Richard Edgar Pipes has confirmed his participation on the XV April conference
Richard Edgar Pipes (born July 11, 1923) is a Polish-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.
Pipes taught at Harvard University from 1958 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 State 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 H W 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. It argued that the National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated both Soviet military strategy and ambition and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions.
According to Vadim Zagladin, the First Deputy Secretary of the Central Committee's International Department, Moscow pursued a double strategy: "Rejecting nuclear war and struggling to prevent it, we, nevertheless, proceeded from the possibility of winning victory in it" (Izvestiia, no. 179, June 27, 1988, p. 3). This statement indirectly confirmed the findings of Team B.
As may be expected, Team B faced criticism. The international relations journalist Fred Kaplan writes that Team B "turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point." Pipes's group insisted that the Soviet Union, as of 1976, maintained "a large and expanding Gross National Product," and argued that the CIA belief that economic chaos hindered the USSR's defenses was a ruse on the part of the USSR. One CIA employee called Team B "a kangaroo court”
Pipes 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.
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". In 1986, Pipes maintained that Team B contributed to creating more realistic defense estimates.
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 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 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 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 revolution 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 anti-Semitic 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". Pipes explained Solzhenitsyn's view of Soviet communism: "[Solzhenitsyn] said it was because Marxism was a Western idea imported into Russia. Whereas my argument is that it has deep roots in Russian history." According to Pipes, this argument offended Solzhenitsyn, who described Pipes as a "pseudo-scholar."
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 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 totalitarian 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, David Schoenbaum, and Hermann Rauschning, Pipes 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, in a chapter in his book Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime.
In what was meant to be an "off-the-record" interview, Pipes 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.[17] However, with President Reagan's backing. Pipes stayed on for two more years, after which he returned to Harvard because his leave of absence had expired.
In 1992, Pipes served as an expert witness in the Constitutional Court of Russia's trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Works
· "The Russian Military Colonies, 1810-1831," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 22, No. 3, September 1950
· The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (1954)Rev. ed. 1964
· (editor)The Russian Intelligentsia (1961)
· Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 (1963)
· Struve, Liberal on the Left (1970)
· Europe since 1815 (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 Détente: 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 Communist System, in: Alexander Dallin/Gail W. Lapidus (eds.) The Soviet System. From Crisis to Collapse, 2nd. revised edition, Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford 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)
· Russia's Itinerant Painters (2011)
· Uvarov: A Life (2013) (In Russian)