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