The Red Road to Nowhere : THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION <i> By Richard Pipes (Alfred A. Knopf: $40; 976 pp., illustrated; 0-394-50241-8) </i>

“Russia stood on the edge of an abyss. It seemed as if the country was boiling over from anger, envy and resentments of every imaginable kind, which until then had been kept contained under a lid of awe and fear. Now that the population had lost respect for the government, there was nothing to hold society together.”

With those apocalyptic words, which might describe the tribulations of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s drive for perestroika , or national restructuring, Richard Pipes, Baird professor of history at Harvard, sets the stage for his provocative study of “arguably the most important event of this century,” the overthrow in 1917 of Russia’s Romanov dynasty and the founding of a new democratic government, which fell within eight months to Vladimir Lenin and his band of Communist revolutionaries.

In his monumental and detailed work, “The Russian Revolution,” Pipes, a renowned Sovietologist, brings to bear knowledge and insights gained during four decades of scholarship to probe the collapse of Russia’s old order and efforts by Lenin’s Bolsheviks during their first months in power to lay the groundwork for what became the totalitarian Soviet state.

Well known for his antipathy toward the ideals of Bolshevism and socialism in general, Pipes, who already has written a study of the pre-revolutionary era (“Russia Under the Old Regime,” Charles Scribner’s Sons), has crafted a sweeping and often absorbing chronicle of how and why that socio-political system gave way to the bloodiest and most grandiose experiment of our times, the creation of a “communist” society and of a new human being, Homo Sovieticus , to match.

Pipes makes no attempt to hide his loathing for the entire enterprise, and many of the contentions of “The Russian Revolution”--for example, that Lenin and comrades had negligible backing among the Russian urban working class, the very social stratum they claimed to represent--will be vigorously challenged by many other scholars.

Nevertheless, anyone trying to fathom the checkered past and the complexities of the political system that begat Gorbachev, and that he is now struggling to change, will gain by reading this book. So will people who murkily link the causes and results of Russia’s “Great October Socialist Revolution” to earlier, “bourgeois” revolutions in America and France. The legacy of 1917 was dramatically different, as Pipes’ book will make clear. And it lives on in today’s Soviet Union, however noble or humane the intentions of Gorbachev and his team.

“In its fully developed form, the concentration camp, along with the one-party state and the omnipotent political police, was Bolshevism’s major contribution to the political practices of the twentieth century,” Pipes notes. Five-and-a-half years of perest roika, he argues, have not been enough to eradicate such a “contribution.”

Although its nearly 800 pages of narrative and reflective analysis mean that Pipes’ book is no beginner’s guide to the end of the Russian Empire, his prose is often compelling, and frequently enlivened by indignation or irony.

The tableau he paints is vast, from the bewildering behavior of doomed Czar Nicholas II and the amoral political ploys of Russia’s left-wing intelligentsia to the demoralizing blood bath on the Eastern Front during World War I and the murder of the imperial confidant and “mad monk” Rasputin, who, Pipes reminds us, was neither mad nor a monk.

Along with an impressive marshaling of statistics that document, for example, the failure by Russia’s pre-revolutionary government to promote private farming as a way to forestall revolution, Pipes brings to his book an array of precisely formulated and often controversial views about the flow of Russian history and the goals pursued by Lenin and his comrades.

Therein lies the topicality of “The Russian Revolution” for readers in 1990. For as Pipes himself implies, the scrutiny of such world-shaking events cannot be left to historians alone, since the debate that results is also “over what may happen in the future.”

For Russia, that future is now very much up in the air, as it was in 1917. To what degree is the Soviet system capable of reform? In its more than seven decades of existence, has its record been “globally positive,” as a French Communist leader has claimed, or has it done more harm than good? If Marxism-Leninism was not perverse to begin with, how did it go wrong?

Such questions are now being passionately debated in the Soviet legislature and on Moscow and Leningrad street corners, and they clearly intrigue Pipes as well. In “The Russian Revolution,” readers will find many answers, but those answers will be fiercely challenged by historians from other camps, including liberals and Marxists.

Significantly, for Pipes, who was the chief official for Soviet affairs on the National Security Council during the early Reagan Administration and the tete pensante behind its “evil empire” doctrine, the Russian Revolution “broadly defined” lasted nearly a century, from the blossoming of radical thought in the 1860s to the death of Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, in 1953.

Such a conceptual framework would mean that Stalinism, and presumably Nikita S. Khrushchev’s “thaw,” Leonid I. Brezhnev’s “developed socialism” and Gorbachev’s reforms as well, are merely historical variations on the authoritarian theme pioneered by Lenin.

Many Soviet and foreign scholars would reject such an idea as anti-socialist nonsense. In a wry comment, Marxist historian Roy A. Medvedev has noted that anti-Western Slavophiles in his country push the beginning of the Russian Revolution even farther back in time, to Peter the Great’s decision to allow foreigners (bearing dangerous non-Russian ideas) to reside in Moscow.

According to Alfred A. Knopf, Pipes’ U.S. publisher, the work also is scheduled to appear in a Soviet edition, which will be one of the most astounding examples yet of how the new freedoms have liberated Soviet historiography from the shackles of ideology.

For Soviets, “The Russian Revolution” will be a disturbing and ultimately depressing work. Like one banner carried across Red Square in this year’s raucous May Day parade, it will proclaim to its readers that they, their parents and grandparents have spent the last 73 years “on the road to nowhere.”

Particularly shocking will be the portrait that Pipes draws of the founder of the Soviet Union, Lenin. Although Stalin, Leon Trotsky, the Mensheviks and other revolutionaries and leaders finally have become fair game for Soviet historians’ criticism, Lenin’s deeds are only beginning to be objectively analyzed in his homeland.

Pipes, determined to strip away the prettifying “varnish” poured over Lenin by decades of state-sponsored hagiography, finds in the historical record a brilliant and cruel prig who was driven not by lofty ideals of social justice but by an “overweening lust for power.”

That assessment will shock many Soviets. So will Pipes’ charge that Lenin was a coward. The tireless champion of the world’s working class and the apostle of Marxist class warfare “had an uncanny ability to make himself scarce whenever there was the threat of arrest or shooting, even if it meant abandoning his troops,” Pipes writes.

Since becoming Kremlin leader in March, 1985, Gorbachev has repeatedly told his countrymen they need to strip the Soviet system of its stultifying bureaucracy and ideological blinkers and return to the purer vision of the Russian Revolution. As Pipes eloquently argues in this book, in the deeds and world view of Lenin and his followers there is not to be found the solution to Soviet Russia’s woes, but their historic cause.