America's foremost authority on Russian communism--the author of the definitive studies The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime--now addresses the enigmas of that country's 70-year enthrallment with communism. Succinct, lucidly argued, and lively in its detail, this book offers a brilliant summation of the life's work of 'one of America's great historians' (Washington Post Book World). 'The author has distilled his arguments concerning several key questions: Why did tsarism fall? Why did the Bolsheviks triumph? Why did Stalin succeed Lenin? The book, based on lectures given at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, has a nicely colloquial feel, clarity, and vigor. At the heart of the answers to the first two questions is Pipes's assertion that, far from being the product of large, impersonal forces of history, the fall of the tsar and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks (in, he reminds us, a coup d' tat largely unsupported by the Russian people) were the