num_pages: 192
description: 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.
language: English
title: Communism: A History
titlecomplete: Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)
genres: History, Russian History, Philosophy, Economics, Russia, European History, 20th Century, Nonfiction, Political Science, Politics
ratings_count: 933
publisher: Modern Library