Richard Pipes was born in Cieszyn, 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 culture. The Pipes family fled occupied Poland in October 1939 and arrived in the United States in July 1940, after seven months passing through Fascist Italy.* 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 an academic and scholar of Middle East affairs.

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. 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. 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 détente, 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, composed of civilian experts and retired military officers and agreed to by then CIA director George Bush at the urging of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) as a competitive analysis exercise. Team B was created as an antagonist force to a group of CIA intelligence officials, known as Team A, and argued that the National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated Soviet military ambition and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions.

One CIA employee called it "a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view." Pipes himself 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 claimed by some critics to be incorrect. According to Dr. Anne Cahn in 2004 (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977—1980) "I would say that all of it was fantasy... 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 himself emphasizes the other aspects of Team B's conclusions: "We dealt with one problem only: What is the Soviet strategy for nuclear weapons? 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. It's now demonstrated totally, completely, that it was", he said, using the example of documents in Polish archives that show the Soviets planning to use nuclear weapons in the event of war. For example, in a Commentary article, he argued that the A team was subject to 'mirror-imaging' (a common problem in intelligence research and analysis) [thinking that the other side necessarily thought the same as your side]; in particular he argued that Team B showed Soviet development of high-yield, accurate MIRV'ed warheads for ICBMs was inconsistent with city-hostage principles of MAD, implying Soviet first-strike plans. In 1986, Pipes said that history shows that Team B, overall, contributed to creating more realistic estimates.

Other members of Team B included Daniel O. Graham and Thomas Wolfe. Its advisors included future Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Nitze.

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".

Pipes is famous 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 there was no concept of private property in Muscovy, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia ensured that Russia would always be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar from the values 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 left Russia uniquely open to a communist hijacking in 1917. Pipes has strongly criticized the values of the radical intelligentsia of later Imperial Russia for what he sees as their unreasoning fanaticism and socialism, and inability to accept reality. The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has denounced Pipes' work as "the Polish version of Russian history". Pipes, in his turn, has accused Solzhenitsyn of being an anti-Semitic Russian ultra-nationalist, who in Pipes' opinion 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".

Pipes has argued that the Soviet Union was an expansionist, totalitarian state bent on world conquest. He is 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, 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 what he regards as the small section of the "fanatical" intelligentsia to carry out policies that were completely unrealistic from the beginning.

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 Détente 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.*; 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 was an expert witness in the Russian Constitutional Court's trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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 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 tend to interpret political movements as responding to pressures from below rather them directing them. Amongst members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick, assert that Pipes has focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez considered that Pipes has approached Soviet History as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the "defendant"'s criminal intent to the exclusion of anything else. 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".

Pipes has reached controversial interpretations, e.g. his attempt to prove that Lenin was an anti-Semite, or his attempt at downplaying the White movement leaders' actual anti-semitism . In the words of historian Alexander Rabinowitch, whenever a document can serve his longstanding crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes will comment on it at length; if the document allows for Lenin being seem in a less negative light, Pipes passes over it without comment.

Pipes, in his turn - specially in the wake of triumphalist cold warrior mood that followed the demise of the USSR - has charged the revisionists in general with skewing their research - by means mainly of statistics "as unreadable as they were irrelevant for the understanding of the subject" to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror 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" . Such views were considered by Peter Novick as "a counterrevolutionary posture" triggered by the turmoil of the 1960s that was maintained "long after it had become more than a little ridiculous" and that they described the historical profession in ways "most found unrecognizable". Edward Acton argued that Pipes in 1993 did not pay sufficient respect to the work of the later historians, and that his depiction of the Soviet Union was not sufficiently nuanced.". In the words of a recent reviewer, Pipes' history is marred from beginning to end with his own ideological obsessions, to the extent that one cannot find anything new in his appraisals of recent archival finds, in that they serve him only to repeat - by quoting documents taken from their specific context and historical ambience - his usual anticommunist diatribes. A non-Leftist historian as Orlando Figes - while agreeing generally on Pipes' low estimation of the October Revolution and of Lenin, both as a political and human figure - considered that Pipes' use of documentation is intended to nurture "Cold War fantasy, or perhaps the figment of a Russophobic mind".

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.

Pipes has been praised in English-speaking press for what it considers his talent for synthesis and clarity of style. The Newsweek reviewer of Pipes's Russian Revolution called it a "brilliantly focused portrait." 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).

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 and Szczecin University, 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.He received one of the 2007 National Humanities Medals and in 2009 he was awarded both the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Brigham-Kanner Prize by the William & Mary Law School.In 2010, Pipes was awarded the degree of doctor honoris causa by the University of Warsaw and the medal "Bene Merito" by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

• 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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