What is the general opinion on the integrity of Pipes' book?

Outside of a few circles, the general opinion of Pipes's work is that it is not terribly useful for understanding either 1917 or the Soviet Union. AH lists three books of Pipes in its booklist for Russia, which is a real shame because there are much better books out there and Pipes's approach to history is very dated and ideologically-skewed.

Pipes was the doyen of what some historians term the totalitarian paradigm of Soviet history. In the case of Pipes, he argued that 1917 was a coup by a minority of disaffected intellectuals who exploited and duped the masses to create a dictatorship. According to Pipes, such alienation had a long pedigree in tsarist Russia as the culture of the knout had dulled civic society and created a class of intellectuals whose rejection of society was knee-jerk. Lenin's championship of slogans like "all power to the Soviets" or anti-tsarist appeals to non-Russians were just window-dressing for a dictatorship that transformed the USSR into a "prison of the peoples." Totalitarian scholarship often emphasized the contradictions of Bolshevik pronouncements and their tactical maneuverings as evidence of their disingenuousness, and their acceptance of German money and the famous "sealed train" as a sign that their seizure of power was artificial. As Pipes put it in a 1970 article on the Russian national character:

Lenin, Trotsky, and their associates seized power by force, overthrowing an ineffective but democratic government. The government they founded, in other words, derives from a violent act carried out by a tiny minority.

These two pithy sentences more or less encapsulate Pipes's view of 1917.

The totalitarian paradigm was a very unsatisfactory model for a number of Western historians. Since the Soviet state put intense pressure upon its historians to hew to the state-sanctioned heroic narrative, the onus for a historiographic revision of 1917 often fell upon Western scholars. The Soviet state's hoarding of sources and archives and their access counterintuitively aided the revision process as it forced a generation of younger historians to look outside high politics for a better understanding of 1917. Alexander Rabinowitch, who would soon become the doyen of the Revisionist interpretation of 1917, based a lot of his early work on Petrograd newspapers and the portrait they painted of the revolutionary milieu. Sheila Fitzpatrick, who like Rabinowitch would exercise influence far outside her tiny frame (seriously, she is super short in real life!), looked at Bolshevik cultural and educational policies and lesser Bolsheviks like Anatoly Lunacharsky. The main contribution of the Revisionists was that they presented a much more nuanced vision of 1917 than prior historical interpretations. For example, Rabinowitch noted that while newspapers showed considerable sentiment in favor of revolution, Lenin and his compatriots were often led by events rather than leading them. The Bolsheviks also emerged in this historiography as a much less monolithic group and although the early Revisionists were still focused upon the intersection of the Revolution with high politics, they injected a degree of interest into the thoughts and aspirations of those below who experienced revolution.

Not surprisingly, the Revisionists were subject to attacks from both the left and the right for either undercutting the heroic image of Lenin or actually acknowledging some revolutionary sentiment existed among the masses. For example, a Soviet newspaper attacked Fitzpatrick as an ideological saboteur and spy for a minor article she wrote about Lunacharsky; and fortunately for her, the paper only identified her as S. Fitzpatrick and assumed she was a male historian, otherwise her research in the USSR might have been quite short-lived. But the Revisionists had a major factor working in their favor that saw them rise above their rivals. In short, the type of history they were doing fit within larger trends within the Western historical academy. The Revisionist methodology fit within broader historiographic developments that eschewed high politics and fit better with intellectual shifts of the 1960s and 70s. But Revisionists also had the benefit of larger generational changes as well. As totalitarian scholars aged and became emeriti, Revisionist historians like Rex Wade became established figures in various Russian departments and newer generation of totalitarianists became enmeshed within Cold War think tanks like Team-B instead of engaging with larger trends in historical scholarship and methodology. Therefore, when this totalitarian scholars often debated the Revisionists in venues like the NYRB, their relative academic isolation ensured that their arguments came across as passe.

In the case of Pipes's specific work, it shows up rather badly in light of the mass of Revisionist-inspired social history. Pipes focuses only on elites to the exclusion of all others and tends to treat the masses of workers and peasants as a lump who passively received the dubious gains of 1917 or just steadfastly refused them because of peasant superstition and religiosity. He asserts the Revolution "was made neither by the forces of nature nor by anonymous masses but by identifiable men pursuing their own advantages." {emphasis mine}. Such an interpretation notably leaves out women (and there were significant women involved in 1917), workers, soviets, unions, soldiers' councils, and anything other than the small group of elite decision-makers and party chiefs. While some Revisionists focused on elite groups, early Revisionists like Rabinowitch at least acknowledged the masses existed and had some agency. And the works of labor history produced in the 1980s and 90s showed that there was a sizable working-class movement within Russia that predated 1917.

In his recent study of the historiography of the USSR, Ronald Gregor Suny paints a fairly damning portrait of Pipes. While acknowledging his (few) strengths, Suny concludes that Pipes often distorted both the historical record, often leaving out key qualifiers when excoriating Lenin by using his speeches, and misrepresented the work of the few Revisionists he cited. As Suny put it:

Rather than providing a synthesis of what we know about the revolutionary processes of 1917–18 or a reinterpretation that contends with the major contributions of recent historiography (almost none of which is even referred to in notes or bibliography), Pipes has offered a personal political vision, an indictment, highly selective, and uneven in its treatment of significant events and processes. By setting out such a strong version of the view that the Bolshevik regime was unpopular and illegitimate, his account prevents an understanding of the complex relationship between the lower classes, which favored Soviet power and a broadly democratic political order, and the Bolsheviks, who eventually turned that order into a one-party dictatorship. An entire range of questions stemming from the motives of the actors and the imperatives of the economic and social context are neglected by such a concentrated focus on personalities.

Such critiques can also extend to Pipes's work on tsarist Russia. Although he lacks a central boogeyman like Lenin, Russia Under the Old Regime does have its share of broadsides against Russia's navel-gazing and self-interested intellectuals. Pipes draws a consistent line between these self-important intellectuals and their descendants on the Russian left. Such a genealogy ignores the variety of the Russian left, it was more than the Bolsheviks, but also the context of the era. Ted Weeks tartly summed up this problematic approach in his book Across the Revolutionary Divide:

Both before 1917 and later, some (mainly conservative) commentators accused the intelligentsia of being overly theoretical and doctrinaire. Because inteligenty were not allowed any part in governing Russia, it has been argued, they tended to support extreme positions, even refusing to condemn the use of terrorist methods by far left parties. In the context of late nineteenth-century Russia, however, such criticism is unhistorical and misses the point {emphasis mine}. While the intelligentsia was generally liberal or mildly socialist in its political stance, the government tended to lump these moderate views together with those of the extreme left. For that reason, it made sense for the liberal intelligentsia to support the left – at least until the government started to differentiate between liberals and radical socialists, which was beginning to happen only after 1905.

By the same token, Pipes frames the lack of private property in nineteenth-century Russia as part of the original sin of the empire because it ingrained certain behaviors and mentalities. This is a somewhat absurd assertion in light of the reams of social history on peasant land use and it also shows how little Pipes appreciated the non-Russian components of the empire when they were not victims of the Soviet jackboot.

So should you read Pipes in 2018? Unless you're looking to understand the historiography of Russia and the USSR, I would say no. His biases contributed to a very flawed methodology that produced readable, but not very useful books. There are better books that examine 1917, warts and all, which do not lead a reader down sterile paths and dead-ends.