Richard Pipes is professor emeritus of history and former director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University. Pipes has also had an extensive career in government, serving as director of East European and Soviet affairs in President Reagan’s National Security Council. He is the author of several books on the Russian Revolution, including the seminal Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution.

Significantly, Pipes was among the very few Western experts on Soviet socialism who were not charmed by the subject of their study and had a realistic view on the future of socialism. This view, ridiculed by liberal Sovietologists as “blind anti-communism” was vindicated by modern history.

Property and Freedom differs in subject from Pipes’s previous books. Yet it grows naturally out of his lifelong research. “From the time I interested myself seriously in Russia, I became aware that one of the fundamental differences between her history and that of the other European countries lay in the weak development of property,” he writes. “The idea occurred to me some forty years ago that property, in both the narrow and broad senses of the word, provides the key to the emergence of political and legal institutions that guarantee liberty.”

First, Pipes analyzes “The Idea of Property” in classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century France; the attack against it by socialists, communists, and anarchists; and the status of the idea at the end of the twentieth century. Then he describes the “Institution of Property” as it evolved from possessiveness among animals, children, primitive peoples, and societies of hunters and gatherers to the emergence of property in land, and the relation between the institution of property and political organizations especially in medieval England and “patrimonial Russia.”

The rise of the Western world coincided with the rise of the idea and the institution of property rights. Wherever property rights were secure and stable, growth of economic activity occurred. England had a long respect for property rights. Beginning in the twelfth century with Magna Carta, the process was set in motion for the elimination of arbitrary, random government. The people were freer to use their property for their own purposes, and as they did so, the nation began to emerge from the economic torpor of the Dark Ages.

The most interesting parts of the book are on Russia. Summarizing the drama of Russian history, Pipes writes: “Prior to 1991, Russians and the nations on which they imposed their rule enjoyed few civil rights and (with the exception of the single decade 1906-17) no political rights. In the age of absolutism, Russia’s sovereigns exercised authority in a more absolute manner than their Western counterparts; in the age of democracy, Russia clung to absolutism longer than any other European country. And during the seven decades of Communist rule, she produced a regime that deprived her people of liberties to an extent previously unknown in world history.”

Communist Russia was the first country to officially abolish property rights, which were declared “a sanctification of capitalist oppression and exploitation.” The results can be considered as the worst tragedy experienced by humanity. It is beyond the abilities of economic analysis to calculate the opportunity cost of the socialist experiment in Russia, but the human toll is estimated by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at over 60 million people who perished during Stalin’s collectivization, purges, campaigns against “unearned” incomes, and other devilish experiments.

The enormous suffering of people in Russia and the other socialist countries is a powerful warning against socialism, statism, and interventionism in the West because the “most audacious attempt in human history to abolish private property has ended in disaster. It is unlikely to be repeated as long as the memory of that calamity remains fresh.”

Unfortunately, the majority of people scarcely understand the importance of property rights. “The trouble,” observes Pipes, “is that because schools fail to teach history, especially legal and constitutional history, the vast majority of today’s citizens have no inkling to what they owe their liberty and prosperity, namely a long and successful struggle for rights of which the right to property is the most fundamental. They are therefore unaware what debilitating effect the restrictions on property rights will, over the long run, have on their lives.” []

Yuri Maltsev is professor of economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.