His robust views have always been conveyed with intellectual force and underpinned by formidable erudition: no footnote-shirker he. It follows that he has been savagely denounced by official organs of the pre-glasnost Soviet Union. So seriously was he taken there as a choice exemplar of the capitalist hyena-intellectual that I distinctly recall a sizable pamphlet, amounting to a small book, appearing some years ago in the Soviet Union and consisting exclusively of an onslaught on him and his alleged falsification of history. This was a rare honor indeed, promoting him as it did to the position of premier antisovetchik among Western historians of the Soviet Union. As for reactions to him on his home patch, he is just the sort of authority on Russia who was described as a cold warrior or hawk not so long ago by the kind of Western person who has now been forced by the march of events to choke on his own parrot-cries.

His new book will be equally valuable inside and outside the Kremlin's shrinking orbit. Its author calls it ''the first attempt in any language to present a comprehensive view of the Russian Revolution.'' That claim might seem immodest, but to shake it you would have to come up with the name of an effective rival, which seems impossible. The works of such writers as E. H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher, of course, do not even begin to fit.

Mr. Pipes's avowed aim is to concentrate on the revolution while never forgetting its wider frame of reference - its historical context and pretensions to have evolved a new kind of human being. He believes that the events of 1917 really began with the student disorders of 1899 in St. Petersburg, but delves back earlier into Imperial Russian history in his search for roots. He assigns the end of the revolution to Stalin's death in 1953; some might prefer the breaching of the Berlin wall in 1989, but this matters little. In any case this study ends with the murder of the last czar in July 1918 and the onset of fully developed Red terror. A sequel is planned to cover the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 and events up to Lenin's death in 1924.

The portrait of Lenin is particularly uncompromising and timely. Mr. Pipes is astute enough to single out hatred as the great revolutionary's prime motivator, and he fully documents the atrocious callousness that the hagiographers have varnished over. He makes the point that Lenin regarded politics as a branch of pest control - the extermination of cockroaches and bloodsucking spiders (the myriad persons who stood in the way of his political ambitions) being the aim of his operations.

Much of the detail on Lenin's appalling cruelty comes new to me: for example, Bertrand Russell's report that Lenin's ''guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold''; the reference is to the Bolshevik manipulation of poor peasants into the mass lynching of allegedly rich peasants in terrorized villages. Mr. Pipes claims that Lenin's attack on the peasantry, beginning in the summer of 1918, has been ''virtually ignored in Western historiography,'' and this section of his book is one of the most valuable. When the Bolsheviks used political chicanery and armed force to extract grain from the villages, they claimed to be doing so in order to feed the starving cities. Mr. Pipes shows that this was a mere pretext to cover the systematic destruction of the peasantry as so many vermin hostile to the new regime. Lenin was beginning what Stalin was to complete in the early 1930's on a scale so vast that the parallel with the previous onslaught was somehow not noticed.