Remembrances of a Harvard hard-liner

February 24, 2004

Daniel Johnson reviews Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger by Richard Pipes

If a medal had been struck for moral courage during the Cold War, Richard Pipes would have deserved to win it with several bars. His great history of the Russian Revolution began to appear only as the Soviet Union was in its final death throes, but his trenchant critique of communism had informed the transatlantic debate throughout the period from Stalin to Gorbachev. From 1980 to 1982, he advised President Reagan as a member of the National Security Council. Pipes is a rare phenomenon: an intellectual who briefly ventured into politics without abandoning his integrity.

Now, at the age of 80, Pipes has written an autobiography that is as candid and combative as it is entertaining. He grew up in Marshal Pilsudski's Poland, where assimilated Jewish families like his "belonged" neither in Polish society nor in the Jewish shtetl. Having survived the Holocaust by a whisker - the first, gripping chapter is devoted to his family's escape from Nazi-occupied Warsaw via Mussolini's Italy to America - Pipes evidently regards the rest of his life as a miraculous bonus.

Like most immigrants to the United States, his gratitude to and admiration for his adoptive land is implicit in everything he does. A tenured professor at Harvard at the astonishingly young age of 25, Pipes never had to struggle for a living. A series of important books and articles soon established him as the American authority on modern Russian history. Despite his academic success, however, he still evidently regards himself as a "non-belonger". Most of his colleagues abhorred his hawkish views on the Soviet Union, all the more so after he was vindicated by events.

Pipes has been close enough to many of the leading figures of his time to paint vivid portraits, while always maintaining a critical distance. His assessment of Reagan, for example, is just right. He quotes his impressions of an NSC meeting, observing that Reagan was "totally lost, out of his depth, uncomfortable". Yet he had earlier noted that "to deal with Russia you must have a simple mind", and concludes that Reagan's crude anti-communism was ultimately much more effective than the diplomatic niceties of more sophisticated politicians. Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor, spent half an hour trying to persuade Reagan to tone down his rhetoric and return to détente. Having heard him out, Reagan cheerfully asked whether Schmidt had heard his favourite Brezhnev joke (the Soviet leader asks his mother what she thinks of his collection of foreign cars. "Fine, my son," she replies. "But what happens if the Commies come and take it away?").

Pipes correctly analysed the crisis of the communist bloc and predicted that there would be a split into "conservative" and "reformist" factions in the Kremlin, as indeed happened under Gorbachev. In 1981 he advised Reagan to pursue a dual strategy, "encouraging pro-reform forces inside the USSR and raising for the Soviet Union the costs of its imperialism": more or less exactly what occurred. The declaration of martial law in his native Poland persuaded Pipes to stay on in Washington for another year, but he is scathing about most of the figures around Reagan, such as Haig, Schultz and Bush the elder, with the sole exception of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the UN.

On the Soviet side, Pipes naturally preferred the dissidents, such as Sakharov, to Gorbachev, whose motives he suspected. When they met in 1987, Gorbachev had read Pipes's harsh review of his book Perestroika, and they chatted. "Well, you are an academic," the Soviet President told him. "You wanted me to outline a systematic programme. But I am in politics." This exchange in Russian apparently alarmed the secretary of state, George Schultz, who distrusted the professorial cold warrior. Pipes admits that he was mistaken about Gorbachev's reformist intentions.

There are many evocative vignettes in this memoir. There is the visit to Moscow in 1975 when Pipes met Anatoly Sharansky, a Jewish dissident, who was subsequently arrested and imprisoned for this encounter with "an agent of the American government" and "Zionist emissary". Sharansky had been betrayed by a mutual acquaintance.

Pipes was at home among the greatest stars of the intellectual firmament, but they impressed him no more than the politicians. A dinner party he gave in 1960 for Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Wilson, George Kennan (father of the Cold War strategy of "containment") and Arthur Schlesinger Jr was intended to produce fireworks, but he was disappointed. "These were four soloists… All I recall of that evening was Wilson and Berlin discussing the various ways of saying 'necktie' in Russian, and Schlesinger picking up the whole cutlet with his fork, bringing it to his mouth, and biting off pieces."

As an octogenarian, Pipes has now embarked on a massive new project, a history of Russian thought. The title of this memoir, Vixi, means "I have lived"; Pipes has certainly lived the intellectual life to the full.