Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger

by Richard Pipes

A distinguished historian, Harvard professor, and White House adviser looks back on his own life and on the tumultuous twentieth century

Sixteen-year-old Richard Pipes escaped from Nazi-occupied Warsaw with his family in October 1939. Their flight took them to the United States by way of Italy, and Pipes went on to earn a college degree, join the U.S. Air Corps, serve as professor of Russian history at Harvard for nearly forty years, and become adviser to President Reagan on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. In this engrossing book, the eminent historian remembers the events of his own remarkable life as well as the unfolding of some of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary political events.

From his youthful memories of bombs falling on Warsaw to his recollections of the conflicts inside the Reagan administration over American policies toward the USSR, Pipes offers penetrating observations as well as fascinating portraits of such cultural and political figures as Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Reagan, and Alexander Haig. Perhaps most interesting of all, Pipes depicts his evolution as a historian and his understanding of how history is witnessed and how it is recorded.

Genres: History, Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Born in Poland, Richard Pipes fled the country with his family when Germany invaded it in 1939. After reaching the United States a year later, Pipes began his education at Muskingum College, which was interrupted in 1943 when he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and sent to Cornell to study Russian. He completed his bachelor's degree at Cornell in 1946 and earned his doctorate at Harvard University four years later.

Pipes taught at Harvard from 1950 until his retirement in 1996, and was director of Harvard's Russian Research Center from 1968-1973. A campaigner for a tougher foreign policy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in 1976, he led a group of analysts in a reassessment of Soviet foreign policy and military power. He served as director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs at the National Security Council from 1981 until 1983, after which he returned to Harvard, where he finished his career as Baird Professor Emeritus of History.

Reviews

[Denis5305 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chapters describing Mr. Pipes government era reminded me Joseph Heller Good as gold. Endless futile battles, little personal wars, buerocracy at its best. Hellers depiction of world of government affairs was shockingly true, as Mr. Pipes memoirs tells.
Mr. Pipes memoirs reveals a lot about America and Europe divide, about political correctness, long march through institutuons, leftist brainwashing and moral flaws in appeasement minds. Overlooking and apologizing of fact that soviet regime was responsible for killing tens of milions its OWN citizens from camp of "modern liberals" is something which is not easy to read and digest.
Memoirs tells story of one rich life, which included almost everything. Escape from Hitler, war, exile, personal and professional rising up, stinch at government service, battles with adversaries, dramatic colapse of object of long life study and change of world order. What an amazing journey. A memoirs made a good prequel to any of Mr. Pipes academic works.

[Fred Kohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Dinesh D'Souza's book on Ronald Reagan, I decided that I needed to read it again. But first, I needed to check out some books and personalities he mentioned in his book that were unfamiliar to me. Richard Pipes was one of these. Pipes is surely a sharp cookie, but I get the impression that he'd likely be pretty unpleasant in person. He makes up for it by being a straight shooter who is right on the money most of the time. I'll probably be reading more of his stuff, but it's not like I'm going to rush right out and grab hold of everything of his that I can. Like a lot of historians, his writing isn't the sort of stuff that is going to keep you turning pages all night.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

the wilde Amazone

A Hero in his own mind
4/10

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 arms 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.

pnotley

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[Marta Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Książkę czyta się dość długo, jednak dla osób chcących pogłębić wiedzę na temat Pipesa oraz systemów politycznych panujących nie tylko w Stanach i Europie- polecam

[Jeffrey Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine memoir by an academic who had real effects on policy and thus on the world through his writings and government service. I most enjoyed the story of his growing up in the 1920s and 1930s as a Polish Jew, the drama of his family's "just in time" escape to the United States, and the story of his service on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration.