Quotes from Richard Pipes

We need to keep a very keen eye on our own government. It's getting too rich and redistributing wealth is a sure way of robbing us of our private property rights and other rights along with them.

Life turned out to be very different from theory. But they would not admit they were wrong: whenever things did not turn out as desired, they did not compromise but instead intensified the violence. To admit to being wrong would threaten to unravel the whole theoretical foundation of their regime, since it claimed to be scientifically correct in all its parts.

When the so-called masses are discontented, they are inspired by specific grievances that are capable of being satisfied within the existing system. Only intellectuals have universal grievances: only they believe that nothing can change unless everything changes.

The theory and practice of socialism, and its offshoot, communism, postulate that all the existing ways of humanity are irrational and that it is the mission of those in the know to make out of them something radically different: mankind's entire past is but a long detour on the road to its true destiny.

It needs to be stated at this point that the ideal of a propertyless Golden Age is a myth—the fruit of longing rather than memory—because historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists concur that there never was a time or place when all productive assets were collectively owned. All living creatures, from the most primitive to the most advanced, in order to survive must enjoy assured access to food and, to secure such access, claim ownership of territory.

In the words of Morelly, the author of the influential treatise Le Code de la Nature, published in 1755: The only vice which I know in the universe is avarice; all the others, whatever name one gives them, are merely forms, degrees of it. . . . Analyze vanity, conceit, pride, ambition, deceitfulness, hypocrisy, villainy; break down the majority of our sophisticated virtues themselves, [they] all dissolve in this subtle and pernicious element, the desire to possess.

From time to time there emerged in the West voluntary communist societies. One of them was the Virginia Company in Jamestown (1607); another, New Harmony of Indiana, founded in 1825 by the British philanthropist Robert Owen. All such attempts broke down sooner or later, largely because of their inability to resolve the problem of "free riders," members who drew a full share of the community's harvest while doing little if any work.

Of course, the lower classes do not acquiesce peaceably to their exploitation; they resist, although for as long as there is private property they merely succeed in replacing one form of exploitation with another. For this reason, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, so far all the history of societies has been the history of class struggles.

Thus the Bolsheviks who five years earlier in a noisy campaign of blasphemy and ridicule exposed as sham the relics of Orthodox saints, created a holy relic of their own. Unlike the church's saints, whose remains were revealed to be nothing but rags and bones, their god, as befitted the age of science, was composed of alcohol, glycerin, and formalin.

More important still was the introduction of state-sponsored welfare schemes. The industrial democracies, alarmed by socialist strides in organizing labor and gaining seats in parliamentary elections, instituted social legislation in the form of unemployment and health insurance and other benefits that kept the working class from sinking into destitution.

Bribing was a subtle and even gracious art. It was considered in better taste to bribe indirectly. For example, one could offer a generous donation to a 'charitable' cause, chaired by the official's wife; or sell him a piece of property at a fraction of its actual value; or buy something from him (e.g. a painting) for a sum far in excess of its value.

Its official platform, the so-called Erfurt Program, adopted in 1891, contended that the interests of the "bourgeois" state and the working class were irreconcilable and that, accordingly, workers had no stake in their nation: they owed loyalty only to their class. It reaffirmed the international unity of labor and the imminence of a revolution that would crush capitalism and the bourgeoisie around the globe.

Within a year or two of Lenin's death he was clearly the party's boss: having solidified his power, he was ready to resume the drive for Communism interrupted in 1921 by the introduction of the NEP. He had three related objectives: to build a powerful industrial base, to collectivize agriculture, and to impose on the nation complete conformity.

The French socialist Jean Jaurès predicted: The proletariat will come to power not through an unanticipated blow of political agitation, but by the methodical and legal organization of its own powers under democratic conditions and the universal right to vote. Our society will gradually develop towards Communism, not through the collapse of the capitalist bourgeoisie but by a gradual and inexorable strengthening of the proletariat.

National loyalties overcame class loyalties, a fact not lost on ambitious demagogues like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who would rise to power after the war on platforms that fused socialism and nationalism.

But the propaganda accompanying collectivization placed emphasis on the elimination of rural "exploiters," to divert attention from the fact that by far the most numerous victims of collectivization were ordinary peasants.

The lives of the great majority of Russians are uncommonly personal, which makes them excellent friends and poor citizens.

Chin now joined chai (tea) and shchi (cabbage soup) to form a triad around which revolved a great deal of Russian life.

As Fidel Castro, the leader of Communist Cuba, would explain with a frankness that his Russian mentors preferred to avoid: "The revolution needs the enemy. . . . The revolution needs for its development its antithesis, which is the counterrevolution."9 And if enemies were lacking, they had to be fabricated.