Historian’s vehement anti-Communism bolstered Reagan’s Cold War toughness
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 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, 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 landhunger 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 that 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’ view, was the archvillain of the piece – a vicious, cynical Jacobin who created the new Russia in blood.
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 centrist journals.
His detractors were not all Leninists; Alexander Solzhenitsyn levelled a blistering attack on Pipes for supposedly hating Mother Russia itself. Even some of his 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’ 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, were well merited. It was he, above all, who exposed the cant and double standards with which so Historian b July 11, 1923 d May 17, 2018 Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz many 20th-century intellectuals approached Russia.
Pipes was born in Polish Silesia, recently emancipated from Russian rule, into an assimilated, upper-middle-class Jewish family with international business connections. Polish and German were spoken interchangeably at home.
The family moved to Warsaw, where he experienced the German siege and lived one month under German occupation before his father at last secured passports for his family. They fled in 1939, escaping through Italy to the United States. Most of his remaining close relations would die in the Holocaust.
Arriving in America in 1940, Pipes enrolled in a small university – Muskingum College in Ohio – and was conscripted to fight in World War II in the Army Air Corps. He was trained as a Russian language specialist at Cornell, where he courted his future wife. But he never saw action. By the end of the war, he was convinced he wanted to be a historian.
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.
If Leftist academics were alienated by his hostility to Leninism, his 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 even earned him a headline in Pravda: ‘‘Attention, Pipes!’’
In 1975, the new CIA head, George Bush, approved the formation of the Team B Strategic Objectives Panel, to reinterpret CIA intelligence on the Soviet threat. Meeting under Pipes’ chairmanship and with the advice of a young Paul Wolfowitz, the Team B reports became the intellectual foundation of the massive arms buildup that accelerated under Ronald Reagan.
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. The speech was said to have infuriated the Russians more than anything else Reagan said or did.
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. In his acknowledgements to The Russian Revolution, he did not mention or thank a single individual.
He is survived by his wife, Irene, and by two sons. – Telegraph Group