Richard Edgar Pipes (Polish: Ryszard Pipes; July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018) was an American academic who specialized in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union, who espoused a strong anti-communist point of view throughout his career. In 1976 he headed Team B, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes was the father of American historian Daniel Pipes.
Richard Pipes was born in Cieszyn, Poland to an assimilated Jewish family (whose name had originally been spelled "Piepes").[1] His father Marek was a businessman and a Polish legionnaire.[2] 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. When he was age 16, Pipes laid eyes upon Adolf Hitler at Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw when Hitler made a victory tour after the Invasion of Poland.[3] The Pipes family fled occupied Poland in October 1939 and arrived in the United States in July 1940, after seven months passing through Italy.[4][5] Pipes became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943 while serving in the United States Army Air Corps. He was educated at Muskingum College, Cornell University, and Harvard University. He married Irene Eugenia Roth in 1946, and had two children with her, Daniel and Steven. His son Daniel Pipes is a scholar of Middle Eastern affairs.[6][7]
Pipes died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 17, 2018 at the age of 94.[8][9]
Pipes taught at Harvard 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 Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard University. In 1962 he delivered a series of lectures on Russian intellectual history at Leningrad State University. He acted as senior consultant at the Stanford Research Institute from 1973 to 1978. During the 1970s, he was an advisor to Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson. In 1981 and 1982 he served as a member of the National Security Council, holding the post of Director of East European and Soviet Affairs under President Ronald Reagan.[10] He also became head of the Nationalities Working Group.[11] Pipes was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger from 1977 until 1992 and belonged to the Council of Foreign Relations.[12] He also attended two Bilderberg Meetings, at both of which he lectured.[12] In the 1970s, Pipes was a leading critic of détente, 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 1976 Team B, composed of civilian experts and retired military officers and agreed to by then-CIA director George H. W. Bush at the urging of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) as a competitive analysis exercise.[10] Team B was created at the instigation of then Secretary of Defense Donald 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 the National 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 journalist Fred 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 of Mutual 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]
Pipes wrote many books on Russian history, including Russia under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990), and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and was a frequent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history and foreign affairs. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times, and The 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 is known for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th-century Muscovy, in a Russian version of the Sonderweg thesis.[citation needed] In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every other State in Europe in that it had no concept of private property, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar.[citation needed] In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia (possibly under Mongol influence) ensured that Russia would be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar from those of Western civilization.[citation needed] Pipes argued that this "patrimonialism" of Imperial 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.[citation needed] In Pipes's opinion, this separate course undertaken by Russia over the centuries made Russia uniquely open to revolution in 1917.[citation needed] Pipes strongly criticized the values of the radical intelligentsia of late Imperial Russia for what he sees as their fanaticism and inability to accept reality.[citation needed] The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn denounced Pipes' work as "the Polish version of Russian history".[citation needed] Pipes, in turn, accused Solzhenitsyn of being an anti-Semitic Russian ultra-nationalist, who sought to blame the ills of Communism on the Jews rather than to admit to the Russian roots of the Soviet Union. Writing of Solzhenitsyn's novel, August 1914 in the New York Times on November 13, 1985, Pipes commented: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Dostoevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews".[21] Pipes explained Solzhenitsyn's view of Soviet communism: "[Solzhenitsyn] said it was because Marxism was a Western idea imported into Russia. Whereas my argument is that it has deep roots in Russian history."[22]
Pipes stressed that the Soviet Union was an expansionist, totalitarianstate bent on world conquest.[citation needed] He is also notable for the thesis that, contrary to many traditional histories of the Soviet Union at the time, the October Revolution was, rather than a popular general uprising, a coup foisted upon the majority of the Russian population by a tiny segment of the population driven by a select group of intellectuals who subsequently established a one-party dictatorship that was intolerant and repressive from the start.[citation needed] In Pipes's view, the Revolution was a total disaster, as it allowed a small section of the fanatical intelligentsia to carry out policies that were completely unrealistic.[citation needed]
In what was meant to be an "off-the-record" interview, Pipes told Reuters 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 Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of West Germany was susceptible to pressure from the Soviets. 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' statements.[23]
Criticism of Pipes's interpretation of the events of 1917 has come mostly from revisionist Soviet historians, who under the influence of the French Annales school, have tended since the 1970s to center their interpretation of the Russian Revolution on social movements from below in preference to parties and their leaders and interpreted political movements as responding to pressures from below rather than directing them.[31] Among members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick write that Pipes focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez (a one-time 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.[32] 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".[33][34]
Other critics have written that Pipes wrote at length about what Pipes described as Lenin's unspoken assumptions and conclusions while neglecting what Lenin actually said.[35]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, in his turn – following the demise of the USSR – charged the revisionists 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"[36] to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror and acting as simpletons and/or Communist dupes.[37] 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".[38]
The Communist System, in: Alexander Dallin/Gail W. Lapidus (eds.) The Soviet System. From Crisis to Collapse, 2nd. revised edition, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford: Westview Press, 1995. ISBN0-8133-1876-9
History’s Mysteries (documentary series). “Killer Submarine”. History Channel, 2001.[45]
Beyond the Movie - The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. National Geographic, 2003.[46]
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (documentary mini-series). Episode 1: “Baby It’s Cold Outside”. Written and directed by Adam Curtis. 2004.[47]
"Well, because I attended — I am a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. I attended two Bilderberg meetings. The Council on Foreign Relations is scholarly institute, and you know, it has a reputation of being very liberal, but I am — here I am, I am a conservative, and I lecture to it, and I wrote for the Foreign Affairs, its official organ, and so on. And secondly, Bilderberg — well, those are very exclusive meetings, they take place once a year in different locations. Some 100 people attend. And again, I attended these two meetings, and I have lectures, people speaking about this, and people speaking about that. And nobody tried to make policy, and nobody conspired about anything."
^Thomas, D.M. Alexander Solzhenitsyn St. Martin's Press, New York City, United States of America, 1998 ISBN0-312-18036-5 p. 490.
^Nancy deWolf Smith (August 20, 2011). "A Cold Warrior At Peace". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 20, 2011.
^Author Unknown (March 19, 1981). "U.S. Repudiates a Hard-Line Aide". New York Times: A8.; 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.
^David C. Engerman, Know your enemy. The rise and fall of America's Soviet experts, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.305.
^Richard Pipes; Walter C. Clemens, Jr. (1983). "U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente". Slavic Review. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 42 (1): 117–18. JSTOR2497460.
^Raymond L. Garthoff, Foreign Affairs, May 1995, pg. 197
^Richard Pipes; Diane P. Koenker (1993). "The Russian Revolution". The Journal of Modern History. The University of Chicago Press. 65 (2): 432–35. doi:10.1086/244669. JSTOR2124477.
^Richard Pipes; Ronald Grigor Suny (1991). "The Russian Revolution". The American Historical Review. Oxford University Press. 96 (5): 1581–83. doi:10.2307/2165391. JSTOR2165391.
^Sheila Fitzpatrick, Revisionism in Soviet History, History and Theory, Vol. 46, Issue 4, December 2007
^Peter Kenez (1995). "The Prosecution of Soviet History, Volume 2". The Russian Review. Wiley. 54 (2): 265–69. doi:10.2307/130919. JSTOR130919.
Bogle, Lori Lyn, "Pipes, Richard", pp. 922–923, in The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing edited by Kelly Boyd, Vol. 2, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishing, 1999. online
Daly, Jonathan, “The Pleiade: Five Scholars Who Founded Russian Historical Studies in America,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 18, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 785–826.
Daly, Jonathan, ed., Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston, 2019).
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), in the periodical Novy Mir. After this he had to publish in the West, most notably Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". Solzhenitsyn was afraid to go to Stockholm to receive his award for fear that he would not be allowed to reenter. He was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994 after the state's dissolution.
Bolsheviks
The Bolsheviks, also known in English as the Bolshevists, were a faction founded by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov that split from the Menshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898, at its Second Party Congress in 1903.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.
The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume, non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, followed by an English translation the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the gulag, the Communist Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a gulag prisoner. In Russian, the term GULAG (ГУЛАГ) is an acronym for Main Directorate of Camps.
History of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union (1917–1927)
The ten years 1917-1927 saw a radical transformation of the Russian Empire into a communist state, the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia covers 1917-1922 and Soviet Union covers the years 1922 to 1991. After the Russian Civil War (1917-1923), the Bolsheviks (Communists) took dictatorial control. They were dedicated to a version of Marxism developed by Vladimir Lenin. It promised the workers would rise, destroy capitalism, and create a socialist utopia under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The awkward problem was the small proletariat, in an overwhelmingly peasant society with limited industry and a very small middle class. Following the February Revolution in 1917 that deposed Nicholas II of Russia, a short-lived provisional government gave way to Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. The Bolshevik Party was renamed the Russian Communist Party (RCP).
Cold War
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states, and the United States with its allies after World War II. The historiography of the conflict began between 1946 and 1947. The Cold War began to de-escalate after the Revolutions of 1989. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 was the end of the Cold War. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany and its allies, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences.
Détente
Détente is the easing of strained relations, especially in a political situation, through verbal communication. The term in diplomacy originates around 1912 when France and Germany tried, without success, to reduce tensions.
Russian famine of 1921–22
The Russian famine of 1921–22, also known as the Povolzhye famine, was a severe famine in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic which began early in the spring of 1921 and lasted through 1922. This famine killed an estimated five million people, primarily affecting the Volga and Ural River regions, and peasants resorted to cannibalism.
Soviet Union–United States relations
The relations between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922–1991) succeeded the previous relations from 1776 to 1917 and precede today's relations that began in 1992. Full diplomatic relations between both countries were established in 1933, late due to the countries' mutual hostility. During World War II, both countries were briefly allies. At the end of the war, the first signs of post-war mistrust and hostility began to appear between the two countries, escalating into the Cold War; a period of tense hostile relations, with periods of détente.
National Bolshevism
National Bolshevism, whose supporters are known as Nazbols, is a political movement that combines elements of fascism and Bolshevism.
