Richard Pipes
Encyclopedia
Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union. In 1976 he headed Team B
Team B
Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970s to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. Team B, approved by then Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush, was composed of "outside experts" who...

, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

 who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership.

Background

Richard Pipes was born in Cieszyn
Cieszyn
Cieszyn is a border-town and the seat of Cieszyn County, Silesian Voivodeship, southern Poland. It has 36,109 inhabitants . Cieszyn lies on the Olza River, a tributary of the Oder river, opposite Český Těšín....

, Poland to an assimilated Jewish family (whose name had originally been spelled "Piepes"). His father was a businessman. 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. The Pipes family fled occupied Poland in October 1939 and arrived in the United States in July 1940, after seven months passing through Italy. Pipes became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943 while serving in the United States Army Air Corps
United States Army Air Corps
The United States Army Air Corps was a forerunner of the United States Air Force. Renamed from the Air Service on 2 July 1926, it was part of the United States Army and the predecessor of the United States Army Air Forces , established in 1941...

. He was educated at Muskingum College
Muskingum College
Muskingum University is a private four-year comprehensive college with a strong liberal arts tradition located in New Concord, Ohio, approximately sixty miles east of the state capital of Columbus. Founded in 1837, Muskingum University is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church , although since the...

, Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 and Harvard. He married Irene Eugenia Roth in 1946, and had two children with her. His son Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum and its Campus Watch project, and editor of its Middle East Quarterly journal...

 is a scholar of Middle Eastern affairs.

Career

Pipes taught at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. He was the director of Harvard's Russian Research Center from 1968 to 1973 and is now Baird Professor Emeritus
Emeritus
Emeritus is a post-positive adjective that is used to designate a retired professor, bishop, or other professional or as a title. The female equivalent emerita is also sometimes used.-History:...

 of History
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

 at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. In 1962 he delivered a series of lectures on Russian intellectual history at Leningrad 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
Henry M. Jackson
Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson was a U.S. Congressman and Senator from the state of Washington from 1941 until his death...

. In 1981 and 1982 he served as a member of the National Security Council
United States National Security Council
The White House National Security Council in the United States is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national security advisors and Cabinet officials and is part of the Executive Office of the...

, holding the post of Director of East European and Soviet Affairs under President Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....

. Pipes was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger
Committee on the Present Danger
The Committee on the Present Danger is an American foreign policy interest group. Its current stated single goal is "to stiffen American resolve to confront the challenge presented by terrorism and the ideologies that drive it" through "education and advocacy"...

 from 1977 until 1992 and belongs to the Council of Foreign Relations. In the 1970s, Pipes was a leading critic of détente
Détente
Détente is the easing of strained relations, especially in a political situation. The term is often used in reference to the general easing of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s, a thawing at a period roughly in the middle of the Cold War...

, which he described as "inspired by intellectual indolence and based on ignorance of one's antagonist and therefore inherently inept".

Team B

Pipes was head of the 1976 Team B
Team B
Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970s to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. Team B, approved by then Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush, was composed of "outside experts" who...

, 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
Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats...

 exercise. Team B was created as an antagonist force to a group of CIA intelligence officials, known as Team A. It argued that the National Intelligence Estimate
National Intelligence Estimate
National Intelligence Estimates are United States federal government documents that are the authoritative assessment of the Director of National Intelligence on intelligence related to a particular national security issue...

 on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated both Soviet military strategy and ambition and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions.

Team B has faced withering criticism. Fred Kaplan writes that Team B "turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point." Pipes's group insisted that the Soviet Union, as of 1976, maintained "a large and expanding Gross National Product," 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".

Pipes called Team B's evidence "soft." Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several new weapons, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that did not depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable by existing technology. The information Team B produced was later proven incorrect.

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". In 1986, Pipes maintained that, on the whole, Team B contributed to creating more realistic defense estimates.

Although Pipes maintains that history has vindicated Team B, his critics are unconvinced. According to Anne Cahn
Anne Hessing Cahn
Anne Hessing Cahn is political author, who holds a doctorate in political science from MIT. She is notable for her criticism of the CIA among other US agencies and leaders, particularly Team B and other aspects of the last days of the Cold War....

 of the Arms Control Disarmament Agency, the assertions of Pipes and his team were all "fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, 'This is a laser beam weapon,' when in fact it was nothing of the sort... And if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."

Writings on Russian history

Pipes has written many books on Russian history
History of Russia
The history of Russia begins with that of the Eastern Slavs and the Finno-Ugric peoples. The state of Garðaríki , which was centered in Novgorod and included the entire areas inhabited by Ilmen Slavs, Veps and Votes, was established by the Varangian chieftain Rurik in 862...

, including Russia under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990) and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and has been a frequent and prominent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history
History of the Soviet Union
The history of the Soviet Union has roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, emerged as the main political force in the capital of the former Russian Empire, though they had to fight a long and brutal civil war against the Mensheviks, or Whites...

 and foreign affairs
Foreign relations of the Soviet Union
At its founding, the Soviet Union was considered a pariah by most governments because of its communism, and as such was denied diplomatic recognition by most states...

. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

 and The Times Literary Supplement". At Harvard, he has taught large courses on Imperial Russia as well as the Russian Revolution and guided over 80 graduate students to their PhD's.

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
Sonderweg
Sonderweg is a controversial theory in German historiography that considers the German-speaking lands, or the country Germany, to have followed a unique course from aristocracy into democracy, distinct from other European countries...

 thesis. In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every state in Europe in that it had no concept of private property
Private property
Private property is the right of persons and firms to obtain, own, control, employ, dispose of, and bequeath land, capital, and other forms of property. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which refers to assets owned by a state, community or government rather than by...

, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke
Grand Duke
The title grand duke is used in Western Europe and particularly in Germanic countries for provincial sovereigns. Grand duke is of a protocolary rank below a king but higher than a sovereign duke. Grand duke is also the usual and established translation of grand prince in languages which do not...

/Tsar
Tsar
Tsar is a title used to designate certain European Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism...

. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia possibly under Mongol influence ensured that Russia would be an autocratic
Autocracy
An autocracy is a form of government in which one person is the supreme power within the state. It is derived from the Greek : and , and may be translated as "one who rules by himself". It is distinct from oligarchy and democracy...

 state with values fundamentally dissimilar from those of Western civilization
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...

. Pipes has argued that this "patrimonialism" of Imperial Russia started to break down when Russian leaders attempted to modernize in the 19th century without seeking however 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 a communist hijacking in 1917. Pipes has strongly criticized the values of the radical intelligentsia of late Imperial Russia for what he sees as their fanaticism and inability to accept reality. The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

 has denounced Pipes' work as "the Polish version of Russian history". Pipes, in turn, has accused Solzhenitsyn of being an anti-Semitic Russian ultra-nationalist, who seeks to blame the ills of Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

 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". 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." According to Pipes, this argument offended Solzhenitsyn who described Pipes as a "pseudo scholar."

Pipes has stressed that the Soviet Union was an expansionist
Expansionism
In general, expansionism consists of expansionist policies of governments and states. While some have linked the term to promoting economic growth , more commonly expansionism refers to the doctrine of a state expanding its territorial base usually, though not necessarily, by means of military...

, totalitarian
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...

 state
Sovereign state
A sovereign state, or simply, state, is a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither...

 bent on world conquest. He is also notable for the thesis that, contrary to many traditional histories of the USSR at the time, the "October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

" was, rather than a popular general uprising, a coup foisted upon the majority of the Russian population (and national minorities) by a tiny segment of the population driven by a select group of intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...

s who subsequently established a one-party dictatorship which was intolerant and repressive from the start, rather than having deviated from an initially benign course. In Pipes's view, the Russian Revolution of November 1917
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

 was a total disaster, as it allowed the small section of the fanatical intelligentsia to carry out policies that were completely unrealistic.

Pipes is a leading advocate of the totalitarian school that sees Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 and the Soviet Union as being fundamentally similar regimes pursuing similar policies that, in fact, collaborated in a few essential respects. Citing the work of such historians as James Gregor, Henry Ashby Turner
Henry Ashby Turner
Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. was an American historian of Germany who was a professor at Yale University for over forty years...

, Renzo De Felice
Renzo De Felice
Renzo De Felice was an Italian historian, who specialized in the Fascist era.-Biography:He was born in Rieti and studied under Federico Chabod and Delio Cantimori at the University of Naples. During his time as student, De Felice was a member of the Italian Communist Party...

, Karl Dietrich Bracher
Karl Dietrich Bracher
Karl Dietrich Bracher is a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the Classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950...

, Ernst Nolte
Ernst Nolte
Ernst Nolte is a German historian and philosopher. Nolte’s major interest is the comparative studies of Fascism and Communism. He is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 to 1991. He was previously a Professor at the University of Marburg...

 and David Schoenbaum
David Schoenbaum
David Schoenbaum is an American social scientist and historian.He was teaching as a professor of History at the University of Iowa until 2008. Schoenbaum received his BA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison...

 together with the work of Hermann Rauschning
Hermann Rauschning
Hermann Rauschning was a GermanConservative Revolutionary who briefly joined the Nazis before breaking with them. In 1934 he renounced Nazi party membership and defected to the United States where he denounced Nazism...

, Pipes, in a chapter in his book Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime, argued that there is no such thing as generic fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

, and that the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy
Italian Fascism
Italian Fascism also known as Fascism with a capital "F" refers to the original fascist ideology in Italy. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian...

 were all totalitarian regimes united by their antipathy to democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...

.

Richard Pipes, in a supposedly "off-the-record" interview, 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
Hans-Dietrich Genscher
Hans-Dietrich Genscher is a German politician of the liberal Free Democratic Party . He served as Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1974 to 1982 and, after a two-week pause, from 1982 to 1992, making him Germany's longest serving Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor...

 of West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....

 was susceptible to pressure from the Soviets. It was learned independently that Pipes was the official who spoke to Reuters. This potentially jeopardized Pipes's job. The White House and the "incensed" State Department issued statements repudiating Pipes's statements. But with President Reagan's backing, Pipes stayed on two years, after which he returned to Harvard because his leave of absence had expired.

In 1992, Pipes served as an expert witness in the Russian Constitutional Court's trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Controversy

The writings of Richard Pipes have provoked controversy in the scholarly community, for example in the Russian Review.

Criticism of Pipes's interpretation of the events of 1917 has come mostly from the "revisionist" Soviet historians, who, under the influence of the French "Annales" school, since the 1970s have tended 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 them directing them. Amongst members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian-American historian. She teaches Soviet History at the University of Chicago.-Biography:Sheila Fitzpatrick attended the University of Melbourne and received her DPhil from St...

, claim that Pipes has focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez
Peter Kenez
Peter Kenez is a historian specializing in Russian history and Eastern Europe. He also teaches courses on Soviet cinema and an interdisciplinary course on the Holocaust with literature professor Murray Baumgarten...

 argued that Pipes has approached Soviet History as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the "defendant"'s criminal intent 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".

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." Other critics have written that Pipes writes at length about what Pipes describes as Lenin's "unspoken" assumptions and conclusions, while neglecting what Lenin has actually said. Alexander Rabinowitch
Alexander Rabinowitch
Alexander Rabinowitch is an American historian, professor emeritus of Indiana University. Rabinowitch received his B.A. at Knox College, 1956, M.A. at University of Chicago, 1961 and Ph.D...

 writes that, whenever a document can serve Pipes' longstanding crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes will comment on it at length; if the document allows for Lenin being seen in a less negative light, Pipes passes over it without comment.

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" to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror
State terrorism
State terrorism may refer to acts of terrorism conducted by a state against a foreign state or people. It can also refer to acts of violence by a state against its own people.-Definition:...

 and acting as simpletons and /or Communist dupes and 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 has been praised in English-speaking press for his talent for synthesis and clarity of style. The Newsweek reviewer of Pipes's Russian Revolution called it a "brilliantly focused portrait." The Oxford scholar, Ronald Hingley, wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "No volume known to me even begins to cater so adequately to those who want to discover what really happened to Russia." In the Washington Post Book World this book was praised as "Monumental and detailed... by one of America's great historians." The book has been translated into several languages, including Russian (two editions).

Honors

Pipes has an extensive list of honors, including: Honorary Consul
Consul
Consul was the highest elected office of the Roman Republic and an appointive office under the Empire. The title was also used in other city states and also revived in modern states, notably in the First French Republic...

 of the Republic of Georgia, Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Learning
Polish Academy of Learning
The Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences or Polish Academy of Learning , headquartered in Kraków, is one of two institutions in contemporary Poland having the nature of an academy of sciences....

 (PAU), Commander's Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland, Honorary DHL at Adelphi College, Honorary LLD at Muskingum College
Muskingum College
Muskingum University is a private four-year comprehensive college with a strong liberal arts tradition located in New Concord, Ohio, approximately sixty miles east of the state capital of Columbus. Founded in 1837, Muskingum University is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church , although since the...

, Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Silesia
University of Silesia
The University of Silesia in Katowice is an autonomous state university in Silesia Province, Poland.The University of Silesia should not be confused with a similarly named university in Opava, Czech Republic ....

, 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
Alfred Nobel
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer. He is the inventor of dynamite. Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of cannon and other armaments...

 Peace Institute, Walter Channing Cabot Fellow of Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is an American interdisciplinary research body in Stanford, California focusing on the social sciences and humanities . Fellows are elected in a closed process, to spend a period of residence at the Center, released from other duties...

, Guggenheim Fellow (twice), Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies
American Council of Learned Societies
The American Council of Learned Societies , founded in 1919, is a private nonprofit federation of seventy scholarly organizations.ACLS is best known as a funder of humanities research through fellowships and grants awards. ACLS Fellowships are designed to permit scholars holding the Ph.D...

 and recipient of the George Louis Beer
George Louis Beer
George Louis Beer was an American historian.Born in Staten Island, New York, he achieved success in the tobacco business. He studied at Columbia University and lectured on European History there from 1893 to 1897. After retiring from business, he wrote three books on the British-American...

 Prize of the American Historical Association
American Historical Association
The American Historical Association is the oldest and largest society of historians and professors of history in the United States. Founded in 1884, the association promotes historical studies, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials...

. 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 Medal
National Humanities Medal
The National Humanities Medal honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.The award, given by the...

s and in 2009 he was awarded both the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a non-profit educational organization in the United States, established as a result of an Act of Congress in 1993 with the purpose to commemorate "the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust"...

  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.

He is a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a non-profit educational organization in the United States, established as a result of an Act of Congress in 1993 with the purpose to commemorate "the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust"...

.

Works

  • The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (1954)
  • The Russian Intelligentsia (1961)
  • Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 (1963)
  • Struve, Liberal on the Left (1970)
  • Russia Under the Old Regime (1974)
  • Soviet Strategy in Europe (1976)
  • Struve, Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944 (1980)
  • U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente: a Tragedy of Errors (1981)
  • Survival is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (1984)
  • Russia Observed: Collected Essays on Russian and Soviet History (1989)
  • The Russian Revolution (1990)
  • Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime: 1919-1924 (1993)
  • Communism, the Vanished Specter (1994)
  • A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (1995)
  • The Three "Whys" of the Russian Revolution (1995)
  • The Communist System, in: Alexander Dallin
    Alexander Dallin
    Professor Alexander Dallin served as Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, in the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Stanford University...

    /Gail W. Lapidus (eds.) The Soviet System. From Crisis to Collapse, 2nd. revised edition, Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford 1995 ISBN 0-8133-1876-9
  • The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996) - Editor
  • Property and Freedom (1999)
  • Communism: A History (2001)
  • Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (2003)
  • The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia (2003)
  • Russian Conservatism and Its Critics (2006)
  • The Trial of Vera Z. (2010)
  • Scattered Thoughts (2010)

Further reading

  • Bogle, Lori Lyn "Pipes, Richard" pages 922-923 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing edited by Kelly Boyd, Volume 2, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishing, 1999.
  • Kenez, Peter "The Prosecution of Soviet History: A Critique of Richard Pipes' The Russian Revolution" pages 345-351 from Russian Review, Volume 50, 1991.
  • Malia, Martin Edward "The Hunt for the True October" pages 21–28 from Commentary, Volume 92, 1991.
  • Poe, Marshall, "The Dissident", Azure (Spring 2008).
  • Somin, Ilya "Riddles, Mysteries, and Enigmas: Unanswered Questions of Communism's Collapse" pages 84–88 from Policy Review, Volume 70, 1994.
  • Stent, Angela "Review of U.S-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente" pages 91–92 from Russian Review, Volume 41, 1982.
  • Szeftel, Marc "Two Negative Apraisals of Russian Pre-Revolutionary Development" pages 74–87 from Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 1980.
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