Richard Pipes: What his 2 newest books say about him
Richard Pipes has had an extremely distinguished career both as a historian specializing in Russian history and culture and as a member of the Reagan administration. These books deal with both these aspects of his life, and one helps to illuminate the other. His views on Russian history, particularly as they related to the Soviet Union, attracted the attention of politicians such as Senator Henry Jackson, and he was invited to testify before Senate commissions and finally to accept a temporary position on the National Security Council. His memoirs offer an extremely interesting, if highly partial, glimpse into the people and personalities who affected American policy toward Russia during the Reagan era; but it is not with this aspect of his activity that I will be concerned here. It is primarily with his views on Russian history, which for a long period placed him in opposition to the ideas then prevailing among students of the subject. These views are amply illustrated in his volume on Russian conservatism; and his memoirs help to clarify the manner in which his particular interpretation of Russian history evolved and took its final shape.
Pipes provides a vivid picture of his childhood and personal life as a member of an assimilated Polish-Jewish family before and after arriving in the United States at the age of sixteen. As an adolescent, he led a very active intellectual existence. In a notebook entry written just before his family quit Poland, he depicts himself during the bombing of Warsaw by the Luftwaffe: "We slept fully dressed ... I slept alone on the sixth floor reading Nietzsche's Will to Power ... or writing notes for my essay on Giotto." He was interested in art, music, and philosophy, and although "in the late 1930s I heard muffled sounds of appalling events taking place in the Soviet Union ... I had no idea what these were and I was not terribly interested in finding out." Examining his later views, however, he now concedes that "coming from Poland, a country which had bordered Russia for a thousand years and lived under its occupation for over a century, I unconsciously shared Polish attitudes toward Russia"--attitudes that could only have been highly critical.
Such a background was quite different from the innocence that he encountered at a small college in Ohio, which he entered quite haphazardly after arriving in the United States. Word had gotten around that he read Nietzsche, and the vice president of the school told him to put Nietzsche aside because "I should not lose faith in mankind, people were basically good and life fair." It was no wonder that he found it impossible to persuade his American interlocutors, who were staunchly Republican and isolationist (how times have changed!), of the monstrosities of Nazism. Pipes's own experience had included not only the Luftwaffe, but also the endemic anti-Semitism of Polish culture; and although this had been relatively mild compared with what occurred under German occupation, it had nonetheless acquainted him with some darker aspects of reality. What he says about the attitude of Polish Jewry toward the German occupation, from which he and his family were luckily able to flee, also helps to illuminate some of his later views. ...
Read entire article at Joseph Frank in the course of reviewing Pipes's Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture and Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger; in the New Republic
Pipes provides a vivid picture of his childhood and personal life as a member of an assimilated Polish-Jewish family before and after arriving in the United States at the age of sixteen. As an adolescent, he led a very active intellectual existence. In a notebook entry written just before his family quit Poland, he depicts himself during the bombing of Warsaw by the Luftwaffe: "We slept fully dressed ... I slept alone on the sixth floor reading Nietzsche's Will to Power ... or writing notes for my essay on Giotto." He was interested in art, music, and philosophy, and although "in the late 1930s I heard muffled sounds of appalling events taking place in the Soviet Union ... I had no idea what these were and I was not terribly interested in finding out." Examining his later views, however, he now concedes that "coming from Poland, a country which had bordered Russia for a thousand years and lived under its occupation for over a century, I unconsciously shared Polish attitudes toward Russia"--attitudes that could only have been highly critical.
Such a background was quite different from the innocence that he encountered at a small college in Ohio, which he entered quite haphazardly after arriving in the United States. Word had gotten around that he read Nietzsche, and the vice president of the school told him to put Nietzsche aside because "I should not lose faith in mankind, people were basically good and life fair." It was no wonder that he found it impossible to persuade his American interlocutors, who were staunchly Republican and isolationist (how times have changed!), of the monstrosities of Nazism. Pipes's own experience had included not only the Luftwaffe, but also the endemic anti-Semitism of Polish culture; and although this had been relatively mild compared with what occurred under German occupation, it had nonetheless acquainted him with some darker aspects of reality. What he says about the attitude of Polish Jewry toward the German occupation, from which he and his family were luckily able to flee, also helps to illuminate some of his later views. ...