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”.
