'In the End I Was Right': How a Harvard Historian Helped Reagan Topple Soviet Communism

In 1949, during Stalin's reign as dictator of the Soviet Union, obituaries in the Communist-controlled newspapers stopped including the ages of those who died, "presumably for fear of revealing a declining life expectancy," Jonathan Daly writes in The Man Who Knew Russia, his new biography of Richard Pipes.

Such crude censorship failed to conceal the grim reality of Bolshevik rule from those millions who were unfortunate enough to be trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Yet many European and North American government officials and intellectuals were duped, naïvely overestimating Soviet strength in the same way that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times now touts the life expectancy of children born in Beijing.

Fortunately for America and for those under the jackboot of Soviet Communism, there were some who saw past the propaganda to the cruel truth. Among them was Pipes, a historian of Russia who also served the U.S. government during the Ford and Reagan administrations.

After Pipes first visited the Soviet Union, in 1957, he wrote a colleague: "All the buildings on the streets were in a state of disrepair, the gateways crumbling, the façades patched up, the courtyards invisible for the mud which covered them. … Everything made the impression of being decayed or dead, even the people walking on the streets, somberly and paying no attention to each other. … I found it difficult to suppress the tears as I viewed about me the effects of 40 years of Soviet rule which had exacted such suffering from the population."

Pipes later recalled it: "in Leningrad everyone looked gloomy and did not look at each other but seemed deep in their own thoughts. Because one could be executed under Stalin merely for an association with someone deemed guilty of counterrevolution, the only reasonable defense was to have nothing to do with other people."

Daly quotes Pipes in 1996 summing up his own contribution: "Whereas the profession as a whole regarded the Soviet Union as an essentially popular and stable regime, I saw it as an unpopular and weak regime, which we ought to press very hard. That was very much a minority view, but I think that in the end I was right. Sound, stable popular regimes don't collapse suddenly, as the Soviet Union did."

Pipes's tombstone sums him up as "Historian, Architect of Cold War Victory." The biography by Daly, a former doctoral student of Pipes at Harvard who now is a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, proceeds in roughly chronological fashion, spending more time on the "Historian" part than the "Architect of Cold War Victory" part; two of the 10 chapters are focused on Pipes's government service.

For the "Historian" part, one guiding question is why Pipes was able to see and tell the truth when so many others did not. "How can one explain Pipes's willingness to go against the grain of mainstream thinking?" Daly asks, correctly identifying a puzzle with potential to make this a story that might appeal beyond a limited audience of Russian history buffs. Daly quotes from Pipes's memoir: "I suppose not everyone has the same low level of tolerance for coercion and lies which lay at the heart of communist regimes: those who did not were prone to view my hostility as an obsession."

Daly is cautious in drawing conclusions about motivation, but he provides ample, intriguing evidence for readers on several fronts.

"Pipes's religious grounding enabled him to maintain a firm foundation despite dramatically changing academic fashions and theoretical fads and in the face of intense hostility," Daly writes. That sounds about right; it reminded me of an anecdote, not in the book, told by Jay Nordlinger, who edited Pipes at National Review: "He cited a book by Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (on ancient Near Eastern religion and society). He had the g in 'gods' down—in the lower case—but, as it was in the title, I, of course, as editor, put it up. He insisted on its being put back down. 'I am a Jew,' he said, 'and there is one God, and I will not have the plural word capitalized.'"

Daly's biography begins by pointing out that "American professors seldom live as richly as Richard Pipes," with his house near Harvard Square, a villa on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, and a place on Silver Lake in Chesham, New Hampshire. Pipes, in his 1999 book Property and Freedom, writes, "In the Jewish legal tradition, wealth honestly acquired was considered a blessing: the rabbis forbade people to give away their wealth, or to engage in excessive alms-giving, so as not to become themselves a burden to the community. In contrast to the Christian Gospels, the Hebrew Bible extols neither poverty nor the poor."

Pipes had an office in Widener Library next door to his Harvard history department colleague, Bernard Bailyn. (A footnote in the book reports that in the late 1980s, Bailyn "gently chided" Ned Keenan, then chairman of the department, "for sporting a polo shirt in the History Department library one summer.") Bailyn's great scholarly contribution was to debunk the idea that the American Revolution was economically, rather than ideologically, motivated. Pipes's great scholarly contribution was to debunk the idea that the Russian Revolution was economically motivated rather than being a coup by Bolshevik thugs. While they both made strong evidence-based historical cases, they both also brought to the source material, consciously or unconsciously, a baseline strong-skepticism-verging-on-disbelief of the idea that anyone would find the vastness of someone else's wealth upsetting enough to die in a revolution for.

Pipes had what he called a commitment "to spread a moral message, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences." A historian, he said, "should not be afraid of passing judgment where moral issues are at stake as they often are." Pipes himself fled the Nazi advance on Poland as a teenager with his immediate family, to Italy and then America, in 1939 and 1940. So it was, one senses, of more than narrowly academic interest when Pipes wrote about Stalin, who "on a single day … sent death sentences for 5,000 people who had never been tried after which he went to his private Kremlin movie theater to enjoy two films, one of them a comedy called Merry Fellows."

In some ways a more interesting question than why Pipes got it right is why so many others got it wrong. Daly quotes Pipes in 1995 warning that left-wing intellectuals used the press "to spread a mood of self-doubt: to project their own discontent on the population at large." The full contribution, in Commentary, concludes with this gem: "The intellectuals' Weltschmerz, fortunately, reflects only their own personal Welt and their own personal Schmerz." I had to look up the meaning, but is there a more succinct summation, accurate analysis, or dismissive diagnosis?

This book's treatment of Pipes's government service is less satisfying than the coverage of his academic career. Pipes led a "Team B" analysis in 1976 devoted to Soviet motivation and eventually summarized in a 1977 Commentary article, "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War." He also served on the National Security Council staff in 1981 and '82, drafting National Security Decision Directive 75 on "U.S. Relations with the USSR." Pipes's contribution was real and constructive. The lunch he organized for President Reagan on May 11, 1982, with critics of the Soviet regime who had managed somehow to escape, was one of the iconic moments in the Cold War. A Baptist pastor who had been sent to the gulag for eight years as punishment for his Christian activity, Georgi Vins, arrived at the event and said he wouldn't sit down if alcohol was to be served; it was taken away.

Vins opened the lunch with a prayer. According to a Washington Post account, Vins gave Reagan "a copy of the tiny copies of the Bible that prisoners were able to hide from their guards in Soviet labor camps." Reagan, in meeting them, expressed optimism about the eventual victory of their cause: "Communists boast that they will crush democratic freedoms. Well, let us tell them: you can imprison your people, you can close their schools, you can take their books, harass their priests and smash their unions. You can never destroy the love of God and freedom in their hearts—they will triumph over you." Daly doesn't quite do the event justice, or explain why Pipes would deserve credit as "architect" of the Cold War victory rather than supporting actor. Nor does he situate Pipes among the other Reagan advisers—Sven Kraemer, Edward Teller, Solomon Buchsbaum, Robert Strausz-Hupé—who were immigrants to America who had close calls with the Nazis.

Pipes was recruited to government service by Dorothy Fosdick, an aide to Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Democrat of Washington. Fosdick saw him speak at the 1969 annual meeting of the American Historical Association. It all seems as long ago and far away as the Soviet era—a hawkish Scoop Jackson-style Democrat with influence in the Senate, the American Historical Association annual meeting as a fertile recruiting ground for practical policy advice. Or even that a Harvard history professor—or any Harvard professor—would be worthy of a biography. Will anyone be writing biographies of today's Harvard historians, of people like Maya Jasanoff, Sidney Chalhoub, Jill Lepore? Or making documentary movies about them? A film about Pipes was in Polish: Najważniejsza jest wolność. In English that means, "The Most Important Thing Is Freedom."

The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior
by Jonathan Daly
Stanford University Press, 440 pp., $65

Ira Stoll is a senior writer at the Washington Free Beacon.

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