Universal History: Communism: The History Of The Intellectual And Political Movement

Richard Pipes, the greatest living historian of modern Russia, tells the whole story of communism - from its origins through to the fall of the Soviet Empire and up to the present day.

Beginning with Plato and the first expressions of a utopian vision of a property-less society, Richard Pipes describes communism's historical antecedents, through to Marx, Engels and the birth of "communism" as a theory calling for the abolition of property and a call to arms.

He goes on to reckon brilliantly with the history of the Soviet Union, from the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, Stalin, Stalinism and the Great Terror, and the Second World War to the regime's decline and its ultimate collapse.

In concluding he analyses the roots of communism's catastrophic failures and the staggering human cost it inflicted on the world in the 20th century.