Richard Pipes

Richard Pipes, October 20, 2004 Richard Edgar Pipes (born July 11, 1923) is an 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.

Contents

1 Background 2 Career
o o

2.1 Team B 2.2 Writings on Russian history

3 Controversy 4 Honors 5 Works 6 Notes 7 Further reading

Background
Richard Pipes was born in Cieszyn, Poland to an assimilated Jewish family (whose name had originally been spelled "Piepes").[1] 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. [2] Pipes became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943 while serving in the United States Army Air Corps. He was educated at Muskingum College, Cornell University and Harvard. He married Irene Eugenia Roth in 1946, and had two children with her. His son Daniel Pipes is a scholar of Middle Eastern affairs.[3][4]

Career
Pipes taught at Harvard University 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 of History at Harvard University. 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. In 1981 and 1982 he served as a member of the National Security Council, holding the post of Director of East European and Soviet Affairs under President Ronald Reagan.[5] Pipes was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger from 1977 until 1992 and belongs to the Council of Foreign Relations. In the 1970s, Pipes was a leading critic of dtente, which he described as "inspired by intellectual indolence and based on ignorance of one's antagonist and therefore inherently inept".[6]

Team B
Further information: Team B Pipes was head of the 1976 Team B, 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 exercise.[5] 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 on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated both Soviet military strategy and ambition [7] 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."[8] Pipes's group insisted that the Soviet Union, as of 1976, maintained "a large and expanding Gross National Product,"[9] and argued that the CIA belief that economic chaos hindered the USSR's defenses was a ruse on the part of the USSR. Some members of Team B promoted a first-strike policy against the USSR. [10][11][12] One CIA employee called Team B "a kangaroo court".[13] Pipes called Team B's evidence "soft."[5] 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. [14] 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". [15] Pipes claims that Soviet development of high-yield MIRV'ed warheads for ICBMs demonstrates

Soviet first-strike plans.[13][not in citation given] In 1986, Pipes maintained that, on the whole, Team B contributed to creating more realistic defense estimates.[16] Although Pipes maintains that history has vindicated Team B, his critics are unconvinced. According to an official from 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."[17][18]

Writings on Russian history

Pipes has written many books on Russian history, 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 and foreign affairs. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times 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 thesis. In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every state in Europe in that it had no concept of private property, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia possibly under Mongol influence ensured that Russia would be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar from those of Western civilization. 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 has denounced Pipes' work as "the Polish version of Russian history". Pipes, in turn, has accused Solzhenitsyn of being an antiSemitic Russian ultra-nationalist, who seeks to blame the ills of Communism 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".[19] Pipes has stressed that the Soviet Union was an expansionist, totalitarian state 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" 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 intellectuals 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 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 totalitarianian school that sees Nazi Germany 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, Renzo De Felice, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Ernst Nolte and David Schoenbaum together with the work of Hermann Rauschning, Pipes, in a chapter in his book Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime, argued that there is no such thing as generic fascism, and that the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy were all totalitarian regimes united by their antipathy to democracy. 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 Dtente is dead." Pipes also stated in the interview that Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of West Germany 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.[20] But with President Reagan's backing,[citation needed] 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.[21][22][23][24][25][26] 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 1970 s 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.[27] Amongst members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick, claim that Pipes has focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez (Pipes's one-time graduate student at Harvard) 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. [28][29] Put into a nutshell, what revisionists and the Left strictu sensu argue is that Pipes seems intent on fighting yesterday's battles again and again, that his historical writing is concerned with perpetuating the unidimensional caricature of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" to the exclusion of everything else, in an attempt "to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm".[30][31] Some of Pipes' interpretations are particularly controversial. His writing on Lenin is notorious for portraying Lenin as "merely a psychopath to whom ideas barely mattered and whose only motivation is to dominate and to kill."[32] Other critics have noted that Pipes writes at length about what Pipes describes as Lenin's "unspoken" assumptions and conclusions, while

neglecting what Lenin has actually said.[33] Alexander Rabinowitch 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.[34] 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" [35] to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror and acting as simpletons and /or Communist dupes[36] 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".[37] In a review of a Pipes' New York Times piece on Dmitri Volkogonov's biography of Leon Trotsky, in which Pipes argued that "Trotsky frequently said and wrote that Stalin's regime had to be overthrown and Stalin himself assassinated", the leftist historian and activist David North, after arguing that Pipes' assertion on Trotsky was "a blatant and odious lie", taken from Stalinist slanders on Trotsky, wrote that Pipes was interested in fostering the Stalinist notion of a continuity between Lenin and Stalinism as long as that nurtured his own agenda: "to demonstrate that all the crimes committed by the Stalinist regime flowed necessarily and inexorably from the October Revolution itself". As long as that served his "own right-wing ideological obsessions", Pipes was ready to treat Stalinist falsifications as fact.[38] 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 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 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.[39] 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[40][41] and in 2009 he was awarded both the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation [42] and the Brigham-Kanner Prize by the William & Mary Law School.[43] In 2010, Pipes received the medal "Bene Merito" by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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 Dtente: 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) - 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)

Notes
1. 2. ^ Pipes, Richard. Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. 2006, page 14-5 ^ Romano, Sergio (2005). Memorie di un conservatore. TEA. p. 180. ISBN 88-3042128-6. *"Notes on Professor Richard Pipes". www.persiancarpetguide.com. http://www.persiancarpetguide.com/sw-asia/People/Bio938.htm. Retrieved January 28, 2006.

3. 4. 5.

^ Norton, Anne. Leo Strauss and the politics of American empire. 2005, page 93 ^ Steven M. Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey, Michelle Brown. Media representations of September 11. 2003, page 22 ^ a b c Press, Eyal (May 2004). "Neocon man: Daniel Pipes has made his name inveighing against an academy overrun by political extremists but he is nothing if not extreme in his own views.". The Nation. Archived from the original on 2007-11-13. http://web.archive.org/web/20071113071644/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1367/is_2 00405/ai_n6382769. Retrieved 2007-08-17. ^ Bogle, Lori Lyn "Pipes, Richard" page 922. ^ Betts, Richard K. and Mahnken, Thomas G. Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel. 2003, page 68. ^ Fred Kaplan, "Can the CIA Be Saved?" Slate (July 9, 2004). ^ Fareed Zakaria, "Exaggerating The Threats," Newsweek (16 June 2003). ^ The Power of Nightmares, Part 1 - Baby It's Cold Outside ^ "Anatomy of a Neo-Conservative White House". Canadian Dimension 39 (03): 46. May 1, 2005. ^ Stone, Devin (March 16, 2005). "Americans must be wary of war on terror". University Wire, Virginia Tech. ^ a b Tanenhaus, Sam (February 11, 2003). "The Hard Liner: Harvard historian Richard Pipes shaped the Reagan administration's aggressive approach to the Soviet Union.". Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/02/the_hard_liner.. Retrieved 2006-07-30. ^ "Anatomy of a Neo-Conservative White House". Canadian Dimension 39 (03): 46. May 1, 2005. ^ Tanenhaus, Sam (February 11, 2003). "The hard-liner". The Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/02/the_hard_liner/. ^ "Team B: The Reality Behind the Myth". Commentary Magazine. Archived from the original on 2006-06-24. http://web.archive.org/web/20060624015324/http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Summari es/V82I4P27-1.htm. Retrieved 2006-07-30. ^ Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right By Dominic Sandbrook 2001, page 99 ^ Common Sense Revisited By Stephen Paine 2005, page 23 ^ Thomas, D.M. Alexander Solzhenitsyn St. Martin's Press, New York, New York, United States of America, 1998 ISBN 0-312-18036-5 page 490. ^ Author Unknown (March 19, 1981). "U.S. Repudiates a Hard-Line Aide". New York Times: A8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Pipes#U.S._Repudiates_a_HardLine_Aide.2C_New_York_Times.2C_p._A8.3B_March_19.2C_1981. *Shribman, David (October 21, 1981). "Security Adviser Ousted for a Talk Hinting at War". New York Times: Section A; Page 1, Column 2. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

res=FB0812F7385D0C728EDDA90994D9484D81.; Author Unknown (November 2, 1981). "The Rogue General". Newsweek. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 1998. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. ^ Lenin: a biography. Robert Service 2000, page 6 ^ Lenin rediscovered: what is to be done? in context , Volume 2005. Lars T. Lih, Vladimir Ilich Lenin 2006. page 23-4 ^ Rabinowitch, "Richard Pipes' Lenin", The Russian Review, 57, january 1998, available at [3] ^ Pipes, apud Ronald I. Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921.London: Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0-415-12438-7, page 8. ^ cf. Vladmir Brovkin, [4] (Word file). ^ Pipes, "The evil of banality", New Republic, 12/18/2000, Vol. 223 Issue 25, p35; available at [5] ^ Cf. Humanities on Line , March 1996 ^ "Twelve FAS Faculty Members to Retire". Harvard Gazette Archives. http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1996/06.13/TwelveFASFacult.html. Retrieved 2006-0730. ^ "6 Academics Receive National Honors in Arts and Humanities" Chronicle of Higher Education Nov. 16, 2007 summary ^ David C. Engerman, Know your enemy. The rise and fall of America's Soviet experts, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.305. ^ Walter C. Clemens, Jr, Slavic Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 117-118 ^ Raymond L. Garthoff, Foreign Affairs, May 1995, pg. 197 ^ Rabinowitch, A. 'Richard Pipes's Lenin', Russian Review Vol. 57 (1998), No. 1, pp. 110-113 ^ [1] ^ http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762(199112)96%3A5%3C1581%3ATRR %3E2.0.CO%3B2-X ^ Sheila Fitzpatrick, Revisionism in Soviet History, History and Theory, Vol. 46, Issue 4, December 2007 ^ Peter Kenez, The Prosecution of Soviet History, Volume 2, Russian Review, vol. 54, April 1995 ^ The Prosecution of Soviet History: A Critique of Richard Pipes' The Russian Revolution The Russian Review, vol. 50, 1991, pp. 345-51 ^ Paul Flewers, review of Pipes' The Unknown Lenin, Revolutionary History, available at [2] ^ Alexander Rabinowitch, "Richard Pipes' Lenin", The Russian Review 57, January

40.

41. 42. 43.

^ "Humanities Medals Awarded by President Bush. Recipients honored for outstanding cultural contributions" ^ VOCMF Photo Gallery ^ NNEH News Archive

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 2128 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 8488 from Policy Review, Volume 70, 1994. Stent, Angela "Review of U.S-Soviet Relations in the Era of Dtente" pages 9192 from Russian Review, Volume 41, 1982. Szeftel, Marc "Two Negative Apraisals of Russian Pre-Revolutionary Development" pages 7487 from Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 1980.

[hide]v d eCentral Asian Studies at Harvard1 Graham T. Allison Ali S. Asani Richard Nelson Frye Richard Pipes James R. Russell Wheeler Thackston Calvert Watkins Michael Witzel

Richard Edgar Pipes

Photographie prise en 2004

Naissance Nationalit Profession(s)

11 juillet 1923 Cieszyn, Pologne tats-Unis Historien

Membre du Conseil de scurit nationale enre 1981 et 1982 Autres activits Membre du Committee on Present Danger de 1977 1992 Membre Conseil des relations trangres Famille pouse : Irne Eugenia Roth Enfants : 2 dont Daniel Pipes

Richard Edgar Pipes, n le 11 juillet 1923 Cieszyn en Pologne, est un historien amricain spcialiste de la Russie et de l'URSS. On l'a dit tre un intellectuel conservateur dans la mesure o dans ses livres il a toujours prsent le rgime sovitique comme totalitaire et qu'il a brivement t conseiller de Ronald Reagan pour l'Europe de l'Est, priode au cours de laquelle il a prch une ligne "dure" l'gard de l'URSS.

Sommaire

1 Biographie 2 Travaux 3 Notes et rfrences 4 Bibliographie

o o

4.1 Traduit en franais 4.2 Non traduits

5 Liens internes

Biographie
Le pre de Richard Pipes a t un homme d'affaires en Pologne. D'origine juive, la famille s'chappe en octobre 1939 aprs l'occupation de la Pologne et, aprs un passage en Italie fasciste, arrive aux tats-Unis en juillet 19401. Richard Pipes est naturalis amricain en 1943 alors qu'il sert dans l'United States Army Air Corps. Il fait ses tudes au Muskingum College, l'Universit Cornell et Harvard. Il se marie avec Irne Eugenia Roth en 1946, avec qui il a deux enfants. Son fils Daniel Pipes est un spcialiste du Moyen-Orient. Richard Pipes a enseign l'Universit Harvard de 1950 jusqu' sa retraite en 1996. Il a dirig de 1968 1973 le Russian Research Center de Harvard et a t senior consultant au Stanford Research Institute de 1973 1978. Durant les annes 1970, il a t un conseiller du snateur Henry M. Jackson, ainsi qu'un critique important de la politique de dtente. En 1981 et 1982, il est membre du Conseil de scurit nationale, dtenant le poste de Director of East European and Soviet Affairs sous le prsident Ronald Reagan. Il a t membre du groupe de lobbying Committee on Present Danger de 1977 jusqu' 1992 et du think tank Conseil des relations trangres.

Travaux
Dans Russia under the Old Regime (1974), Richard Pipes dresse un vaste tableau de l'histoire de la Russie et des contraintes particulires sur le temps long. Fondamentalement diffrente des pays europens, soumise des contraintes gographiques fortes, la Russie tait caractrise par la permanence dun systme patrimonial : ltat, quil soit tsariste ou sovitique, tait le propritaire du pays et de ses habitants. Le maintien durant la priode bolchevique dun rgime autocratique tait lexpression dun despotisme oriental , tandis que la formation de lURSS en 1922 tait un retour limprialisme multinational du XIXe sicle2. Dans son tude extrmement dtaille, sans quivalent ce jour, sur la Rvolution russe, Richard Pipes reprend les thses classiques de lcole totalitaire . Selon lui, le putsch dOctobre et la construction de lURSS ont t luvre dun seul homme, Lnine, anim dun inextinguible apptit de pouvoir 3. Daprs l'historien amricain, Lnine est lorigine du stalinisme et a servi de modle pour Mussolini et pour Hitler. Cette vision est reprise dans un ouvrage postrieur4 o, si lon en croit le compte rendu critique d'Alexander Rabinowitch, Richard Pipes poursuit avant tout sa croisade de longue date pour diaboliser Lnine 5. Critique pour le moins tonnante, car Lnine n'a absolument pas besoin d'tre diabolis, comme le prouve l'tude exhaustive des oeuvres de Lnine par Dominique Colas, dans Le lninisme (PUF, Quadrige, rdition 1998): Lnine n'a jamais cach son cynisme politique, ni son got pour la violence et la terreur comme instrument de domination. De fait, si le grand public plbiscite depuis longtemps l'oeuvre de Pipes 6, crite dans une langue limpide qui n'est pas sans rappeler celle de Raymond Aron, sans jamais verser dans

l'hystrie comme on le prtend trop souvent, les critiques, et surtout en France, o l'idologie communiste a marqu des gnrations d'historiens, ne manquent pas. De manire assez rvlatrice, une seule oeuvre de Pipes a t traduite en franais, La rvolution russe (PUF, 1990). Alors que les travaux de son opposant de l'cole rvisionniste, Moshe Lewin, ont presque tous t traduits. Les critiques qui suivent ne doivent surtout pas tre considres comme dfinitives et servir d'argument d'autorit pour dcrdibiliser Pipes, un historien remarquable de l'universit Harvard qui, il ne faut jamais l'oublier, a crit ses travaux dans un contexte de Guerre froide. Selon Jean-Paul Depretto, un historien trs marqu gauche, la synthse de Pipes sur la Rvolution russe finit par dformer le tableau des vnements, force d'ignorer dlibrment les travaux de l'histoire sociale7 . Ronald Grigor Suny regrette lattitude passionne de Richard Pipes : son antipathie violente pour Lnine empche Pipes de sengager dans un traitement pondr et nuanc du personnage mme quil voit comme central dans le rcit de 1917 8. Peter Kenez, pourtant lui aussi partisan de la thorie du totalitarisme, pointe lanticommunisme ardent de Richard Pipes, quil qualifie d homme extrmement conservateur : La haine de lauteur pour les rvolutionnaires est tellement grande quil cesse dtre un historien et devient la place un procureur des rvolutionnaires. 9 De fait, Pipes appartient une gnration d'historiens "engags" qui, comme Raymond Aron, ne se font aucune illusion sur le communisme et ses avatars.

Notes et rfrences
1. Notes on Professor Richard Pipes [archive]
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union : Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1964. Richard Pipes, La Rvolution russe, Paris, PUF, 1993, p. X. Richard Pipes (d.), The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archives , New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996. Alexander Rabinowitch, Richard Pipess Lenin , The Russian Review, vol. 57, janvier 1998, p. 110. Voir les citations de priodiques commela prestigieuse New York Review of Books, sur la 4e de couverture de Russia under the old regime: "une excellente introduction, minutieuse et vivante" social, n 196, 2001/3, p. 3-19. 8. 9. Ronald Grigor Suny, Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917 : Social History and its Critics , The Russian Review, vol. 53, avril 1994, p. 173. Peter Kenez, The Prosecution of Soviet History : A Critique of Richard Pipes The Russian Revolution , The Russian Review, vol. 50, 1991, p. 345-346.

7. Jean-Paul Depretto, Pour une histoire sociale de la dictature sovitique [archive], Le Mouvement

Bibliographie
Traduit en franais

La Rvolution russe, Paris, PUF, 1993, 866 p. (d. originale : New York, 1990).

Non traduits

The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 , Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1954. (d.), The Russian Intelligentsia, New York, 1961. Social Democracy and the St Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 , Cambridge, 1963. (d.), Revolutionary Russia, Londres, 1968. Struve, Liberal on the Left, Cambridge, 1970. Russia Under the Old Regime, New York, 1974. Soviet Strategy in Europe, 1976. Struve, Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944, 1980. U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Dtente : A Tragedy of Errors, Boulder, 1981. Survival is Not Enough : Soviet Realities and America's Future, New York, 1984. Russia Observed : Collected Essays on Russian and Soviet History, 1989. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime : 1919-1924, New York, 1993. Communism, the Vanished Specter, New York, 1994. A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, 1995. The Three Whys of the Russian Revolution, 1995. (d.), The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archives, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996. Property and Freedom, 1999. Communism : A History, 2001. Vixi : Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, Yale University Press, 2003, 320 p. The Degaev Affair : Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia, Yale University Press, 2003, 153 p. Russian Conservatism and Its Critics, 2006.

Liens internes

Sovitologie Noconservatisme Daniel Pipes