Richard Pipes - Controversy

Controversy

The writings of Richard Pipes have provoked controversy in the scholarly community, for example in The Russian Review.

Criticism of Pipes's interpretation of the events of 1917 has come mostly from "revisionist" Soviet historians, who, under the influence of the French Annales school, have tended since the 1970s to center their interpretation of the Russian Revolution on social movements from below in preference to parties and their leaders, and interpreted political movements as responding to pressures from below rather than directing them. Amongst members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick claim that Pipes has focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez (a one-time PhD student of Pipes') argued that Pipes has approached Soviet History as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the criminal intent of the "defendant" to the exclusion of anything else. Pipes' critics argue that his historical writing is concerned with perpetuating the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" in an attempt "to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm".

Some of Pipes' interpretations are particularly controversial. His writing on Lenin portrays Lenin as "merely a psychopath to whom ideas barely mattered and whose only motivation is to dominate and to kill", as Robert Service put it. Other critics have written that Pipes writes at length about what Pipes describes as Lenin's "unspoken" assumptions and conclusions, while neglecting what Lenin actually said. Alexander Rabinowitch writes that whenever a document can serve Pipes' long-standing crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes will comment on it at length; if the document allows Lenin to be seen in a less negative light, Pipes passes over it without comment.

Pipes, in his turn - following the demise of the USSR - has charged the revisionists with skewing their research, by means of statistics, to support their preconceived ideological interpretation of events, which made the results of their research "as unreadable as they were irrelevant for the understanding of the subject" to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror and acting as simpletons and /or Communist dupes. He has also stated that their attempt at "history from below" only obfuscated the fact that "Soviet citizens were the helpless victims of a totalitarian regime driven primarily by a lust for power".

Pipes has been praised in the English-language press for his talent for synthesis and clarity of style. The Newsweek review of Pipes' Russian Revolution called it a "brilliantly focused portrait." The Oxford scholar, Ronald Hingley, wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "No volume known to me even begins to cater so adequately to those who want to discover what really happened to Russia." In the Washington Post Book World, this book was praised as "Monumental and detailed... by one of America's great historians." The book has been translated into several languages, including Russian (two editions).