The venom disseminated by Richard Pipes has committed much harm to scholarship over the last two decades. As one whose work has been endlessly derided by the scholarly community, Pipes's work on 20th century Russia cannot be taken seriously.
Every word you post presents a person who has been brainwashed into thinking that communism was the best thing that happen since the invention of the wheel.
Pipes may not have gotten everything right but he was darn close. Perhaps, you should reread his book and take it to heart because his description of Russia is what my families remembers. Most members of my family, who hadn't managed to escape before 1918, were labeled as "Kulacks" and very few lived into the 1940s.
The trains were full of my cousins that headed toward Siberian camps.... The sick, the dying and the dead were pushed out of the train cars which left a trail of horror along the tracks.... Lice and fleas crawled among the living who were too tired to stratch or care... The smell of the overflowing single bucket used as a toliet was wretched.... No water... No food... Babies... The poor hungary babies crying and crying....
Surly, you've heard of the trains that took so many people to the "camps" where their dead children were stacked like cords of wood because the ground was frozen and no one could be buried....
AGRBear