Scholar and Cold War warrior

When not thinking and writing, Richard Pipes tells us in these memoirs, he is at a loose end. At different times he had ambitions to be an art historian or perhaps a musicologist, he also says, but settled to be a historian. The writing of history depends in the first place on scholarship. Vixi is the work of a man of immense learning, whose apposite quotations range through several classical and modern literatures from Praxilla of Sicyon in the fifth century BC and Seneca all the way to Trollope, Guizot and Sainte-Beuve. But selection of facts rests ultimately on the historian’s humanity and aesthetic sense. Most unusually, Vixi is also the work of an intellectual for whom beauty is truth, and truth beauty.

Pipes’s field was Russian history, which he taught for 50 years at Harvard. By temperament, he probably would have liked to limit himself to the study of congenial figures like the early historian Karamzin and the liberal Peter Struve. But his career coincided with the Cold War, and with his specialist knowledge he could hardly avoid taking a position. On a first trip to the Soviet Union in 1957 he saw for himself how brutal and ugly communism was. Just to walk in the streets was enough to bring tears to his eyes. On a streetcar in Leningrad, a woman suddenly whispered to him, ‘We live like dogs, don’t we? Tell me, please.’ The more he saw of communism, the more he despised it.

The system was to blame, not the people. A day would surely come, he always maintained, when the people would free themselves from the system. Diplomats and Sovietologists on the contrary held that the system was sound, and people one way and another were living up to it successfully. At conferences in prestigious universities and at government-sponsored seminars, Pipes was invariably odd man out, written off as a conservative, a scandalous Cold Warrior.