richard Pipes (1995), Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage: 067977646X). I am getting increasingly annoyed–not at Pipes’s desire to convince me that Lenin was a really evil man (he was), but at how many corners Pipes cuts in the process of laying on his message:

On pp. 37-38, Pipes writes:

Lenin… novel political power… seizure of power at the opportune moment. this moment was linked in his mind with a general European war…. postcard… sent in July 1914… wrote… “Best greeting for the commencing revolution in Russia.” Apparently he concluded… that the carnage would radicalize the masses… and make revolution all but inevitable…

But back on pp. 11-12, Pipes wrote:

hardly anybody expected the downfall of tsarism… people believed that tsarism would survive for a long time to come…. Suffice it to say that as late as January 1917, when he was an exile in Switzerland, Lenin predicted that he and his generation would not live to see a revolution in Russia…

On pp. 37-38, it is important to establish that Lenin believes that war and chaos and blood and death were his friends. On pp. 11-12, it is important to establish that tsarism was not rotten to the core but rather a system of government that could have endured for decades if not generations. In both cases Pipes ignores the fact that Lenin said lots of contradictory things and that no one quote can be taken to accurately and unambiguously reveal his settled, sober judgment. And Pipes ignores that his proof-text from Lenin on pp. 37-38 contradicts his proof-text from Lenin on pp. 11-12.

DeLong goes on to provide other examples. I had the same impression of Pipes when I read his Russian Revolution as a callow youth of about 22. (I write these lines at the hoary old age of 30, my back hunched with age over the keyboard.) At the time, I knew almost as little about Russian history as I do now, and nothing about Pipes’ reputation as an ideologue. Even so, the book struck me as very peculiar. I remember – and I don’t have the book with me, so I’m relying on memory – being especially struck by his horror-filled descriptions of Soviet interference in the affairs of sovereign nations. This struck Pipes – again, if I’m remembering correctly – as virtually unprecedented. It seemed to me that for an ordinary person this attitude would be forgivably naive. But for a professor of history at Harvard, “naive” wasn’t quite the word.

It was Pipes who got me interested in Stolypin, the man in charge of the Tsar’s best shot at badly needed agricultural reforms. He was, by all accounts, an extraordinarily gifted man, and he was given the authority to institute reforms in one of the most important areas of the Tsar’s government. But he failed badly, after several years of trying.

Stolypin is interesting because your attitude to the Russian revolution is inevitably influenced by your attitude towards him and his ambitious reforms. The more inclined you are to regard Stolypin’s failure as inevitable, the less likely you are to see much possibility of change from within the Tsarist regime. Even those of us with Burkean temperaments and a hatred of extremism and instability may be inclined to look more kindly on those who advocated a radical break from the past � if, that is, we are convinced that a future with the Tsar promised only more of the same.

Pipes does his usual trick with Stolypin – again, if I remember correctly. After presenting an awful lot of evidence that the failure of his agricultural reforms was vastly overdetermined, he nevertheless ends up giving his conclusions as Burkean a spin as he possibly can.

If you’ve read this far, congratulations, I suppose. I’ve already confessed several times that I’m not really sure about what I’m talking about. Corrections or suggestions welcome in the comments.