Historian who escaped from the Nazis and spent his life warning of the dangers posed by the authoritarian regime in the Soviet Union
Richard Pipes at Harvard, where he taught for almost 40 years, in 1991AP
When Richard Pipes, a young Polish-Jewish emigrant to the United States, began in 1945 to discover what had happened to much of his extended family during the Holocaust, he made a number of life-changing decisions. After reading letters from a few surviving relatives about brutal deportations and death camps, he avoided pursuing much more knowledge “for the sake of my sanity and positive attitude to life”. At the same time, he concluded that his own immediate family’s miraculous escape from Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940 should make him “delight in every day of life that has been granted to me, for I was saved from certain death”.
His life was not to be wasted, but used “to spread a moral message by showing, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences”. Rather than studying the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, “I thought it my mission to demonstrate this truth using the example of communism”.
Pipes went on to make his career at Harvard where he became one of the best-known historians of Russia and the Soviet Union. He saw significant continuities between tsarist imperialism and authoritarianism and what followed the 1917 Revolution, and wrote unfashionably and unflinchingly about the personal evils and culpability of communist leaders such as Lenin and Stalin. And he took his academic perspective of Russian behaviour into a brief but highly influential political role as an adviser to President Reagan in the early 1980s, persuading him to adopt a less compromising approach towards Moscow in the belief that the Soviet Union could not survive a sustained economic and military challenge.
Such was Pipes’s prominence that the Kremlin published a book denouncing him as the “Falsifier of History”. While critics accused him of Russophobia, Pipes insisted that “I draw a sharp distinction between Russian governments and the Russian people”.
Although Russia later became the focus of his interest, it was Poland and Germany that dominated his early life. Richard Edgar Pipes was born in 1923 in the town of Cieszyn on the Polish-Czech border. His mother, Zosia, was just 21. His parents, who moved to Warsaw, were Jewish but non-observant. They spoke Polish and German and regarded themselves as well integrated. They were prosperous too, with his father, Marek, involved in the manufacture of chocolate and the import of fruit. Richard was their only child.
The German invasion of Poland in 1939 exposed his family’s vulnerability. Pipes recalled watching the German bombers from his window, “a formation of silvery planes heading for Warsaw”. He was forced into hiding, fearing deportation. “All my ambitions, plans and dreams lay shattered.”
Months spent watching the aftermath of the Nazi occupation, and the passivity of many Poles, also left Pipes with “the abiding conviction that the population at large plays only a marginal role in history, or at any rate in political and military history, which is the preserve of small elites; people do not make history — they make a living.” It made him instinctively sceptical as a historian about the increasing popularity of the idea that history was “made from below” by social movements.
Eventually, as his father exploited his contacts, the family managed to obtain papers to take them as far as Italy, which in 1940 was not yet implementing the harshest antisemitic measures. They were able to remain there until they were ready to make their final escape to the US in a Greek ship sailing from Portugal. Pipes arrived in New Jersey on July 11, 1940, his 17th birthday.
Pipes fleeing Europe for the US with his parents, Zosia and Marek, in 1940He set about acquiring an education, enrolling at an Ohio college and then enlisting in the US Army Air Corps in 1942, and was sent to Cornell University to learn Russian in preparation for US-Soviet military co-operation against Germany. In the end he did not see active service and after discharge from the military in 1946 he married Irene Roth, whom he had met at Cornell in 1944. She survives him with their two sons: Daniel, who also became a historian and is president of the Middle East Forum, and Steven.
According to Daniel, his father was a serious man, but not a sombre one. He was a skilful raconteur who regaled his children with “imaginative bedtime stories” and “enjoyed silly television shows” such as the BBC’s Keeping Up Appearances. He was also a connoisseur of fine wine, and a devoted fan of the actress Greta Garbo.
At about the same time as his marriage, Pipes made his decision to pursue an academic career in Russian history and won tenure at Harvard in 1958. His first book was The Formation of the Soviet Union. He wrote or edited about 20 more, notably: Russia Under the Old Regime; an extensive account of the Russian Revolution, in 1990; and Communism: A History published in 2001.
His study of the 1917 revolution, and the rapid centralisation and brutal enforcement of Bolshevik power, persuaded him that the Soviet Union was in some ways a successor to earlier Russian imperialism, a “patrimonial state” in its authoritarian instincts and contempt for individuals and their rights. He also saw the Bolsheviks as taking the use of violence and terror to new levels, describing Lenin’s “strong streak of cruelty” and publishing documents showing him urging the murder of opponents among the bourgeoisie and the church. Pipes also documented in chilling detail the routine murder of thousands during Stalin’s Great Terror. He accused historians who omitted such material of “writing bloodless history about a time that drowned in blood”.
Pipes’s own visits to the Soviet Union confirmed his bleak view about the place and its regime. He remembered a woman on a tram in Leningrad in 1957 whispering to him: “We live like dogs, don’t we?”
Yet that sense of the misery of Soviet life also led him to believe that the Soviet system could not last, especially if put under pressure by the West. He became a prominent critic of what he saw as the appeasement of the Soviet Union by the US and other countries, and was recruited by the new Reagan administration in the early 1980s as a national security adviser.
He issued a warning that Soviet leaders might believe they could fight and win even a nuclear war, so the US needed to build up its defences accordingly. He also expressed confidence that, if challenged in the right way, the Soviet Union would be forced to change or cease to exist. His advice became the base of a famous speech, which Reagan gave to the British parliament in 1982, that foresaw a “march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history”.
As Pipes recalled, Reagan was “altogether incapable of thinking abstractly” and hardly ready for full intellectual engagement with Pipes’s theories, preferring instead to muse on whether the distribution of a million Sears Roebuck catalogues in the Soviet Union might bring down the regime most quickly. However, he praised Reagan’s intuitive understanding of the need for strength. “How did it happen that this man, regarded by the intelligentsia as an amiable duffer, grasped that the Soviet Union was in the throes of terminal illness, whereas nearly all the licensed physicians certified its robustness?”
The Kremlin took Reagan’s new adviser seriously enough to publish a book entitled Richard Pipes: Falsifier ofHistory, which Pipes enjoyed distributing to friends, just as he seemed to enjoy his liberal critics’ view of him as a “Cold Warrior”. He later began to find the intrigues of Washington power struggles wearying — he was himself seen as an often prickly character — and returned to academic life in Harvard.
From there he watched the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reformist instincts he was slow to appreciate, and then the implosion of the Soviet Union he had predicted. Yet Russia’s evolution under Vladimir Putin renewed Pipes’s fear that, even after the end of communism, autocratic rule was far from over.
After his retirement he still took on a significant study of Russian thought and published a memoir entitled Vixi, which is Latin for “I have lived”. Among many honours he received one of the most moving was the award of honorary citizenship back in his home town of Cieszyn — a place to reflect on how easily the brutal totalitarian world he went on to describe and explain so memorably might have ended his life before it had really begun. Professor Richard Pipes, historian, was born on July 11, 1923. He died on May 17, 2018, aged 94
Richard Pipes, who has died aged 94, was a historian of the Soviet Union whose anti-Communism was so strident that many of his fellow historians warned their students not to read him; but his views proved more congenial to the American Right and he became one of his country’s leading Cold Warriors.
Pipes shunned the Olympian detachment school of history. He believed that history should be written with passion and commitment and was never restrained in his conclusions.
He was best known for his three-volume study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which he argued that “the Revolution was the result not of insufferable conditions but of irreconcilable attitudes”: the dithering absolutism of the Tsar, the land-hunger of the peasants and, above all, the extreme utopianism of the Bolsheviks.
These factors, Pipes suggested, explained why the collapse of monarchy in Russia did not end, as it did in Germany and Austria, with the creation of parliamentary republics which survived, albeit shakily, for more than a decade. The revolution was not, though, the product of historical inevitability.
Pipes had no truck with the old apologist line that Stalin was a 30-year aberration, and that if only Lenin’s legacy had been properly developed, Soviet history would have been different. Lenin, in Pipes’s view, was the arch-villain of the piece – a vicious, cynical Jacobin who created the new Russia in blood.
By promising an end to the war, power to the workers’ councils or “soviets”, land to the peasants, and independence to non-Russian nationalities, Lenin was able to sweep the democratic option aside. By the time it became clear that Bolshevism meant civil war, grain requisitions, mass starvation and a return to Tsarist imperial expansion and tyranny, it was too late. Terror had become institutionalised.
Pipes liked to see himself as a “non-belonger” whose works on the Russian Revolution were ignored or vilified by the liberal establishment. But in fact he had plenty of admirers and, far from being frozen out by a hostile establishment, was a prominent contributor to such journals of the centre as Encounter, The New Republic and the Times Literary Supplement.
Pipes liked to see himself as a 'non-belonger' whose works on the Russian revolution were ignored or vilified by the liberal establishment
His detractors were not all Leninists. His lack of sympathy for the Russian people and culture led one anti-Soviet Russian émigré to refer scornfully to Pipes’s work as “the Polish version of Russian history”; Alexander Solzhenitsyn levelled a blistering attack on Pipes for supposedly hating Mother Russia itself. Even some of Pipes’s supporters found it difficult to justify his claim that “the Jewish holocaust turned out to be one of the many unanticipated and unintended consequences of the Russian Revolution”.
But if Pipes’s anger sometimes seemed to overwhelm his argument, his resistance to intellectual fashion was admirable. His furious broadsides at “fellow travellers and liberals”, who had abjectly failed to address what was going on in the Soviet Union, was well merited.
It was, above all, Pipes who exposed the cant and double standards with which so many 20th-century intellectuals approached the Russian Bear.
Richard Pipes was born in Polish Silesia, recently emancipated from Russian rule, on July 11 1923 into an assimilated, upper-middle-class Jewish family with international business connections. His father had spent his youth in Vienna, and in the Pipes home Polish and German were spoken interchangeably.
Richard was a quick learner. “I remembered mother giving me a sandwich of rye bread covered with a thick layer of butter and radishes,” he recalled in his memoirs. “As I was eating it in front of the house, the radishes slid off. Thus I learnt about loss. Next door lived a boy my age who had a rocking horse covered with a glossy hide. I badly wanted one like it. Thus I became acquainted with envy. And finally, my parents told me that I once invited several of my friends to a grocery store and gave each an orange. Asked by the proprietor who would pay, I replied: ‘Parents.’ Thus … I learnt what communism was, namely, that someone else pays.”
Pipes wrote at least 20 books
The family moved to Warsaw, where he experienced the German siege and lived one month under German occupation before Pipes’s father at last secured passports for his family. They fled in 1939, when Pipes was 16, escaping through Italy to the US. Most of his remaining close relations would die in the Holocaust.
The teenage Pipes was deeply interested in music, art and literature. During the family’s flight to freedom, he purchased books in Breslau and attended lectures on art at the University of Florence. The need for continuous and varied intellectual stimulation would never leave him.
Arriving in America in 1940, Pipes enrolled in a small university – Muskingum College in Ohio – and was conscripted to fight in the Second World War in the Army Air Corps. He was trained as a Russian language specialist at Cornell, where he spent his spare time translating Rilke and courting his future wife. But he never saw action. By the end of the war, he was convinced he wanted to be a historian.
He received a doctorate from Harvard in 1950, stayed on to teach and gained permanent tenure in 1958. He soon established himself as a leading expert on Russia. Beginning with The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (1954), Pipes focused on the endurance of Russia’s autocratic traditions – the dominant theme of his scholarship.
His visits to Russia in the 1950s and 1960s cemented his hatred of the Soviet state and confirmed in him a rather unsympathetic attitude to the Russian people who had allowed such a state of affairs to persist. Initially, Pipes’s work was received respectfully, but things began to change in the 1960s when opposition to the Vietnam War led to ideological splits in the ranks of Sovietologists.
A younger academic generation argued that capitalism and communism were not really so different. Pipes was scathing. “Nothing,” he wrote caustically, “not even travel to the Soviet Union or the appearance in the West of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees with their own tales to tale, could sway the Sovietological profession in its opinions, because here science coincided with self-interest.”
Pipes’s uncompromising polemics caught the attention of the American Right and he came to be regarded as a leading critic of 'appeasement' of the Soviet Union
If Leftist academics were alienated by his hostility to Leninism, Pipes’s uncompromising polemics caught the attention of the American Right and he came to be regarded as a leading critic of “appeasement” (as he called it) of the Soviet Union. His reputation as a Cold Warrior even earned him a headline in Pravda: “Attention, Pipes!”
In 1970 he found a patron in the Democratic Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, a Cold War hardliner who led the early resistance to the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente. Pipes drew out the implications of his theories for American foreign policy in papers he wrote for Jackson and in testimony before Congress.
A reshuffling of the Ford administration in 1975 installed a new defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a new chief of staff, Dick Cheney, and a new head of the CIA, the senior George Bush. Bush approved the formation of the Team B Strategic Objectives Panel, a controversial effort in the mid-1970s to reinterpret CIA intelligence on the Soviet threat.
Meeting under Pipes’s chairmanship and with the advice of a brilliant young weapons analyst, Paul Wolfowitz, the Team B reports became the intellectual foundation of the massive arms build-up that began towards the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under Ronald Reagan.
He helped to steer Ronald Reagan towards the belief that the Soviet regime could and must be defeated
Pipes became a national security adviser to Reagan in 1981, and over the next two years he helped to steer Reagan towards the belief that the Soviet regime could and must be defeated. He was instrumental in the drafting of Reagan’s celebrated speech to the British Houses of Parliament, when he argued that in Marxist terms the Soviet Union was facing inevitable collapse and, by implication, was not a power whose interests had to be taken into account. The speech was said to have infuriated the Russians more than anything else Reagan ever said or did.
Surprisingly, perhaps, for a man who had made an impact by showing the importance of personalities in Soviet politics, Pipes was shocked by the way in which personal factors intruded into American public life. He found that Reagan loathed his secretary of state, Alexander Haig, and that this made their collaboration “ineffectual”; that “Reagan had a deep dislike of the French as a nation, a prejudice that had a marked effect on policymaking at times”. He was shocked to find Nancy Reagan trying to persuade the President to take a softer line on the Soviet Union, because his Cold Warrior rhetoric was damaging her standing in Washington society.
After two years in Washington, Pipes returned to Harvard, though he continued to play a part in chivvying the administration to take a tough line in dealing with the ailing Soviet giant and was not reticent in claiming some of the credit for its eventual collapse.
Undoubtedly some of the antipathy directed towards Pipes was personal rather than ideological. Though in person he was scholarly and genteel, he cared little for his colleagues. Strikingly, in his acknowledgements to The Russian Revolution, he did not mention or thank a single individual.
George Bush presenting the 2007 National Humanities Medal to Richard PipesCredit: Gerald Herbert /AP
Pipes was the author of some 20 books including Russia Under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990), Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1996). His memoirs, Vixi: Memoirs of a non-Belonger were published in 2003, and his last book was Alexander Yakovlev: The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism (2015).
He is survived by his wife, Irene, and by two sons. Richard Pipes, born July 11 1923, died May 17 2018
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