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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ikip (talk | contribs) at 20:06, 22 December 2005 (revert again, POV: "A prominent realist about the Soviet Union" and anon deleted references to Team B, to fit his own POV, see talk). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Richard Edgar Pipes (b. July 11, 1923) is a Polish American scholar who is a specialist in Russian history. Pipes was born in Cieszyn, Poland to a wealthy Jewish family. His father was a diplomat with the Polish foreign office. 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 culture. The Pipes family fled Poland in 1939 and arrived in the United States in 1940. Pipes became a U.S citizen in 1943. He was educated at Muskingum College and Cornell University. Pipes taught at Harvard University starting in 1950. He married Irene Eugenia Roth in 1946, and had two children with her. His son Daniel Pipes is a specialist in Middle East history and affairs and a former appointee to the U.S. Institute of Peace.

He has written many books, including The Russian Revolution (1995) and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and has been a frequent and prominent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history and foreign affairs. His writing also appears in the National Review, The New York Times and the Moscow Times. A leading Cold Warrior, Pipes has argued that the Soviet Union was an expansionist, totalitarian state bent on conquest. Pipes is famous for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th century Muscovy. He was also notable for his thesis that, contrary to many traditional histories of the USSR at the time, the "October Revolution" was, rather than a popular general uprising, practically a coup foisted upon the majority of the Russian population (and imperial national minorities) by a tiny segment of the population driven by a select group of intellectuals who subsequently established a dictatorship which was intolerant and repressive from the start, rather than having deviated from an initially benign course. This critical view of the Bolsheviks is a prime theme in his works.

Pipes was head of the 1970's Team B, created by conservative cold warriors determined to stop détente and the SALT process. Panel members were all hard-liners. The Team B reports became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Reagan. Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology. This information was later proven to be false. According to Dr. Anne Cahn (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-1980) "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."

Pipes is Baird Research Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University. From 1981-1982 he was the National Security Council adviser on Soviet and East European Affairs, under President Ronald Reagan. He was also an adviser to Washington senator Henry M. Jackson during the 1970s.

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 Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996)
• 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)

• American academics
• 1923 births
• American historians