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HomeNuméros59/4In memoriam Richard PipesA Scholar with a Sense of Mission

In memoriam Richard Pipes

A Scholar with a Sense of Mission

Academic, Cold Warrior, Public Intellectual
Jonathan Daly
p. 553-566

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  • 1 I am grateful to Jane Burbank, Daniel Pipes and Alla Zeide for helpful comments on the manuscript o (...)

1On May 17, 2018, Richard Pipes died quietly in a nursing home in Belmont, Massachusetts, to which he had been moved from a Cambridge hospital the day before. He had lived ninety‑four years and ten months.1 He wrote more books and articles on more topics and phases of Russia’s past, from Muscovy to late Soviet and even post‑Soviet times, than any other Western scholar. He was the most influential practicing American historian in the field of Sovietology, for a time the best‑known historian of Russia in America, and undoubtedly the best known American or even Western historian of Russia in Russia itself. He was animated throughout his career, which began in graduate school in 1946 at Harvard University and ended only in 2016 with his last publication, by a morally grounded devotion to freedom and opposition to authoritarian oppression. At the same time, his intellectual interests ranged from the underlying political culture of Russia to art history. He taught thousands of undergraduate students and dozens of PhD candidates at Harvard. He also kept up relations with hundreds of people in many walks of life beyond the academy.

2Richard Edgar Pipes was born into an assimilated Jewish family on July 11, 1923, in Cieszyn, in Polish Silesia. He spent his early years speaking German and Polish indiscriminately. When he was four, the family moved to Warsaw. There he attended the liberal private Michał Kreczmar High School with separate religion classes for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The Pipes family lived comfortably, and Richard enjoyed a happy childhood.

3The rise in Polish nationalism following the death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935 turned Pipes away from his school work and drew him into independent study of music, art, and philosophy, especially the works of Nietzsche.

4The Pipes family’s flight from occupied Poland, like that of his future bride, Irene Roth, was nothing short of miraculous. With forged documents, obtained by his father thanks to high‑level connections secured during his fight for Polish independence against Russia in the World‑War‑I‑era Polish Legions, and a contest of wills and wiles with a Gestapo officer on the Austro‑Italian border, Marek Pipes arranged his family’s westward passage through Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal on their way to the United States. A few years later, Richard and Irene met at Cornell University, where she was studying architecture and he was learning Russian language and culture in the Army Specialized Training Program.

  • 2 See Jonathan Daly, “The Pleiade: Five Scholars Who Founded Russian Historical Studies in America,” (...)
  • 3 Richard Pipes, “The Russian Military Colonies, 1810–1831,” The Journal of Modern History, 22, 3 (Se (...)

5Following their wedding on September 1, 1946, Richard and Irene departed for Harvard University where he and a dozen other future founders of the Russian history field in America began their doctoral studies with the émigré Russian, Michael Karpovich.2 In his second semester, Pipes wrote a seminar paper for the intellectual historian, Crane Brinton, on Alexander I’s “military colonies.” This became his first publication (1950).3 In this work, Pipes was inspired in part by a desire to understand the Soviet present through Russia’s past, an important leitmotif of his entire career.

6While Pipes had nothing but contempt for the autocratic tendencies of Russia’s rulers and government before 1917 and after, he admired Russian high culture and believed in the creative brilliance of its leading members. As he wrote many years later,

  • 4 As quoted from Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non‑Belonger (New Haven, CT, – London: Yale Univer (...)

I draw a sharp distinction between Russian governments and the Russian people, and further between educated Russians and the population at large. I have immense admiration and sympathy for Russian intellectuals (even as I criticize the politics). When I read the prose of Turgenev, Tolstoy, or Chekhov, the poetry of Pasternak and Akhmatova, when I listen to the songs of an Okudzhava or Vysotsky, when I observe the heroism of a Sakharov, I am at home. Indeed, I almost feel Russian.4

7Pipes also devoted years of assiduous research to rescuing from historical oblivion such important liberal Russian political thinkers as Peter Struve and Alexander Yakovlev, both of whom he admired greatly.

  • 5 For a complete bibliography of Pipes’s scholarly works, see Jonathan Daly, ed., Pillars of the Prof (...)

8In his first major research project, Pipes investigated the nationalities question in Russia, a topic that only decades later would become a central focus of Western historians. He framed his dissertation, which he defended in 1950, as a study into the how the Bolsheviks interpreted nationalism in the light of their socialist ideals. His first book, The Formation of the Soviet Union (1954), built on this work, narrating the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Bolshevik state’s re‑forging of a multinational polity through policies of concessions and coercion. The volume prophetically hinted that fostering national minority consciousness through constitutional guarantees and cultural promotion was likely to establish preconditions for an eventual breakup of the USSR. The book garnered the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize in European international history. Over the next several years, Pipes continued to research and write on questions relating to the Soviet national minorities, especially Muslims. His book and a dozen published articles on this and other topics5 won him tenure in 1958 at Harvard University, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

9Next, Pipes delved into the nature of Russia’s political culture. The result was a critical edition of Nicholas Karamzin’s “Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia,” prepared in defense of Russian absolutism, in 1810–1811, for Emperor Alexander I. Pipes called the text, which he brought out in 1959 in both Russian and English versions and with extensive commentary, “the manifesto of Russian conservatism” and suggested that a conservative political culture continued to inform the Russian mentality even in the Soviet era.

  • 6 For a fuller bibliography of Pipes’s works (albeit only through 1992), see “Papers of Richard Pipes (...)

10From 1957 to 1969, Pipes placed fifteen articles (not counting book reviews) in magazines and newspapers aimed at a broader readership, including Encounter, New Leader, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.6 From this time and throughout his career, Pipes cultivated an enthralling writing style that brought public attention to many of his works. Pipes also managed to project his voice behind the “Iron Curtain.” At the Tenth International Congress for Historical Sciences in Rome, in 1955, he met A.L. Sidorov, the director of the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. They exchanged books and research advice and made plans for further scholarly interaction.

  • 7 As quoted from Richard Pipes, “Muslims of Soviet Central Asia: Trends and Prospects,” Middle East J (...)
  • 8 As quoted from “Amerikanskii uchenyi Ridchar [sic] Paips v Alma‑Ate [The American scholar Richard P (...)

11Yet from the time of Pipes’s first visit to the USSR, in 1957, his writings and public argumentation were systematically denounced by Soviet journalists and historians trained in the criticism of “bourgeois falsification” and the writing of “unmasking” (razoblachitel´naia) literature. In 1960, for example, Kazakhstanskaia pravda published a scathing critique of Pipes’s 1955 article “Muslims of Soviet Central Asia : Trends and Prospects.” Ironically, the reviewer accused Pipes of arguing that the Soviet authorities were suppressing the national consciousness of the ethnic minorities, when he in fact asserted that it was the policy of the communist government “to encourage the growth of national consciousness among the major native ethnic groups.”7 Even so, not all of the early Soviet reactions to Pipes were condemnatory. In 1957, he granted an interview in Alma‑Ata to Kazakhstanskaia Pravda, which approvingly quoted him as opining that Kazakhstan had a bright future for “it is right at the meeting place of China, India, and Afghanistan.”8

  • 9 All quotations from Unfinished article on trip to USSR, “Russians on Russia,” 1962, HUG(FP)98.45, b (...)
  • 10 Theodore Shabad, “U.S. Scholar Tells Russians about their Past,” New York Times (April 6, 1962), 10
  • 11 As quoted from “Mirnoe sosushchestvovanie ne oznachaet oslableniia ideologicheskoi bor´by [Peaceful (...)

12The response to a cycle of four lectures in Russian that Pipes presented at the University of Leningrad in spring 1962 was mixed. In the first lecture, to a packed auditorium, Pipes traced the origins of Russian conservatism. “My approach,” he sensed, “was quite visibly perplexing to the audience which was accustomed neither to a treatment of history from a non‑economic point of view, nor to an effort to present historical evidence in a dispassionate manner.”9 The last two lectures, concerning the emergence in the 1860s of liberal and conservative ideologies, focused on Boris Chicherin and Peter Struve as “conservatives with liberal inclinations” and Dostoevsky and Konstantin Leontev as “conservatives tending toward reaction.” Not one of these figures had been studied by Soviet scholars as thinkers. The attendees were on the edge of their seats when Pipes quoted from Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer to the effect that human kindness and brotherhood stem not from good institutions but from faith in the immortality of the soul. Theodore Shabad, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, noted that never before had an American scholar been permitted “to defend aspects of Russia’s intellectual history that ran counter to official Communist teachings.”10 Indeed, the June issue of the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Kommunist, carried a lengthy editorial reiterating that the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence” could not forestall “the affirmation of socialism by means of the destruction of capitalism.”11 The editorial singled out for criticism, along with Pipes, both A.J. Ayer, a leading Oxford philosopher, and the Soviet physicist (and later Nobel laureate) P.L. Kapitsa.

  • 12 Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (Cambridge, MA: Ha (...)
  • 13 G. Zhuikov and V. Shishkin, “Ukhishchreniia fal’sifikatora: Po povodu knigi amerikanskogo professor (...)
  • 14 R.A. Kazakevich and F.M. Suslova, “Richard Pipes protiv faktov istorii [Richard Pipes against the f (...)
  • 15 Iu.I. Igritskii to Richard Pipes, August 18, 1966, Richard Pipes, Personal Papers, 17 Berkeley St., (...)
  • 16 R.A. Kazakevich and F.M. Suslova, Mister Paips fal´sifitsiruet istoriiu: O knige Paipsa “Sotsial‑de (...)

13Pipes enjoyed his interactions with Soviet scholars and felt the same compulsion to enter into dialogue with them as he did in the West, for he was an inveterate writer of letters to the editor and to scholars on whose work he had a strong opinion. When his Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (1963),12 which downplayed the role of Lenin in organizing Russian industrial workers in the 1890s, was denounced in the party newspaper of Leningrad13 and castigated in the main Soviet journal devoted to Russian and Soviet history, Istoriia SSSR,14 Pipes penned a lengthy reply. The journal’s editor agreed to publish Pipes’s letter, but only if it were expanded to address the reviewers’ “conceptual criticism and polemics.”15 Pipes decided against developing his response, because “all historical research involves a great deal of deductive and often subjective interpretation of events. A reviewer has a right to accept or reject these interpretations,” he wrote, “but he must believe in the goodwill of the writer and respect it. I see no evidence of such an attitude in the review in question.” (Two years later, the article was expanded into a book—thirty pages longer than Pipes’s and in a print run of 7,500 copies.16) Pipes was undoubtedly disappointed at how difficult engaging with his Soviet counterparts proved to be.

  • 17 Richard Pipes to Leopold Haimson, May 26, 1959, Richard Pipes Collection, Accession number 17397, b (...)

14Pipes continued, nevertheless, to take Soviet scholarship seriously. For one thing, he appreciated the warm feelings that Russian historians privately expressed toward him and his work. Especially important was a journal he founded at Harvard. Back in 1959, he had written to Leopold Haimson that “in the field of economic and social history, archaeology, and text publication,” their Soviet counterparts were producing “much important work […] which ought to be brought to the attention of the specialist.”17 For the purpose of reviewing such work, and also to contribute to the training of his plentiful graduate students, in 1964 Pipes launched a quarterly journal Kritika. Nowhere else in America were PhD candidates in Russian history given so much responsibility and working so closely on actual scholarship as part of an editorial team with their mentor.

  • 18 Richard Pipes to Nicholas Riasanovsky, 1968, Richard Pipes Collection, Accession number 17397, box (...)
  • 19 “Captain Pyotr Zayonchkovsky,” in Jochen Hellbeck, ed., Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Thir (...)

15Pipes respected the efforts of the best Soviet historians, especially given the great pressures and restrictions under which they were required to function. In 1968, for example, he requested Nicholas Riasanovsky’s support in persuading Harvard’s History Department to award its MacVane Prize for modern European history to P.A. Zaionchkovskii, since there was “a certain reluctance to award the prize to a scholar whose work virtually no one in the department can read.”18 Apparently thanks to Pipes’s efforts, the prize was indeed awarded to Zaionchkovskii that year.19

  • 20 Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 197 (...)
  • 21 Richard Pipes, ed., P.B. Struve: Collected Works in Fifteen Volumes (Ann Arbor, MI: University Micr (...)

16During the 1960s and 1970s, Pipes researched the life of Peter Struve, a brilliant intellectual who went from left‑wing idealist and author of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party manifesto in 1898 to leader of the liberal Constitutional Democratic party and later staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks and advisor to “White” generals. Pipes traveled all over Europe and America to interview scholars and intellectuals who had known Struve and to work in a dozen archives, tracking down thousands of documents, and exchanging hundreds of letters, as he slowly gathered material for his definitive, two‑volume biography.20 He also published a fifteen‑volume compendium of Struve’s publications and the compilation of his complete bibliography.21

17To some extent, Pipes can be counted, along with his mentor Karpovich, as an optimist in the famous debate about Russia’s chances for further constitutional development, had World War I not opened a path to revolution and Bolshevik takeover. Nor was he entirely pessimistic about Russia’s future, to judge by the efforts he lavished on his Struve biography, which he wrote primarily for eventual Russian readers. Indeed, Pipes hoped that one day it would provide Russians with an example of a liberal thinker devoted to the rule of law and constitutional government who could serve as a guide for building such institutions in their homeland. When communism collapsed in the USSR in 1991, Pipes waxed hopeful about the prospects of a liberal political evolution in Russia.

18Pipes was always admirably productive. In the 1960s alone, he wrote two dozen book reviews, served as director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center, organized two scholarly conferences under its auspices with participants from across Europe and America (on the Russian intelligentsia in 1960 and on the Russian Revolution in 1967), edited the resultant compendia of papers, served as an editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, authored a dozen scholarly articles (on the Russian intelligentsia and revolutionary movements, national minorities, Soviet intellectuals, and the Russian Revolution, among other topics), co‑edited and wrote the introduction for an early modern English traveler’s account of Russia (1966), and wrote nearly 600 hundred pages of a college textbook on the history of Western civilization (1968).

19While many American academics—including a number of his former students—had become admirers of the Soviet experiment, Pipes remained a fervent anti‑Communist and opponent of the Soviet state. When the USSR achieved rough nuclear parity in 1969 or 1970, Pipes grew deeply concerned and felt compelled to speak more forcefully about what he considered the dangers of treating the Soviet Union as just another polity in competition with the United States, rather than an aggressive power driven by its underlying political culture to seek world domination.

  • 22 Richard Pipes, “Russia’s Mission, America’s Destiny,” Encounter, 35, 4 (October 1970): 3–11.

20In 1969, he presented a paper on U.S.‑Soviet relations at the American Historical Association annual meeting and published a revised version in Encounter. In these contributions, Pipes rejected the widely accepted view that the USSR and the United States were converging and, on the contrary, argued that Russia’s political culture made its leaders xenophobic and millenarian. Pipes argued that, unlike the leadership and a majority of the population of the United States, with its “business ethos,” the Soviet leadership, which did not have to consider public opinion, was uninterested in international political stability and the politics of compromise.22

  • 23 Testimony before Subcommittee on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the Committee on Armed Services (...)
  • 24 The testimony was excerpted in Richard Pipes, “An Inside View: Why Russia Wants a World in Turmoil, (...)
  • 25 See Papers of Richard Pipes, 1941–1992 (inclusive), Lecture outlines and related material, 1950–198 (...)

21Pipes immediately caught the attention of a prominent Senator, Henry Jackson, who invited him to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the Committee on Armed Services.23 Pipes argued that what mattered above all was intentionality. The Soviets, in his view, did not intend to coexist with Western countries but remained committed in the long run to overwhelming them militarily, economically, and politically.24 He went on to testify a half‑dozen times before various House and Senate committees, served as a consultant on Soviet foreign policy for the Stanford Research Institute, published three dozen popular and scholarly articles on strategy and geopolitics (a number of them translated into foreign languages), and gave scores of interviews and invited lectures. In 1979 alone, he presented twenty‑five public lectures around the country and the world.25

  • 26 As quoted from Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974) (...)

22Connected with Pipes’s Sovietological work was his bold interpretation of Russia’s political evolution from medieval to modern times, Russia under the Old Regime (1974). The book sought to explain “why in Russia—unlike the rest of Europe to which Russia belongs by virtue of her location, race, and religion—society has proven unable to impose on political authority any kind of effective restraints.”26 It remains a seminal classic that has never gone out of print. Russia under the Old Regime also strongly shaped Pipes’s concurrent intensive work in the field of Soviet foreign policy and strategy and U.S.‑Soviet relations.

  • 27 As quoted in Willard C. Matthias, America’s Strategic Blunders: Intelligence Analysis and National (...)
  • 28 See Richard Pipes, “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War,” Commentary, (...)

23Pipes had an opportunity to challenge the prevailing Western view of Soviet strategic thinking, thanks to his leadership in 1976 of the CIA’s external audit (Team B) of its own internal assessment of Soviet air defenses, missile accuracy, and strategic objectives. Pipes’s team concluded that “the Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded.”27 Pipes further developed this idea in a Commentary (1977) article with the exceptionally provocative title “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War.”28 This article probably stimulated more heated discussion than anything else he wrote.

  • 29 As quoted from Richard Pipes, “Prospects for East‑West Relations,” Survey, 22, 3/4 (Summer‑Autumn 1 (...)

24Pipes believed the Soviet system was weak—because of demographic challenges, growing political dissent, rising Russian nationalism, and declining belief in communism. Thus, he expected that shutting off economic and technological aid would increase the influence of reformers in the Kremlin, leading to dramatic internal change. Already in 1976, he was arguing that the Soviet system was likely to “disintegrate from its internal pressures.”29

  • 30 The declassified NSDD‑75 is available here: https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd‑75.pdf.
  • 31 “Reflections on the Soviet Crisis: An Interview with White House Kremlinologist Richard Pipes,” Tim (...)
  • 32 Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s Future (New York: Simon and S (...)

25Ronald Reagan viewed the USSR in much the same way as Pipes and therefore selected him as the Soviet and Eastern European expert in the National Security Council for the first two years of his presidency (the maximum absence Harvard would permit). Pipes’s most important contribution to the Reagan administration’s Soviet policy was strategic. He argued against the U.S. policy of containment, first articulated by George Kennan and instituted by President Truman, and the Nixonian policy of détente, and in favor of challenging the Soviet Union militarily, diplomatically, covertly, and economically. This grand strategy was articulated in National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 75 on U.S. Relations with the USSR, of which Pipes was the principal author.30 Its purpose, as Pipes asserted in an interview with Time magazine in early 1982, was to undermine “the conservative hawks who don’t want to democratize” in favor of “reform‑minded […] Russian nationalists” in the Kremlin.31 In late 1984, several months before Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, Pipes asserted that “the forces making for change are becoming well‑nigh irresistible” within the Soviet leadership.32

  • 33 Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); idem, Russia under the Bol (...)

26By this time, Pipes was already deep into a study of the Russian Revolution. His Russia under the Old Regime served as the first volume of what came to be a sweeping trilogy on Russian political history from Muscovite times to the death of Lenin.33 Taken together, these volumes constitute Pipes’s magnum opus.

  • 34 Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
  • 35 As quoted from Pipes, Vixi, 223.

27The study enjoyed great commercial success worldwide, being translated into a half‑dozen languages (the concise version of the book was translated into eight),34 but reviewers were divided in their assessment. Anti‑communists loved the work, while sympathizers with the Bolshevik project recoiled. These so‑called Revisionists faulted Pipes for ignoring the vast social history literature of the previous two decades, including many works by his own former students. Yet, Pipes considered most of this scholarship irrelevant. First, it focused on mass movements and utopian visions, when politics after the February 1917 Revolution were driven, in Pipes’s interpretation, by educated elites and full‑time political activists. Second, he was livid that hardly any of this literature paid attention to the horrors of the Bolshevik project, including the Red Terror, concentration camps in peacetime, official hostage‑taking, policy‑induced famine, the wholesale expropriation of private property, the destruction of civil society, the dismantling of the independent judiciary, the eradication of Russia’s legal culture, and many other catastrophes. Pipes took them to heart : “I was driven to despondency,” he later wrote, “and had difficulty sleeping when studying the details of the Red Terror, which the existing historical literature either minimized or ignored.”35

  • 36 See Richard Pipes, “Témoignage destiné à la Cour constitutionnelle de Russie,” Commentaire (Pari (...)

28Over the following two and one‑half decades, Pipes gave lectures and interviews and published op‑ed pieces all over the world, especially in Russia and Poland. For example, he served as an expert witness before the Russian Constitutional Court on the nature of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in July 1992.36 (He retired from teaching at Harvard at the end of the 1995–1996 academic year.)

  • 37 Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
  • 38 Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: Random House, 2001).

29In his last big project, Pipes took up the study of the intellectual foundations and historical development of private property as an institution. He published a monograph, Property and Freedom (1999), which developed case studies of the development of private property rights—strong in England and feeble in Russia, and argued that private property rights are an indispensable bulwark of political liberty. The book, which was translated into nine languages,37 landed him worldwide speaking engagements and two book prizes : the William & Mary Law School’s Brigham‑Kanner Property Rights Prize (2009) and the prestigious Bruno Leoni Prize (2015). Next followed Pipes’s brief history of Communism in the Random House Modern Library Chronicles series, as the dialectical counterpart to his book on property : how the fabric of civil society is destroyed when private property is abolished.38 This book was translated into fourteen languages.

  • 39 Richard Pipes, The Degaev Affair (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
  • 40 Richard Pipes, Russian Conservatism and its Critics: A Study in Political Culture (New Haven, CT: Y (...)
  • 41 Richard Pipes, “Moskovskie tsentry: Politicheskii front v grazhdanskoi voine v Rossii [The Moscow c(...)
  • 42 Richard Pipes, “The trial of Vera Z,” Russian History, 37, 1 (2010): 1–82; idem, “Vklad Teodora Ruz (...)
  • 43 Richard Pipes, “Russia’s Itinerant Painters,” Russian History, 38, 3 (2011): 315–427; idem, “Polish (...)
  • 44 Richard Pipes, Sergei Semenovich Uvarov: Zhizneopisanie [Sergei Semenovich Uvarov: biography] (M.: (...)

30Over the next fourteen years, Pipes published his memoirs, as well as a dozen more scholarly books and articles on all sorts of topics. The main inspirations seem to have been, on the one hand, subjects he had started to investigate in the past, and therefore on which he had some research materials available, and, on the other hand, whatever struck his fancy. Among his later works were an investigation of the life of a Russian revolutionary terrorist who ended up teaching mathematics at the University of South Dakota,39 a survey of Russian conservative thought,40 secret anti‑Bolshevik organizations in Moscow during the Civil War,41 a narrative of the trial in 1878 of a Russian female terrorist, the contributions of Theodore Roosevelt to the 1905 peace negotiation between Japanese and Russian diplomats,42 an account of late‑nineteenth‑century Russian realist painters, an investigation of Polish Sovietology before the Cold War, an article on Iurii Samarin as a pro‑Russification official in Latvia, a historiographical essay on Mongol influence on Russia’s historical development,43 a short biography on the framer of the policy of “Official Nationality,” an analysis of Mme. De Staël’s visit to Russia in the early 1800s, a brief article on the emergence of the Gulag under Lenin, and a biography of Gorbachev advisor Alexander Yakovlev.44

  • 45 As quoted from Daly, ed., Pillars of the Profession, 326.

31Why did he write so much ? When I asked him several years ago about his motivation, he answered simply “it is all I know how to do” or, as he wrote to Raeff in 1996, “I simply get bored unless I spend at least 4–5 hours a day doing research and/or writing.”45

  • 46 V.O. Kliuchevskii, Skazaniia inostrantsev o Moskovskom gosudarstve [Tales of foreigners about the M (...)
  • 47 Richard Pipes to the author, July 15, 2015.

32Pipes started, but did not complete, work on two final projects : a translation of Vasilii Kliuchevskii’s book on European traveler accounts to Muscovy46 and a study of Pavel Miliukov’s evolution, who “from an ardent supporter of intervention in the Civil War […] became an admirer of Stalin and the Stalin‑Hitler pact.”47

  • 48 Jennifer Mnookin, “Unexpectedly High Enrollment: Three Core Classes Hold Lotteries,” Harvard Crimso (...)
  • 49 Marilee L. Chang, “Core Courses Dominate Top 10,” Harvard Crimson (February 13, 1985), HUG(FP)98.85 (...)

33Richard Pipes had a huge impact on thousands of undergraduate students, hundreds of master’s degree students, and dozens of doctoral students at Harvard University for over forty years. He was a popular and effective lecturer in large survey courses on such topics as Russian intellectual history, the national minorities in Imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union, Imperial Russian history, and the Russian Revolution. Even before Gorbachev became General Secretary of the USSR, which heightened interest in the Soviet Union, Pipes’s Russian Revolution course in spring 1985 enrolled over 300 students. Since the history department was unable to find enough section leaders, Pipes proposed to make attendance in discussion section optional.48 That same semester, Pipes’s “Introduction to Russian Civilization” also attracted 244 students. Consequently, “For the first time in recent memory, a single professor, Baird Professor of History Richard Pipes, managed to land two spots in the top fifteen” biggest courses at Harvard.49

  • 50 Comment by Rocketman1959, to Matt Schudel, “Richard Pipes, historian who helped shape Reagan‑era So (...)
  • 51 Chauncey L. Walker, Harvard Class of 1960, to the author, July 20, 2018.

34Pipes often manifested exceptional kindness and care toward his students and potential students. One young man on a tour of colleges around 1976 rang up Pipes and later recalled that he “was gracious enough to talk with me at some length about his book Russia Under the Old Regime.”50 Another student, who wrote a successful exam after having got off to a rocky start in one of Pipes’s courses, received from him “a personal, handwritten note” of congratulations on his blue book. It made an impression, he recalled, of “one of the most thoughtful and gracious things to happen to me at the hands of a professor during my four years at Harvard.”51

  • 52 Richard Pipes to the author, August 28, 1999.

35In regard to his doctoral candidates, Pipes was no hand holder. He did not spend a lot of time engaging in intellectual conversation or walking his advisees through all the steps of researching and writing their dissertations or preparing to go on the job market. Nevertheless, in his seminars, he emphasized meticulousness in research and the craft of writing. He also gave consistent advice. Master the requisite languages. Read everything. Get deeply into primary sources and let what you find in them guide your research. Try to write a little bit every day. He quoted “Balzac’s response to a question how he managed to write so many books : ‘If you write one page a day,’ he said, ‘you have a book a year ; two pages mean two books.’”52

  • 53 I am grateful to Marina Mogilner for stimulating conversation about this topic and for suggesting t (...)

36Pipes advocated no specific “methodology,” which he would have considered a social scientific conceit.53 For Pipes, history was a humanistic endeavor. One needed to seek to understand the language, culture, and history of a people through a creative intellectual process, not at all unlike the work of an artist. Indeed, history for him was an art and not science. Concepts could be borrowed from other disciplines, but just as likely from philosophy as from sociology and from Aristotle as from Weber.

37Pipes’s five dozen PhD students wrote dissertations on intellectual, diplomatic, imperial, national minority, institutional, social, cultural, political, and even military and economic history. None of the thirteen women he trained recalled him treating them any differently than his male students. Pipes genuinely felt affection for nearly all of his PhD students, though he was typically at his warmest in correspondence with them.

  • 54 Edward L. Keenan and Richard Pipes “To Our Readers,” Kritika, 20, 1 (Winter 1984): 1.

38His single most important contribution to the training of his graduate students was his establishment and sponsorship of Kritika, as noted above, a journal specializing in reviews of Soviet books of historical scholarship and edited by his graduate students. Kritika ceased publication in 1984 because the number of graduate students training in Russian history at Harvard had dwindled. Yet Kritika’s legacy continued : in the scholarship of its former editors ; in the willingness of Western journals to review selected Soviet works, perhaps under the influence of the Kritika model, as Edward L. Keenan and Richard Pipes suggested in their farewell address “To Our Readers” ;54 and in the founding of Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History in 2000.

39In April 1967, when Pipes organized the abovementioned conference at the Russian Research Center to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he was recognized by his peers as a leader in his field. Among the participants were such luminaries as Isaiah Berlin and Leonard Schapiro from the UK, Marc Ferro from France, Dietrich Geyer from Germany, and Shlomo Avineri from Israel.

  • 55 The talk was recorded and published as Richard Paips, “Nasledie russkoi revoliutsii [The legacy of (...)
  • 56 Edith Frankel to the author, May 13, 2015.
  • 57 Donald J. Raleigh to the author, September 27, 2015.

40Twenty years later, an intellectual rift had opened within the profession. Attendees at the conference on the Russian Revolution at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in January 1988 were especially livid over Pipes’s claim “that without the Russian Revolution there would have been no Nazi Germany and no Holocaust,” because Hitler took inspiration from the Bolsheviks’ “development of an unprecedented system of repression involving concentration camps in peace time and broadly applied state terror,” a “quasi‑religious cult of an infallible leader,” and the emergence of a “one‑party state,” and because Hitler was able to come to power on “a wave of anti‑communist sentiment.”55 One of the conference organizers, Edith Frankel, recalled that “chaos reigned for a few minutes until the chairman brought things under control” and that Pipes’s old friend, the editor of Problems of Communism, Abe Brumberg, stood up and dramatically renounced his friendship with Pipes,56 to “prolonged, stormy applause.”57

  • 58 As quoted from Pipes, Vixi, 56.

41It is hard to imagine a scholar with a more pronounced sense of mission than Richard Pipes. He and his immediate family were spared almost certain annihilation at the hands of the Nazis. As a consequence, he felt a moral obligation to devote his life to a higher cause, and that cause was a life of scholarship, specifically “to spread a moral message, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences.”58 The fact of having been snatched out of the jaws of death inspired in him a sense that any complaints would be virtually a form of blasphemy. This attitude seems to have imparted to him a serenity even in the face of great uncertainty, for example, when he spent seven long years in various adjunct positions at Harvard before finally landing an associate professorship with tenure in 1958. Throughout those years, anxiety about the future seems not to have greatly troubled him. Perhaps in the same way, widespread disapproval of him and his intellectual positions in the field of Russian studies did not strongly affect him.

42In remarks at his retirement dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club in May 1996, Pipes shared reflections on his career in teaching. “Recently,” he recalled,

  • 59 Richard Pipes, “Remarks at My Dinner on May 3, 1996,” PP. 

an undergraduate asked me what it is that I will miss the most about retirement, and I said, without hesitation, “being with young people.” I found that teaching was a marvelous antidote to presumption and error and on at least two occasions questions posed by students—for I often taught my forthcoming books as courses—made me fundamentally rearrange the structure of my books. History is immensely important and should not be reduced to a mere cultural ornament, as has happened to the classics. It helps us establish our roots and in public life it is an indispensable guide. A historian should not be an antiquarian : he should not be afraid of passing judgment where moral issues are at stake, as they often are. If the opportunity presents itself, he should not hesitate to gain some exposure to public life, to see how decisions—how history—is made. And perhaps most importantly, bear in mind that history is not a science (even though it uses scientific methods) but a branch of the humanities that deals with human affairs and therefore is closer to literature and the arts than it is to the natural sciences.59

43His was a life almost entirely devoted to scholarship as both a high calling and a valuable contribution to public affairs and the life of the mind.

44Pipes’s death unleashed a torrent of appreciations and recognition. His overarching and compelling interpretation of Russian history—articulated in wide‑ranging publications dealing with questions of political, intellectual, and cultural history—reached a vast readership in many countries in writings translated into over a dozen languages. They also exerted such influence in the policy realm that many admirers credit Pipes with contributing to the demise of Soviet communism. His culturally‑based framework for holistically understanding Russian history permitted him to discern trends in Russia’s evolution and to articulate predictive interpretations of that evolution. The most important were his recognition that the constitutional and cultural promotion of the linguistic and territorial attributes of national minorities of the USSR was likely to undermine the country’s political integrity, that political conservatism had not been irrevocably eradicated from Russia by the revolutionary Bolshevik state, and that it was reasonable to expect that applying pressure to the Soviet leadership might prompt it to pursue political reform. Pipes’s overall interpretation of Russian historical development, as well as his scholarly meticulousness, probably account for why so many Russian historians and intellectuals viewed him as the most important Western historian of Russia and why so many Western scholars respected him as a historian even when they disagreed with his political ideas.

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Notes

1 I am grateful to Jane Burbank, Daniel Pipes and Alla Zeide for helpful comments on the manuscript of this article.

2 See Jonathan Daly, “The Pleiade: Five Scholars Who Founded Russian Historical Studies in America,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 18, 4 (Fall 2017): 785–826.

3 Richard Pipes, “The Russian Military Colonies, 1810–1831,” The Journal of Modern History, 22, 3 (September 3, 1950): 205–219.

4 As quoted from Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non‑Belonger (New Haven, CT, – London: Yale University Press, 2003), 62.

5 For a complete bibliography of Pipes’s scholarly works, see Jonathan Daly, ed., Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff (Leiden, The Netherlands, – Boston: Brill, 2019), 366–386.

6 For a fuller bibliography of Pipes’s works (albeit only through 1992), see “Papers of Richard Pipes, 1941–1992 (inclusive),” finding aid, “Bibliography of Publications,” HUGFP 98.xx, Harvard University Archives [hereafter: HA].

7 As quoted from Richard Pipes, “Muslims of Soviet Central Asia: Trends and Prospects,” Middle East Journal, 9, nos. 2–3 (Spring‑Summer 1955): 147–172, 295–308 [here: 307].

8 As quoted from “Amerikanskii uchenyi Ridchar [sic] Paips v Alma‑Ate [The American scholar Richard Pipes in Alma‑Ata],” Kazakhstanskaia pravda, no. 105/9034 (May 5, 1957): 4.

9 All quotations from Unfinished article on trip to USSR, “Russians on Russia,” 1962, HUG(FP)98.45, box 2, 15 pp. , Papers of Richard Pipes, HA.

10 Theodore Shabad, “U.S. Scholar Tells Russians about their Past,” New York Times (April 6, 1962), 10.

11 As quoted from “Mirnoe sosushchestvovanie ne oznachaet oslableniia ideologicheskoi bor´by [Peaceful coexistence does not mean weakening of the ideological struggle],” Kommunist, no. 6 (June 1962): 60–68.

12 Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

13 G. Zhuikov and V. Shishkin, “Ukhishchreniia fal’sifikatora: Po povodu knigi amerikanskogo professora Richarda Paipsa [Tricks of the falsifier: In regard to a book by American Professor Richard Pipes],” Leningradskaia Pravda (April 12, 1964): 2.

14 R.A. Kazakevich and F.M. Suslova, “Richard Pipes protiv faktov istorii [Richard Pipes against the facts of history],” Istoriia SSSR, no. 1 (1966): 190–213.

15 Iu.I. Igritskii to Richard Pipes, August 18, 1966, Richard Pipes, Personal Papers, 17 Berkeley St., Cambridge, MA [hereafter: PP].

16 R.A. Kazakevich and F.M. Suslova, Mister Paips fal´sifitsiruet istoriiu: O knige Paipsa “Sotsial‑demokratiia i rabochee dvizhenie v S.‑Peterburge, 1885–1897” [Mister Pipes falsifies history: About the book of Pipes “Social Democracy and the Saint‑Petersburg labor movement, 1885‑1897”] (L.: Lenizdat, 1966). According to Novye knigi SSSR (January 1966): 14, the book came out in 10,000 copies.

17 Richard Pipes to Leopold Haimson, May 26, 1959, Richard Pipes Collection, Accession number 17397, box 2, HA.

18 Richard Pipes to Nicholas Riasanovsky, 1968, Richard Pipes Collection, Accession number 17397, box 3, HA.

19 “Captain Pyotr Zayonchkovsky,” in Jochen Hellbeck, ed., Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), 378–398 [here: 380].

20 Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); idem, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

21 Richard Pipes, ed., P.B. Struve: Collected Works in Fifteen Volumes (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1970); idem, ed., Bibliography of the Published Writings of Peter Berngardovich Struve (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1980).

22 Richard Pipes, “Russia’s Mission, America’s Destiny,” Encounter, 35, 4 (October 1970): 3–11.

23 Testimony before Subcommittee on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), 18–50.

24 The testimony was excerpted in Richard Pipes, “An Inside View: Why Russia Wants a World in Turmoil,” Seattle Post‑Intelligencer (April 19, 1970): 6–7.

25 See Papers of Richard Pipes, 1941–1992 (inclusive), Lecture outlines and related material, 1950–1987 (6 containers), HUGFP 98.45, HA.

26 As quoted from Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), xxi.

27 As quoted in Willard C. Matthias, America’s Strategic Blunders: Intelligence Analysis and National Security Policy, 1936–1991 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 309.

28 See Richard Pipes, “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War,” Commentary, 34, 1 (July 1977): 21–34.

29 As quoted from Richard Pipes, “Prospects for East‑West Relations,” Survey, 22, 3/4 (Summer‑Autumn 1976): 119.

30 The declassified NSDD‑75 is available here: https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd‑75.pdf.

31 “Reflections on the Soviet Crisis: An Interview with White House Kremlinologist Richard Pipes,” Time (March 1, 1982): 16–17 [here: 16].

32 Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 280.

33 Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); idem, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

34 Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

35 As quoted from Pipes, Vixi, 223.

36 See Richard Pipes, “Témoignage destiné à la Cour constitutionnelle de Russie,” Commentaire (Paris), 61 (Spring) : 127–131.

37 Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

38 Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: Random House, 2001).

39 Richard Pipes, The Degaev Affair (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

40 Richard Pipes, Russian Conservatism and its Critics: A Study in Political Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

41 Richard Pipes, “Moskovskie tsentry: Politicheskii front v grazhdanskoi voine v Rossii [The Moscow centers: the political front in the civil war in Russia],” Voprosy Istorii, no. 2 (2009): 31–67. Pipes always wrote his manuscripts in English, even when they were later published in foreign languages.

42 Richard Pipes, “The trial of Vera Z,” Russian History, 37, 1 (2010): 1–82; idem, “Vklad Teodora Ruzvelta v zakliuchenie Portsmutskogo mirnogo dogovora 1905 g. [Theodore Roosevelt’s contribution to the conclusion of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty of 1905],” Amerikanskii Ezhegodnik, 2010 (M.: IVIRAN, 2010), 103–121.

43 Richard Pipes, “Russia’s Itinerant Painters,” Russian History, 38, 3 (2011): 315–427; idem, “Polish Sovietology in the Lead‑up to the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 13. 2 (Spring 2011): 175–193; idem, “Iurii Samarin’s Baltic Escapade,” Journal of Baltic Studies, 42, 3 (September 2011): 315–327; idem, “Vliianie Mongolov na Rus’: Za i protiv [Mongol influence on Russia ’: For and against],” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, no. 79 (5/2011): 234–256.

44 Richard Pipes, Sergei Semenovich Uvarov: Zhizneopisanie [Sergei Semenovich Uvarov: biography] (M.: Posev, 2013); idem, “Germaine de Stael Discovers Russia,” in Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda i rossiiskaia provintsiia [Patriotic war of 1812 and the Russian province] (Maloiaroslavets: Voenno‑Istoricheskii Muzei 1812 goda, 2013), 169–180; idem, “Lenin’s Gulag,” International Journal of Political Science and Development 2, 6 (June 2014): 140–146; idem, Alexander Yakovlev: The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015).

45 As quoted from Daly, ed., Pillars of the Profession, 326.

46 V.O. Kliuchevskii, Skazaniia inostrantsev o Moskovskom gosudarstve [Tales of foreigners about the Muscovite state] (Petrograd: Pervaia gos. tip., 1918).

47 Richard Pipes to the author, July 15, 2015.

48 Jennifer Mnookin, “Unexpectedly High Enrollment: Three Core Classes Hold Lotteries,” Harvard Crimson (February 4, 1985), HUG(FP)98.85, Box 3, folder July‑Dec. 1985, Papers of Richard Pipes, HA.

49 Marilee L. Chang, “Core Courses Dominate Top 10,” Harvard Crimson (February 13, 1985), HUG(FP)98.85, Box 3, folder July‑Dec. 1984, Papers of Richard Pipes, HA.

50 Comment by Rocketman1959, to Matt Schudel, “Richard Pipes, historian who helped shape Reagan‑era Soviet policy, dies at 94,” The Washington Post (May 19, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/richard‑pipes‑historian‑who‑helped‑shape‑reagan‑era‑soviet‑policy‑dies‑at‑94/2018/05/19/0dc2d5c4‑5b78‑11e8‑8836‑a4a123c359ab_story.html?utm_term=.5646dfc7e358

51 Chauncey L. Walker, Harvard Class of 1960, to the author, July 20, 2018.

52 Richard Pipes to the author, August 28, 1999.

53 I am grateful to Marina Mogilner for stimulating conversation about this topic and for suggesting that I develop it further in a separate article.

54 Edward L. Keenan and Richard Pipes “To Our Readers,” Kritika, 20, 1 (Winter 1984): 1.

55 The talk was recorded and published as Richard Paips, “Nasledie russkoi revoliutsii [The legacy of the Russian revolution],” Dvadtsat’ dva, 62 (October‑December 1988): 124–133 [quotations: 129].

56 Edith Frankel to the author, May 13, 2015.

57 Donald J. Raleigh to the author, September 27, 2015.

58 As quoted from Pipes, Vixi, 56.

59 Richard Pipes, “Remarks at My Dinner on May 3, 1996,” PP. 

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References

Bibliographical reference

Jonathan Daly, A Scholar with a Sense of MissionCahiers du monde russe, 59/4 | 2018, 553-566.

Electronic reference

Jonathan Daly, A Scholar with a Sense of MissionCahiers du monde russe [Online], 59/4 | 2018, Online since 01 October 2018, connection on 18 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/10566; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.10566

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About the author

Jonathan Daly

University of Illinois at Chicago, daly@uic.edu

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The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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