BOOKNOTES:

Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (C-SPAN, 12/07/03, 8 & 11pm)

A distinguished historian, Harvard professor, and White House adviser looks
back on his own life and on the tumultuous twentieth century

Sixteen-year-old Richard Pipes escaped from Nazi-occupied Warsaw with his family in October 1939. Their flight took them to the United States by way of Italy, and Pipes went on to earn a college degree, join the U.S. Air Corps, serve as professor of Russian history at Harvard for nearly forty years, and become adviser to President Reagan on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. In this engrossing book, the eminent historian remembers the events of his own remarkable life as well as the unfolding of some of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary political events.

From his youthful memories of bombs falling on Warsaw to his recollections of the conflicts inside the Reagan administration over American policies toward the USSR, Pipes offers penetrating observations as well as fascinating portraits of such cultural and political figures as Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Reagan, and Alexander Haig. Perhaps most interesting of all, Pipes depicts his evolution as a historian and his understanding of how history is witnessed and how it is recorded.

“Mr. Pipes has had a long and distinguished life and career, and he has made distinctive and important contributions to both scholarship and public policy. He has much of interest to tell, particularly concerning his often contentious involvement with American policy toward the Soviet Union.”--Mark Raeff, Columbia University

It is not possible to fully understand the 20th Century without reading Mr. Pipes's brilliant history of the Russian Revolution. Like all of the very greatest conservative, his analysis of the situation (in his case the Soviet Union) was so prescient and so contrary to that of the mainstream intellectuals that, even though it was contemporary, folks are forced to dismiss it as hindsight. This is the very highest compliment that the Left pays the Right.

MORE:
-BUY IT: Vixi by Richard Pipes (Amazon.com)
-BOOK SITE: Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (Yale University Press)
-PROFILE: The hard-liner: Harvard historian Richard Pipes shaped the Reagan administration's aggressive approach to the Soviet Union. His support for confrontation over containment prefigured the Bush foreign policy of today. (Sam Tanenhaus, 11/2/2003, Boston Globe)

In his historical writings, Pipes contends that the 1917 revolution, though the central event of its time, simply replaced one elite with another. The Kremlin nomenklatura, like the royal despots before them, appropriated the nation to themselves. "You look at a picture of [Lev] Kamenev at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918," Pipes says of an early Bolshevik hero. "He's slender. Two years later he's fat, obese. It is a Russian story." The great mass of people, whether subjects or comrades, understood that order and continuity flowed only from above. The country had no enduring secular institutions, no legitimate rule of law, no private property. Pipes's views were confirmed in visits to Russia and China, where he discovered, as he writes in "Vixi," that "culture is more important than ideology: that ideas accommodate to the cultural soil on which they fall."

Initially, Pipes's work was received respectfully. "I was not considered to be a hardliner or a cold warrior," he says. But then, in the 1960s, "things began to split" in the ranks of Sovietologists, owing in large part to the Vietnam War. "Guilt-ridden" establishment figures like George F. Kennan drifted leftward "and became more tolerant of the Soviet Union." Meanwhile, a younger academic cohort, some of its members tutored in the antiwar movement, insisted that capitalism and communism were not really so different and that the two enemy superpowers might be headed toward "convergence."

Pipes, as a staunch anticommunist, came under attack and responded in kind. "He was courageous to write at the time when the dominant school was revisionism," says Walter Laqueur, a historian of modern Europe and a recent biographer of Stalin. "He thought that the Soviet experiment was a disaster, and of course this was vindicated."

Stephen Sestanovich, a Russian expert in the Clinton Administration who now teaches at Columbia, agrees. "Revisionist views don't look so good [today] in the sense that Soviet Communism collapsed in a miserable heap." Vladimir Putin himself, Sestanovich adds, "uses the word `totalitarian' even though American scholars spent a generation squirming at the word."

But if Pipes's politics alienated many in the academy, they won him an attentive audience in Washington, particularly among those convinced, as he was, that the USSR was at once a menacing regime and a vulnerable one. It should not be merely "deterred" or "contained" but defeated in a war of attrition that would pit America's flexible democracy against what Pipes deemed "a rigidly conservative regime that had more in common with the absolutism of a Nicholas I than with the utopian fantasies of 19th-century radicals." The United States should strike where the enemy was weakest -- Russia's decrepit economy, its flagging national morale, its submerged dissident culture.

MORE:
-ESSAY: Where Sovietologists Went Wrong RICHARD PIPES
-ESSAY: Private Property, Freedom, and the Rule of Law: Juxtapose the history of England with that of Russia. What emerges? The importance of private property. (Richard Pipes, Spring 2001, Hoover Digest)
-ESSAY: Life, Liberty, Property (Richard Pipes, March 1999, Commentary)
-PROFILE: A Hardliner's Life (Kenneth Silber, 11/20/2003, Tech Central Station)
-REVIEW: of Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (Mark Falcoff, FrontPage)

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 7, 2003 7:58 PM