Professor Richard Pipes
July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018
We are deeply saddened to announce the death of Professor Richard Pipes, a distinguished member of the Advisory Board of our sister organisation, the American Association of Polish-Jewish Studies (AAPJS).
The Times of London wrote of “his own immediate family’s miraculous escape from Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940”; “at Harvard…he became one of the best-known historians of Russia and the Soviet Union. He saw significant continuities between tsarist imperialism and authoritarianism and what followed the 1917 Revolution, and wrote unfashionably and unflinchingly about the personal evils and culpability of communist leaders such as Lenin and Stalin. And he took his academic perspective of Russian behaviour into a brief but highly influential political role as an adviser to President Reagan in the early 1980s, persuading him to adopt a less compromising approach towards Moscow in the belief that the Soviet Union could not survive a sustained economic and military challenge.”
The New York Times wrote of him “Richard Pipes, the author of a monumental, sharply polemical series of historical works on Russia, the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime, and a top adviser to the Reagan administration on Soviet and Eastern European policy”.
These obituaries are available to read here: The Times of London and the New York Times.