When was the Russian Revolution? The conventional answer would be October 1917. After all, people associate Lenin with the October Revolution, don't they? Well, Mr. Pipes (amongst an increasing group of others) would stop you right there. Upon the tsar's abdication Russia's first free elections (promised since that February) were held November 12, 1917. This was but days after Lenin's Bolsheviks supposedly "rode to power on a wave of popular support," yet Lenin's ilk only received enought votes to garner 175 seats out of 707! The Bolshevik takeover was more akin to a putsch, consequently. Trotsky himself wrote (in his memoirs) "that 25,000 or 30,000 people, at most, took part in the events of October in Petrograd"; this in a city of 2 million. It was largely bloodless and basically upended the hopelessly incompetent Provisional Government in the dead of one night in favor of the Petersburg Council---or "Soviet," to utilize the Russian word for council. And it was through this organ of competing power that Lenin was able to forestall Russian military units from marching in to St. Petersburg to resist him. In January when Russia's first Constituent Assemby opened Lenin immediately proposed a motion that would have prevented the duly elected Assembly from wielding any real power over the Petersburg Soviet, or any of the other Soviets in other cities. Lenin's Bolsheviks were handedly defeated in this, however; which marked the end of democracy in Russia. The next day Bolshevik Red Guards closed down the Assembly and it was never permitted to sit again. How Lenin was able to engineer this is the subject of the second part of this tri-part (extremely concise & worthy) mini-book of 84 pages. Pipes shows, in addition, how nothing of this was at all inevitable. Tsarism fell for particular reasons, mostly political, and whence it did was replaced by a Provisional Government (PG) bereft of any legitimacy. Said PG was meant to be a caretaker until elections for a Constituent Assembly could be held; elections which weren't held until more than 8 months later. The interim thus provided much time for Lenin & Company to champion the Soviets and their radical maneuverings---which disrupted the economy and war effort---while constantly calling for the elections for the CA to be held (the same Assembly which they smothered by armed force as soon as it sat). "No other group in Russia," but the Bolsheviks, Pipes writes "was prepared to consort with the enemy, and therefore, none could compete with him [meaning Lenin] effectively once the struggle for power got under way." And funds were not a problem either. "There is no longer any question," Pipes writes, "that he [Lenin] took money from Imperial Germany even while Russia & Germany were at war; we have plenty of [recently opened Russian archival] documents dating from 1917-18 proving this fact." Why didn't the democratic socialists ("who between them had garnered nearly 3/4 of the national vote") confront the Bolsheviks "on any other but the verbal level"? In Pipes's reading of the situation this was because these socialsits believed time to be on their side; that "the Bolsheviks would have no choice but sooner or later to invite them into government" to be able to get anything accomplished. Lenin, however, choose instead (based on his long written view to rule alone) to employ the use of terror to impose his will instead. Thus Pipes debunks fallacy #3 in this short treatise---that Stalin was an aberration when, in fact, he was a rather natural successor to Lenin. (Read Gorbachev advisor A. Yakovlev's book "A Century of Violence" for proof of Lenin's terror methods.) While Stalin's rise wasn't inevitable, it was a heck of a lot more likely than the 2 fallacies that he lays bare herein concerning the fall of tsarism & Lenin's rise. Tsarism's fall when it did wasn't inevitable & neither was Lenin's rise. (See Pipes's "A Concise History of the Russian Revolution" for all the details of the above.) (06Apr) Cheers!