The Russianist

The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior

Jonathan Daly

Stanford University Press, 

408 pp. $65.00

In 1985, I invited Richard Pipes to speak at Oberlin College. As chairman of the College Republican club, I hosted a variety of neoconservative and conservative thinkers, ranging from Carl Gershman, who headed a fledgling organization called the National Endowment for Democracy, to William Rusher, the publisher of the National Review. But my biggest, or at least most controversial, catch was Pipes.

Pipes was a professor of Russian history at Harvard and a former Reagan administration national security council adviser on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. At Oberlin, then as now a hotbed of political correctness, Pipes confronted a skeptical, if not hostile, audience that viewed Washington, not Moscow, as the true culprit for Cold War hostilities. After Pipes delivered his remarks, he was quickly challenged by an audience member who identified himself as a former arms-control official and who declared, “I’m appalled and astonished by your depiction of Soviet nuclear capabilities.” 

In his biography of Pipes, The Man Who Knew Russia, Jonathan Daly emphasizes that he was a lightning rod for many in the university, media and government. Paul Warnke, the former head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, once stated that Pipes was “just full of crap.” W. Averell Harriman, who was FDR’s ambassador to Moscow during World War II, dismissed him as “nothing but a damn fool.” 

Daly explains that the anathema on Pipes extended to his students, noting that when he was doing research in 1990 in Moscow, a young revisionist historian, upon learning that he was studying with Pipes, remarked, “I will forgive you.” Daly also recounts that another scholar, Vladimir Brovkin, was in part rejected for promotion in 1995 at Harvard because revisionist historians had successfully campaigned against him for taking a critical view of the Bolsheviks. The historian Peter Kenez told Daly that Brovkin’s “career was ruined because he was in the Pipes camp.” 

Pipes’s detractors reviled him as an anticommunist ogre—a dogmatic and arrogant academic who offered a hallucinatory, distorted portrait of Russia as a tyrannical backwater. And it wasn’t just American revisionists who objected to Pipes. Russian nationalists viewed him with disfavor as well. The novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in Foreign Affairs that reading Pipes on imperial Russia “affects me in much the same way as I imagine [Mstislav] Rostropovich would feel if he had to listen to a wolf playing the cello.”

An immensely productive scholar who wrote several dozen books and over 100 essays and reviews, Pipes had a knack for capturing attention with sweeping judgments that sounded like Jovian thunderbolts hurled from Olympus. He first achieved public notoriety in 1976, when he headed “Team B,” making a harshly critical assessment of the CIA’s analysis of Soviet nuclear doctrine. (To this day, the episode remains a subject of acute controversy in the intelligence community.) Pipes followed it up with an essay in Commentary magazine called “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight And Win A Nuclear War.” So controversial was Pipes that People magazine ran a multi-page spread about him in April 1977 headlined “A Harvard Professor Urges the U.S. to Keep Up Its Nuclear Dukes.”

Daly, who is a professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago and a former Pipes student, provides a ringside seat to Pipes’s serial battles. Drawing on interviews and original documents, Daly has produced a dispassionate and detailed work of intellectual history that takes a fresh look at the controversies surrounding Pipes, including his attacks on Henry Kissinger’s advocacy of warmer relations with the Kremlin. Daly makes a persuasive case for Pipes’s significance not only as a scholar, but also as a policymaker. 

Daly suggests that Pipes, the start of whose career coincided with the onset of the Cold War, when interest in communist doctrine and thought peaked, was an unconventional thinker who repeatedly provided pioneering analyses of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Pipes believed that Imperial Russia was a patrimonial state, one that prefigured the rise of communist totalitarianism in the early 20th century. His beliefs found their political expression in the Reagan administration’s rejection of détente, a rejection that Pipes believed would force the Soviet regime to choose between reform or collapse. As a younger generation of revisionist historians emerged in the 1970s to defend the Bolshevik revolution as a popular workers’ uprising and to downplay the Stalinist purges, Pipes never wavered in his conviction that from its inception the Soviet Union was an illegitimate and fragile regime based on violence and terror. After the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Pipes delighted in its demise, declaring that he had been right all along.

Pipes’s fascination with totalitarianism can be traced back to his childhood in Poland, where he was born in a Silesian province in 1923. In 1929, his Viennese-born father, Marek, the owner of a candy factory, moved the family from Krakow to Warsaw. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Marek arranged for the family to flee to Italy before emigrating to the United States, but many of his relatives perished in the Holocaust.

Richard applied to 100 colleges and universities and ended up attending Muskingum College in Concord, Ohio, where he became an enthusiastic contributor to the school newspaper, praising American democracy and analyzing international affairs. In 1943, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and was dispatched by the Army’s Specialized Training Program to Cornell University for a one-year program in Russian studies. The idea was that he would serve in the Soviet Union as an interpreter for American pilots refueling in Poltava and other Ukrainian cities, but Soviet leaders ended up refusing to cooperate with the Army program.

With the war’s end, Pipes entered graduate school at Harvard and married a vivacious fellow Polish refugee, Irene Roth, who was born in Warsaw in 1924. When their respective parents met, Irene later recalled, “it was like homecoming.” Pipes felt unwelcome in Harvard’s stuffy WASP milieu, but cherished his academic mentor, Mikhail Karpovich, a Russian émigré who had been active in Socialist-Revolutionary circles before gravitating toward the liberal Constitutional Democrats. 

Another academic figure who left a deep impression upon Pipes was the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, whom he met and befriended at Harvard in 1949. As a staunch opponent of totalitarian ideology and champion of liberal democracy, Berlin condemned the “scientific” historical writing practiced by E.H. Carr and others. Berlin believed, above all, that the study of history was a humanistic endeavor, a credo that Pipes sought to put into practice. According to Daly, “Pipes had avidly studied philosophy, literature, and social thought, and throughout his life he would continue to do so, but from this point, if not before, it had become clear to him that social scientific theory was no substitute for the painstaking acquisition of detailed historical knowledge.” His first book, The Formation of the Soviet Union, delved into the dozens of nationalities that Lenin and Stalin had tried to forge into a coherent polity. Pipes argued that the Bolsheviks, for all their bluster about national self-determination, had themselves constructed a new imperial entity out of the ashes of the old Russian Empire—albeit one that was even less conciliatory than its tsarist predecessor. In his conclusion Pipes implied that this multinational empire could collapse in the future.

Consistent with his penchant for upending conventional wisdom in Western scholarship, Pipes focused less on liberal currents in Russian history than on what he saw as the dominant influence that conservatism exercised during the Romanov dynasty. “In Pipes’ interpretation,” Daly writes, “Russian conservative political thought developed and advanced upon a succession of socio-institutional bases beginning in the late fifteenth century, by representatives, in turn, of the clergy, the gentry, the bureaucracy, and intellectuals.” Pipes drew a parallel between Edmund Burke’s denunciation of schemes to revise society—the famous “projectors”—with Russian conservative thinkers who scorned ideas about progress not merely as presumption but as a form of spiritual death. By the 19th century, the Slavophile movement was hailing autocracy as a good thing—a vital bulwark against Western encroachments.

Pipes’s insistence on a Russian special path in his finest book, Russia Under the Old Regime, not only antagonized Soviet historians, but also neo-Slavophiles such as Solzhenitsyn. In his famous June 1978 Harvard commencement speech, Solzhenitsyn decried individual autonomy and freedom of the press, prompting Pipes to liken him to the prerevolutionary arch-reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostev. A year later Solzhenitsyn denounced Pipes, declaring that Russia Under the Old Regime “allows only one possible conclusion to be drawn: that the Russian nation is anti-human in its essence, that it has been good for nothing throughout its thousand years of history, and that as far as any future is concerned it is obviously a hopeless case.”

Pipes’s animadversions about Russia and the Soviet Union had also attracted the attention of Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, a leading foe of the Nixon administration’s pursuit of détente. Jackson invited Pipes to testify before the Senate in March 1970 on a proposed strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union. Pipes denounced it. His testimony was featured in Newsweek, and “Pipes found himself in high demand as a speaker on Soviet affairs in the United States and around the world.” His thesis was that the Soviet Union would implode provided that the United States exerted sufficient pressure on it.

With Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, Pipes made the transition from historian to policymaker, joining the National Security Council. He was part of a vanguard of neoconservative hardliners, including Richard Perle and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who urged confrontation, not conciliation, with the Kremlin. Pipes’s most important contribution was to draft National Security Decision Directive 75. His governing idea was not to “coexist with the Soviet Union but to change the Soviet system.” 

Pipes believed that the correlation of forces, to use the old Soviet term, was in America’s favor. Reagan signed NSDD-75 on January 17, 1983. It seems difficult to dispute that the impetus that Pipes gave to reviving the Cold War with the Soviet Union had a salubrious effect, helping to heighten the internal contradictions of the Soviet system and leading to its ultimate collapse.

The revisionist historians who had sought to present the Soviet Union as a plausible alternative to Western capitalism were caught flatfooted by its self-liquidation. Pipes was feted in Russia itself for his lacerating studies of Bolshevism, including his tome, The Russian Revolution, which appeared in 1990. In 1994, the historian S. Frederick Starr wrote that “Not one of Pipes’ many critics has mustered all the revisionist studies and monographs to form a convincing rebuttal to his synthesis, with its statist emphasis. Until then, all the anger is premature, bearing as little resemblance to a serious rejoinder as a menu does to the meal that is supposed to follow.”

Pipes’s insights and provocations remain timely. Now that Vladimir Putin has reestablished an autocratic Russia and embarked upon foreign expansion, the emphasis that Pipes placed upon the weakness of civil society and the concomitant sway of the state seems hard to quarrel with. In chronicling his life and work, Daly has performed a valuable service.