After the end of the First World War, the famous American historian and expert on the history of the USSR and Russia Richard Pipes was born into a Jewish-Polish family. With the advent of the Nazis, Pipes with great difficulty fled from occupied Poland and, bypassing many countries, including the "black-shirt" Italy Mussolini, finally came to the United States, Ohio. Richard Pipes studied there in college and began to serve in American aviation, which resulted in the acquisition of citizenship of this country. In the war he received good training as a translator from Russian.
World
After demobilization, Richard Pipes married and graduated from Harvard University, where he studied with the famous philosopher, specialist in historical European thought, Crane Brinton, who proved himself to be the best in modern science and raised many public and political figures known throughout the country.
Pipes was to defend his doctoral dissertation in 1950, then work at his native Harvard University. Already in 1963, Richard Pipes became a professor, in 1968 - the director of the Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, and in 1973 he began working as chief scientific consultant at the Institute for Russian Studies at the University of Steenford.
Team B
Team B was very different from Team A, for the most part in that it most often had to serve as a counterbalance to the drafting of state opinions. Team A consisted of specialists from a purely single department — CIA analysts, while the team that Pipes joined in 1976 was staffed by civilian experts and retired military personnel.
Nevertheless, both teams were created by the head of the CIA to assess the threat to the States from the USSR. The director of the CIA at the time was George W. Bush. Since 1981, Richard Pipes has dealt with many issues of US policy on the doctrine of Ronald Reagan in the National Security Council. The Department of State, therefore, for several decades remained the main workplace of a political writer. It was at the suggestion of Pipes and his colleagues that the first bricks were taken out of the foundation on which the USSR state stood, by applying specially developed political technologies.
Now
Before and after the destruction of the USSR, an American political scientist, among many, was often in our country, helping to destroy it from the inside since about 1958. Now he is a member of the American Peace Committee in Chechnya, where, he said, he helps resolve conflicts. In parallel, he continues to explore the history of Russia, and many Russians indignantly read what Richard Pipes writes about.
His huge articles are periodically published in Russia. In addition, actively collaborating with the well-known opposition and, let's say, harmful for the country activities - the School of Political Studies in Moscow - Richard Pipes constantly flies to the country to give his lectures. Participates in a variety of discussion clubs, gives interviews to the Russian and foreign press on the results (most often deplorable for us) of his activities.
The history of Russia through the eyes of Pipes
Richard Pipes, whose books have been published in great numbers and almost all of them are devoted, to one degree or another, to the history of Russia, sees the development of our country in a completely different way; he actively dislikes that this path was significantly different from the development paths of other countries. He draws parallels in the study of the phenomenon of the October Revolution with the distant past of Russia, tracing the origins of communist ideas there. In his opinion, medieval Muscovy just did not want to have an idea of private property, which radically distinguished it from the rest of Europe. There was a single owner - the Grand Duke.
This alone is already ridiculous to everyone, at least somewhat familiar with the history of the Russian state. Indeed, the prince could dispose of the treasury, but not the property of his subjects. Pipes incorrectly and too narrowly interprets the word "patrimony." Accusing our princes and kings of legal nihilism, he does not take into account that the country was developing safely, growing in lands, defeating enemies. The main institutes of feudalism built in Europe, for which Pipes so advocates, did not prevent the shedding of such rivers of blood, which our Ivan the Terrible never dreamed of.
"Chronic lawlessness"
Strange as it may seem, the book in which Richard Pipes ("Russia under the Old Regime") examines these phenomena has become the subject of close study at Russian universities and institutes. The seditiousness and harmfulness of the postulates set forth in it show that this is completely unacceptable. You can study such books in an academic manner only if the students have already received a base of real historical knowledge. To broaden horizons and teach polemic.
Pipes does not like Russian culture very much, and in this book he gives her his negative assessment, blaming it on the nature of property, which formed it so different from Western values.
Philosophers: Russian and American
Choosing a denomination in Russia Pipes also considers a huge mistake. But in order to quote our Chaadayev regarding this issue, it is necessary to delve deeper into the worldview features of this Russian philosopher. And Richard Pipes (“The Russian Revolution” and his other works - a direct confirmation of this) - following many - cites all the same lines where Chaadaev notes a break with Western civilization in connection with the Byzantine follow - away from the pillar roads of Christian civilization.
Here we will recall what kind of blood Catholicism acquired other, which became the main, branches of the faith: the Reformation nevertheless "taxied out". The Byzantine branch of Christianity is far from the most bloodthirsty, without a crusade. Even more controversial is Pipes' analysis of the views on the policies of our Gogol and Pushkin, sometimes causing amazement, but more often laughter.
Amazing resemblance
Richard Pipes (The Origins of Civil Rights and almost all of his other works contain information on this topic) sees a huge similarity between the regimes of the Soviet Union and fascist Germany. He repeats this so often that it becomes like a kind of mantra, under the influence of which the least thinking part of the population, which is characterized by a lack of life experience, still falls.
Quite often, and from different lips, now it is necessary to hear this statement, terrifying in its lies and injustice. These are by no means related political regimes: neither domestic nor foreign policy had any common ground at any stage in the existence of the two countries.
How did the USSR die
Here you need to see on whose mill Pipes is pouring water. Being always the very “hawk” of the American establishment, it was he who convinced Reagan - as a consultant to the CIA and head of the department of the National Security Council - to take the most severe measures to suppress and destroy the USSR. It was he, being a connoisseur who in his own way interpreted the history of Russia, assured the US president that the USSR was a colossus with feet of clay.
There was pressure from the United States: support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan and in Chechnya, the collapse of oil prices and the launch of a propaganda machine with the organization of an extensive network of schools where future "young reformers" were trained. The network, by the way, spread to all the capitals of the republics and more or less large regional and regional centers, and in the mid-eighties the main school settled at the level of committees in the government. Five years later, the USSR collapsed. Admirers of the books "Two Ways of Russia" can applaud. Richard Pipes won.
Russia is not to be a superpower?
Pipes believes that long before her formation, Russia only did that she dreamed of this role in the world community. The purpose of statements of this kind is to further humiliate a great country in public (and not only Western, but also domestic) opinion.
However, the opinion of Pipes is not so important for Russia. More important are actions that can be considered interference in our internal affairs. The geopolitics of our country directly depends on its geographical location, which simply obliges it to be a great power. The longest borders, contact with Europe, the Far, Middle and Middle East - all world crises and any other world-wide events cannot pass without our participation.
Pipes and the Russian intelligentsia
The most famous American political scientist brought work on pre-revolutionary Russia, on the intelligentsia. It should be noted that it was not the radicals who were interested in the writer, but the conservatives, the guards of the existing camp, who defended the monarchy, Orthodoxy, and autocracy. Richard Pipes examined this part of the Russian population somewhat one-sidedly. Property and freedom - these are the two components of his worldview that can never exist in isolation from each other. But what about the peculiarity of the Russian mentality, which is always based on the disinterestedness? Pipes is not just not considering this; most likely, he is not even aware of its existence.
But he literally bursts out talking about those ideologues who are still ruling in Russia now, by a strange misunderstanding - the republican one. These are liberal economists who are modernizing the country at the expense of a supposedly backward and by nature not very smart people who do not accept any progressive undertakings. These are dense nationalists, dreaming of medieval orders, these are enlightened functionaries and confessional leaders. Pipes does not consider truly intelligent people , as if they had never happened: neither Herzen, nor Kropotkin, nor Bakunin, nor Lopatin, nor Plekhanov were interested in him. But the demonization of the image of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a man of a hundredfold higher flight of philosophical thought than the author considered here, began precisely with the books of Richard Pipes.
Afterword
Pipes' works contain an abundance of all kinds of quotes and references, where Russian historians draw parallels with Western Europe. But the further the reading continues, the more often the question arises: is the author mocking us by citing these links in this context? It seems that the texts are composed of already existing stereotypes, which even before the beginning of the twentieth century were considered by Russian philosophers and writers in all kinds of libel for a variety of bullying.
When reading, it seems that this smart Pipes will laugh in the next line, saying that he was joking, because it is impossible to believe what was written. But no. Pipes goes on and on. And it’s not funny anymore.