Rating: 
Summary: A Hero in his own mind
Review: When I heard that Richard Pipes' memoir would be subtitled "Memoirs of a Non-Belonger", I thought to myself, great, another conservative who acts as though voting for the Republicans was an act of profound moral courage. And sure enough, whether it is his debates with the revisionists and the Sovietologists, or his stance as an arch-opponent of détente, or during his brief tenure as a member of Reagan's National Security Council, Pipes consistently portrays himself as an isolated figure armed with nothing but the truth on his side. One would not know from his account that for several decades Pipes was a prominent contributor to such eminently respectable journals of the centre as "Encounter" "The New Republic" or "The Times Literary Supplement." Yet in a way that he would not appreciate, Pipes is a non-belonger. At one point he comments "Until adolescence, everything I experienced other than my own thoughts and feelings seemed to lie outside of me and to be not quite real." Reading this book one feels this problem did not go away with adolescence. The only son of relatively prosperous middle-class Polish Jews, Pipes says he was thoroughly bilingual in Polish and German from an early age. Yet he was unable to speak with his maternal grandmother, who almost certainly would have spoken Yiddish. Unlike most Polish Jews he is assimilated, so assimilated in fact that his family is not only able to escape Poland in 1939 but spend a surprisingly pleasant six months in Italy thanks to the intervention of the Polish ambassador there. (This incidentally is the best part of the book). But unlike most assimilated Jews he never doubts God's existence. Indeed while the Holocaust weakened his father's faith, Pipes says it only strengthened his. He describes himself as "non-observant Orthodox." Although he was 16 in 1939, Pipes showed no interest in the struggles within the Jewish Community between Bundists and Zionists, Communists and the Ultra-Orthodox. It is rather odd that he did not hear about the Holocaust until 1945. True, many other Jews were slow to grasp the truth, but then relatively few of them had been recently exiled from Poland. There is no realization that Pipes finds any of this odd or unusual. There is a certain isolation around Pipes, a lack of curiosity in and sympathy for other people. How does this affect Pipes' stature as a historian? Early on Pipes proudly argues that the Poles killed 91,000 Germans and wounded 63,000 more in their brief war. Actually Gerhard Weinberg's seminal "A World at Arms" and Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler claim total casualties were only 45,000. But then they did not rely like Pipes did on statistics published in Communist Poland. Later Pipes will quote Nietzsche out of context, apparently believes that before Columbus Europeans thought the Earth was flat and suggests, quite wrongly, that Yuri Andropov was involved in the attempt on the Pope's life. But this carelessness with detail is not Pipes' biggest weakness as a historian At one point Pipes says feminism "treat[s] all men as would-be rapists," and reduces Third World Revolution to the Soviets' promotion of "political subversion and creating economic dependence." Such opinions do not show a particularly open or generous mind. Indeed, he resorts to simple-minded chauvinist stereotypes: Palestinians are hate filled and destructive, Germans have no sense of humour and care more about hygiene than basic decency. Russians "require a 'strong hand' to regulate their public lives." Nor is Pipes' dislike of Russia confined to its rulers. To visit the Soviet Union after a cruel and savage war and to say of Moscow's residents that they "were culturally and even physically the most backward elements of Russia's rural population" or "like barbarian invaders" who had usurped its urban civilization reveal not pity, nor sympathy nor compassion, but a heartless snobbery. He cares little more for his colleagues. Rather strikingly in his acknowledgements to "The Russian Revolution," he did not mention or thank a single individual. Indeed he appears to have learned nothing from his professional colleagues and indeed is so ungracious as to complain that the poor style of his colleagues hampered the sales of the textbook he helped write in the sixties. One is reminded of how he preposterously accused Orlando Figes of plagiarism. He is cool towards his own students (they are illiterate and ill-informed), and does not mention any of his graduate students (we do see a picture of Daniel Orlovsky and Nina Tumarkin). His accounts of Sovietology and Revisionism are abusive caricatures where he damns his critics as appeasers and pro-Soviet sympathizers but does not bother to seriously criticize them. Conservatives may like this, but no fair-minded person will think he has refuted Raymond Garthoff, Frances Fitzgerald, Archie Brown, Stephen Cohen, Ronald Suny or Alexander Rabinowitch. He argues that anything less than his cold war stance was appeasement, and explicitly rejected both arm control and negotiation. How his cold war stance supposedly encouraged Gorbachev is not clear, since Pipes' main activity during his short government tenure was to push for sanctions that George Schultz quickly revoked. There is a smug self-righteousness that cannot bear too close an examination. It is striking that he can condemn Russians for indulging anti-Tsarist terrorism, while the assassins of Bernadotte, let alone those of Deir Yassin, escape his censure. He can conclude "Property and Freedom" with a screed against affirmative action and the welfare state: does he think the Israeli settlements that his son is a devoted apologist for arose because of the workings of a free West Bank land market? Ultimately, everyone who challenges his views or criticizes him is always wrong, whether it is Malia or Solzhenitsyn, or whether it is Haig or Schultz. The only historian who gains his unqualified admiration is himself.
Rating: 
Summary: Alive and kicking!
Review: When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union 'the evil empire', much of the western left stood up on its hind legs and howled in dismay - but today, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, people in Moscow commonly refer to their past as 'the evil empire'. Prof Pipes, a leading Russian expert, was one of few westerners who saw through the farce of communism and urged the hard and sensible line against the USSR, which ultimately led to its collapse. It is pathetic how some reviewers are still fighting an ideological fight they had lost - 'swinging their fists after the fight is over' to use a Russian expression - and viciously pan Prof. Pipes' beautifully written book. The flaw of most memoirs is that they have a high point - usually the beginning or the middle, and then they trail off. Pipes is as alive and intellectually vigorous at 80 as he seems to have been in his youth and his autobiography is a pleasure to read to the last page. His many asides are charming - on the academe, on the personalities in the Reagan White House, on the kaleidoscope of people he meets, works with, loves, hates. I wish I could have taken a course with him.
| 
