Richard Pipes
Vehemently anti-communist scholar of Russia who encouraged Reagan in his Cold War toughness
RICHARD PIPES, who has died aged 94, was a historian of the Soviet Union whose anticommunism 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.
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, uppermiddle-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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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