Little Reds Book

Communism: A Brief History, by Richard Pipes (Modern Library, 176 pp., $19.95)

A SKEPTICAL generation is convinced that the Cold War was nothing more than a traditional power struggle, and that the West’s pretensions in calling itself “the free world” lost all credibility when it accepted the support of reactionary “McCarthyites” and religious “authoritarians” in the fight against Communism. How is a historian to restore a proper understanding of the moral importance of the Cold War? Richard Pipes, the Harvard professor who served as a national-security aide to President Reagan, has settled on one answer in his new book: He ignores the role of the churches in the fall of Communism, and does not mention American anti- Communists except in throwaway lines, e.g., “there was never the slightest danger of a Communist takeover of the United States.”

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Peter Coleman

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Communism: A Brief History, by Richard Pipes (Modern Library, 176 pp., $19.95)

A SKEPTICAL generation is convinced that the Cold War was nothing more than a traditional power struggle, and that the West’s pretensions in calling itself “the free world” lost all credibility when it accepted the support of reactionary “McCarthyites” and religious “authoritarians” in the fight against Communism. How is a historian to restore a proper understanding of the moral importance of the Cold War? Richard Pipes, the Harvard professor who served as a national-security aide to President Reagan, has settled on one answer in his new book: He ignores the role of the churches in the fall of Communism, and does not mention American anti- Communists except in throwaway lines, e.g., “there was never the slightest danger of a Communist takeover of the United States.”