The future of Russia would be assured only if it dismantled whatever stood in the way of a full-blooded capitalist market economy. For in a country which had traditionally stifled private initiative, political as well as economic, these disintegrating processes bring into play the instinct of self-preservation, leaving the population no choice but to take matters into its own hands, as it must if it is to acquire the habits of democracy and free enterprise. Five years after those words were spoken, their stupidity and irresponsibility have been exposed by the terrible results of market economics. Yet Professor Pipes is not about to offer apologies. In an article published last Sunday in the New York Times , Pipes admits that a social, economic and political catastrophe is unfolding in Russia.
Pipes writes that there are three possible outcomes of the crisis in Russia.
Without realizing it, Pipes has substantiated one of the essential justifications offered by the Bolsheviks for their seizure of power in October 1917. The choice that faced the Russian masses in 1917, they insisted, was not between a workers state and a flourishing bourgeois democracy. If the Bolsheviks failed to take power, Lenin and Trotsky warned, the alternative would be a counterrevolution leading ultimately to the physical dismemberment of Russia and its reduction to semicolonial status. In delivering his cold-blooded message, Pipes gives not the slightest indication that he feels at least slightly abashed by the results of the policies for which he supplied so much ideological justification. As far as he is concerned, it is not Professor Pipes and capitalism that have failed the Russian people.