Richard Pipes

119
Richard Pipes bigraphy, stories - Historians

Richard Pipes : biography

July 11, 1923 –

Richard Edgar Pipes (born July 11, 1923) is a Polish-American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union. 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.

Controversy

The writings of Richard Pipes have provoked controversy in the scholarly community, for example in The Russian Review.David C. Engerman, Know your enemy. The rise and fall of America’s Soviet experts, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.305.Raymond L. Garthoff, Foreign Affairs, May 1995, pg. 197http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762(199112)96%3A5%3C1581%3ATRR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X

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.Sheila Fitzpatrick, Revisionism in Soviet History, History and Theory, Vol. 46, Issue 4, December 2007 Amongst members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick claim that Pipes has focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez (a one-time PhD student of Pipes’) argued that Pipes has approached Soviet History as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the criminal intent of the "defendant" to the exclusion of anything else. Pipes’ critics argue that his historical writing is concerned with perpetuating the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" in an attempt "to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm".Paul Flewers, review of Pipes’ The Unknown Lenin, Revolutionary History, available at Alexander Rabinowitch, "Richard Pipes’ Lenin", The Russian Review 57, January 1998.

Some of Pipes’ interpretations are particularly controversial. His writing on Lenin portrays Lenin as "merely a psychopath to whom ideas barely mattered and whose only motivation is to dominate and to kill", as Robert Service put it.Lenin: a biography. Robert Service 2000, page 6 Other critics have written that Pipes writes at length about what Pipes describes as Lenin’s "unspoken" assumptions and conclusions, while neglecting what Lenin actually said.Lenin rediscovered: what is to be done? in context, Volume 2005. Lars T. Lih, Vladimir Ilʹich Lenin 2006. page 23-4 Alexander Rabinowitch writes that whenever a document can serve Pipes’ long-standing crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes will comment on it at length; if the document allows Lenin to be seen in a less negative light, Pipes passes over it without comment.Rabinowitch, "Richard Pipes’ Lenin", The Russian Review, 57, january 1998, available at

Pipes, in his turn – following the demise of the USSR – has 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"Pipes, apud Ronald I. Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921.London: Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0-415-12438-7, page 8. to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror and acting as simpletons and /or Communist dupes.cf. Vladmir Brovkin, (Word file). He has 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".Pipes, "The evil of banality", New Republic, 12/18/2000, Vol. 223 Issue 25, p35; available at

Honors

Pipes has an extensive list of honors, including: Honorary Consul of the Republic of Georgia, Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU), Commander’s Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland, Honorary DHL at Adelphi College, Honorary LLD at Muskingum College, Doctor Honoris Causa from the University 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 Norwegian Nobel Peace Institute, Walter Channing Cabot Fellow of Harvard University, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Guggenheim Fellow (twice), Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and recipient of the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He serves on a number of editorial boards including that of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. He received one of the 2007 National Humanities Medals"6 Academics Receive National Honors in Arts and Humanities" Chronicle of Higher Education Nov. 16, 2007 "Humanities Medals Awarded by President Bush. Recipients honored for outstanding cultural contributions" and in 2009 he was awarded both the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Brigham-Kanner Prize by the William & Mary Law School. In 2010, Pipes received the medal "Bene Merito" by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since 2010 he belongs to the Russian Valdai Discussion Club.