Richard Pipes | |
|---|---|
 Pipes in 2004 | |
| Born | (1923-07-11)July 11, 1923 |
| Died | May 17, 2018(2018-05-17) (aged 94) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Citizenship | Poland (1923–1943) United States (1943–2018) |
| Education | Muskingum College Cornell University Harvard University |
| Spouse | Irene Eugenia Roth |
| Children | Daniel Pipes, Steven Pipes |
| Awards | National Humanities Medal |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Russian history |
| Doctoral advisor | Michael Karpovich |
| Doctoral students | John V. A. Fine,Anna Geifman,Abbott Gleason,Edward L. Keenan,Peter Kenez,Eric Lohr,Michael Stanislawski,Richard Stites,Lee In-ho |
Richard Edgar Pipes (Polish:Ryszard Pipes; July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018) was an American historian who specialized inRussian andSoviet history. Pipes was a frequent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history andforeign affairs. His writings also appear inCommentary,The New York Times, andThe Times Literary Supplement.
AtHarvard University, Pipes taught large courses onImperial Russia as well as theRussian Revolution and guided over 80 graduate students to their PhDs. In 1976, he headedTeam B, a team of analysts organized by theCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA), which analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes is the father of American historianDaniel Pipes.[1][2]
Richard Pipes was born inCieszyn,Poland to an assimilatedJewish family (whose name had originally been spelled "Piepes" in German spelling, which in pronunciation is the same as the Polish spelling "Pipes"[ˈpipɛs]).[3] His fatherMarek Pipes [pl] was a businessman and aPolish legionnaire during World War I.[4] He was a co-owner of the chocolate factory Dea in Cieszyn, before he moved to Warsaw in 1929. During the time Pipes attended theSynagoga Ahawat Tora [pl] on Michejda Street.[5] By Pipes's own account, during his childhood and youth, he never thought about the Soviet Union; the major cultural influences on him were Polish and German. Aged 16, Pipes sawAdolf Hitler atMarszałkowska Street in Warsaw during Hitler's victory tour after theInvasion of Poland.[6] The Pipes family fled occupied Poland in October 1939 and arrived in the United States in July 1940, after seven months passing through Italy.[7][8] Pipes became anaturalized citizen of the United States in 1943 while serving in theUnited States Army Air Corps. He was educated atMuskingum College,Cornell University, andHarvard University. In October 1944, Pipes was sent toCamp Ritchie, Maryland, to receive training in psychological warfare.[9]
Pipes taught atHarvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1996. He was the director of Harvard's Russian Research Center from 1968 to 1973 and later Baird ProfessorEmeritus of History at Harvard University. In 1962 he delivered a series of lectures on Russian intellectual history atLeningrad State University. He acted as senior consultant at the Stanford Research Institute from 1973 to 1978. During the 1970s, he was an advisor toWashington SenatorHenry M. Jackson. In 1981 and 1982 he served as a member of theNational Security Council, holding the post of Director of East European and Soviet Affairs under PresidentRonald Reagan.[10] He also became head of the Nationalities Working Group.[11] Pipes was a member of theCommittee on the Present Danger from 1977 until 1992 and belonged to theCouncil of Foreign Relations.[12] He also attended twoBilderberg Meetings, at both of which he lectured.[12] In the 1970s, Pipes was a leading critic ofdétente, which he described as "inspired by intellectual indolence and based on ignorance of one's antagonist and therefore inherently inept".[13]
Pipes was head of the 1976Team B, composed of civilian experts and retired military officers and agreed to by then-CIA directorGeorge H. W. Bush at the urging of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) as acompetitive analysis exercise.[10] Team B was created at the instigation of then Secretary of DefenseDonald Rumsfeld as an antagonist force to a group of CIA intelligence officials known as Team A. His hope was that it would produce a much more aggressive assessment of Soviet Union military capabilities. Unsurprisingly, it argued that theNational Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated both Soviet military strategy and ambition[14] and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions.
Team B faced criticism. The international relations journalistFred Kaplan writes that Team B "turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point."[15] Pipes's group insisted that the Soviet Union, as of 1976, maintained "a large and expanding Gross National Product,"[16] and argued that the CIA belief that economic chaos hindered the USSR's defenses was a ruse on the part of the USSR. One CIA employee called Team B "a kangaroo court".[17]
Pipes called Team B's evidence "soft."[10] Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several new weapons, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a system that did not depend on active sonar, and was thus undetectable by existing technology.[18]
According to Pipes, "Team B was appointed to look at the evidence and to see if we could conclude that the actual Soviet strategy is different from ours, i.e. the strategy ofMutual Assured Destruction (MAD). It has now been demonstrated totally that it was".[19] In 1986, Pipes maintained that Team B contributed to creating more realistic defense estimates.[20]
In what was meant to be an "off-the-record" interview, Pipes toldReuters in March 1981 that "Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their Communist system in the direction followed by the West or going to war. There is no other alternative and it could go either way – Détente is dead." Pipes also stated in the interview that Foreign MinisterHans-Dietrich Genscher ofWest Germany was susceptible to pressure from the Russians. It was learned independently that Pipes was the official who spoke to Reuters. This potentially jeopardized Pipes' job. The White House and the "incensed" State Department issued statements repudiating Pipes' comments.[21]
Pipes wrote many books onRussian history, includingRussia under the Old Regime (1974),The Russian Revolution (1990), andRussia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and was a frequent interviewee in the press on the matters ofSoviet history andforeign affairs. His writings also appear inCommentary,The New York Times, andThe Times Literary Supplement. At Harvard, he taught large courses on Imperial Russia as well as the Russian Revolution and guided over 80 graduate students to their PhDs.
Pipes was the leading expert on philosopherPeter Struve,[citation needed] of whom he wrote a biography.
Pipes is known for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th-centuryMuscovy, in a Russian version of theSonderweg thesis. In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every other State in Europe in that it had no concept ofprivate property, and that everything was regarded as the property of theGrand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia (possibly under Mongol influence) ensured that Russia would be anautocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar from those ofWestern civilization. Pipes argued that this "patrimonialism" ofImperial Russia started to break down when Russian leaders attempted to modernize in the 19th century, without seeking to change the basic "patrimonial" structure of Russian society. In Pipes's opinion, this separate course undertaken by Russia over the centuries made Russia uniquely open to revolution in 1917. Pipes strongly criticized the values of the radicalintelligentsia of late Imperial Russia for what he sees as their fanaticism and inability to accept reality. Pipes stressed that the Soviet Union was anexpansionist,totalitarianstate bent on world conquest.[22] He is also known for the thesis that, contrary to many traditional histories of the Soviet Union at the time, theOctober Revolution was, rather than a popular general uprising, a coup under false slogans foisted upon the majority of the Russians by a tiny segment of the population driven by a select group of radical intellectuals, who subsequently established aone-party dictatorship that was intolerant andrepressive from the start.[23]
In 1992, Pipes served as anexpert witness in theConstitutional Court of Russia's trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[24]
His writing has provoked discussions in the academic community, for example inThe Russian Review among several others.[25][26][27][28][29][30] Among members of this school,Lynne Viola andSheila Fitzpatrick write that Pipes focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents.Peter Kenez, a former PhD student of Pipes', argued that Pipes approached Soviet history as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the criminal intent of the defendant, to the exclusion of anything else,[31] and described Pipes as a researcher of "great reputation" but with passionateanti-communist views.[32]
Other critics have written that Pipes wrote at length about what Pipes described asVladimir Lenin's unspoken assumptions and conclusions while neglecting what Lenin actually said.[33]Alexander Rabinowitch writes that whenever a document can serve Pipes' long-standing crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes commented on it at length; if the document allows Lenin to be seen in a less negative light, Pipes passed over it without comment.[28] Pipes' critics argued that his historical writings perpetuated the Soviet Union as "evil empire" narrative in an attempt "to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm."[34][35]Diane P. Koenker describedThe Russian Revolution as having a "fundamentally reactionary" perspective that presents a sympathetic view ofimperial forces and depicted Lenin as a "single-minded, ruthless and cowardly intellectual".[36]
Following the demise of the USSR, Pipes charged the revisionists[clarification needed] with skewing their research, by means of statistics, to support their preconceived ideological interpretation of events, which made the results of their research "as unreadable as they were irrelevant for the understanding of the subject,"[37] to provide intellectual cover for Sovietterror and acting as simpletons and/or communist dupes.[38] He also stated that their attempt at "history from below" only obfuscated the fact that "Soviet citizens were the helpless victims of a totalitarian regime driven primarily by a lust for power."[39]
Pipes had an extensive list of honors, including: Honorary Consul of theRepublic of Georgia, Foreign Member of thePolish Academy of Learning (PAU), Commander's Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland, Honorary DHL atAdelphi College, Honorary LLD atMuskingum College, Doctor Honoris Causa from theUniversity of Silesia, Szczecin University, and the University of Warsaw. Honorary Doctor of Political Science from the Tbilisi (Georgia) School of Political Studies. Annual Spring Lecturer of the NorwegianNobel Peace Institute, Walter Channing Cabot Fellow ofHarvard University, Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Guggenheim Fellow (twice), Fellow of theAmerican Council of Learned Societies and recipient of theGeorge Louis Beer Prize of theAmerican Historical Association.[40] He was a member of the Board of Advisors of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He served on a number of editorial boards including that of the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. He received one of the 2007National Humanities Medals[41][42] and in 2009 he was awarded both theTruman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by theVictims of Communism Memorial Foundation[43] and theBrigham–Kanner Property Rights Prize by theWilliam & Mary Law School.[44]In 2010, Pipes received the medal "Bene Merito" awarded by the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. From 2010 to 2014, he participated in the annualValdai Discussion Club.
He was a member of the advisory council of theVictims of Communism Memorial Foundation.[45]
Pipes married Irene Eugenia Roth in 1946; the couple had two children, Daniel and Steven. Their sonDaniel Pipes is a scholar of Middle Eastern affairs.[46][47]
Pipes died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 17, 2018, at the age of 94.[1][2]
Author
Editor
Contributor
Essays
{{cite journal}}:|author= has generic name (help);Shribman, David (October 21, 1981)."Security Adviser Ousted for a Talk Hinting at War".New York Times: A1.;Author Unknown (November 2, 1981). "The Rogue General".Newsweek.{{cite journal}}:|author= has generic name (help)what occurred in October 1917 was a classical modern coup d'etat accomplished without mass support. It was a surreptitious seizure of the nerve centres of the modern state, carried out under false slogans in order to neutralise the population at large, the true purpose of which was revealed only after the new claimants to power were firmly in the saddle.
