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Title: Russia Under the Old Regime by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0-14-024768-8 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The beginning of study for students of Russian history
Comment: This is the best place to begin a study of Russian history. Prof. Pipes introduces the student to the fundamental sources, the hows and whys about Russia's development through history. He sheds light on how 20th cnetury Russia would become what it is as a natural and understandable result. This book will make you a unique ringside viewer as Russsian continues to reform itself into, perhaps, a new version of what it was and always has been or a new historically free society as never before. The book clearly reveals the social trends and human behavior that long ago were profoundly and irremedially instilled in Russian character as everlasting behavior, which is still seen today. This book is almost a definition of how a people suffer deterministically their historical destiny due to the conditionaing of history based on the early days of this society. Like all great books, Pipes' study has insights and observations that can be applied to all cultures, societies, institutions and historical eras through all times, but most importantly in our own times. This is a great book about history as well as Russia.
Rating: 5
Summary: Indispensible Guide to Understanding Prerevolutionary Russia
Comment: This work by Pipes is the place to start if you are interested in studying the history or literature of Pre-Revolutionary Russia. Pipes takes a traditionalist historical approach to discussing development of Russia from the Kievan Rus state through to the height of Imperial Tsarist Russia. His work is extremely illuminating, revealing the formation, evolution and interaction of the complex Russian social classes. He clearly sets forward what he believes to to be the unique factors which produced Russia's "differentness" and which contributed toward the production of the absolutist institution of the Tsarist autocracy. Pipes is particularly interesting on the subjects of serfdom (and why is was not a feudal construct) and the symbiotic, destructive relation between Russian society and topography. This is indeed the definitive work on Old Russia, and is required reading for an understanding of Tolstoy.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best of the Set
Comment: I think this is the best of what I guess you would call Pipes' "Revolutionary Trilogy." "The Russian Revolution," perhaps two or three times the length, is impaired a bit by Pipes' sometimes tedious moral-pointing. "Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime" seems a bit less ambitious than the other two, and in any event it is surely the one least likely to survive the torrent of new material that is becoming available after the fall.
What distinguishes Russia in Pipes' eye is the tradition of "patrimonialism" -- as a political category, a coinage of Pipes' own, though with its roots in Weber, in Hobbes and Bodin, even in Aristotle. Pipes means to denote "a regime where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of becoming indistinguishable, and political power is exercised in the same manner as economic power."
"Despotism," Pipes continues, "has much the same etymological origins, but over time it has acquired the meaning of a deviation or corruption of genuine kingship, the latter being understood to respect the property rights of subjects. The patrimonial regime, on the other hand, is a regime in its own right, not a corruption of something else."
This is a brave assertion, and Pipes remains faithful to it. Indeed, the core of the book is perhaps his chapter entitled "The Anatomy of the Patrimonial Regime," where Pipes tries to show how utterly different is the tradition of governance in Russia from the tradition in the West -- even in Western nations that we might think of as "reactionary."
There are other virtues to this book. His introductory chapter on the environment is perhaps worth the price of admission, as he retails the grim arithmetic of topsoil and grain production. His discussion of serfdom provokes all kinds of questions about the relationship between serfdom in Russia and slavery in the West.
A work of just 318 pages can hardly pretend to be the last word on the history of a great nation, and Pipes maintains no such pretention. I take it as given that much more could be said to inform, expand upon, or criticize, Pipes' perspective. But as a framework for approaching the study of Russia, it is hard for me to see how it could be bettered. As a provative contribution to the literature of political analysis generally, I should think its claim is equally strong.
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Title: Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime by RICHARD PIPES ISBN: 0679761845 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0679736603 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 05 November, 1991 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes ISBN: 014024364X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Communism : A History by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0679640509 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 04 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: A Concise History of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0679745440 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 26 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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