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."

This approach imposes enormous handicaps. How does one treat the fall of Communism without mentioning Ronald Reagan or John Paul II, Sidney Hook or Whittaker Chambers?

But it also frees Pipes, in a very short book, to concentrate on what really interests him in the big picture-Stalinism, the Comintern, and the Third World.

His theme is always the political, economic, and moral devastation that Communism inflicted on the world wherever it emerged, from China to Peru-and its ultimate failure.

Inevitably, half the book is about Russia (and its East European clones). It would be hard to find a better sketch of the rise and fall of Bolshevism. Pipes begins with the revolutionary formation of Lenin ("who arguably had a greater impact on twentieth-century politics than any other public figure"), tracing his passage from embittered terrorist to commander of a paramilitary party, funded at first by bank robberies and later by the German Embassy.

Lenin presided over civil war, the destruction of the economy, a famine that claimed over 5 million lives, and a massive state terror. If, when he died in 1924, he was, as Pipes claims, "haunted by a sense of failure," this nightmare never troubled his faithful disciple Stalin, who established a vast privileged and servile nomenklatura, re-enserfed the peasants, conducted purges that in ferocity and number of victims had no parallel in history, and inflicted on the Russian people what Alec Nove, a specialist on the Soviet economy, called "the most precipitous decline in living standards" ever recorded.

Nikita Khrushchev's revelations in his "secret speech" of 1956 began the delegitimization of Communism. But it was a slow process prolonged by flourishing corruption. By the mid 1980s the Soviet elite had lost faith, as it saw the rest of the world surpassing it by every test except expenditure on the military (and on alcohol). In the end the USSR collapsed almost as easily as the czarist empire.

But, as Pipes reminds us, no one responsible for the Soviet crimes against innocent people has been brought to trial, or even exposed to serious moral opprobrium. Instead of facing justice, the elite was allowed to pounce on the country's assets in the guise of "privatization."

Other chapters deal with Maoism (30 million dead in the Great Leap Forward, and a whole generation eviscerated in the Cultural Revolution); the Khmer Rouge (2 million Cambodians-25 percent of the population-exterminated, but no demonstrations of protest in the streets of the West and no resolutions at the United Nations); Ethiopia (1 million dead in its Marxist famine); and Cuba (now a popular stop for sex-vacationers).

Pipes also fills out the story of Chile, of liberal Eurocommunism ("a flash in the pan"), and of the sundry terrorist movements spawned and financed by Communism-Italy's Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, the Peruvian Shining Path, and the drug-trafficking Army of National Liberation of Colombia.

Each episode ends with the defeat of the Communists. Pipes's postmortem is that Communism was far more than an assault on private property and nationality: It was an attack on human nature. To the Communist political and moral engineer, man's nature is changeable, so that in the end even George Orwell's hero loves Big Brother. Pipes sides with Malcolm Muggeridge in finding that the most encouraging thing of all about the Soviet regime was its failure: If it had succeeded, we would know that there are no limits to the extent to which human beings can be terrorized and enslaved.

His conclusion is: Close thy Orwell, open thy Muggeridge. But have we yet absorbed this lesson? As Whittaker Chambers foresaw, Communism may be defeated, yet leave behind it a West that continues to share its materialist vision of man emancipated from God. The great humanist heresy persists: Ye shall be as gods. Pipes's brilliant opuscule has not rung the death knell of this alternative faith, but it is a good start.