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Title: Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0-300-10165-1 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (8 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: A Hero in his own mind
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: Wonderful and thoughtful autobiography..
Comment: ..and it even has a little good humor thrown in. Most satisfying for me, as a political science Ph.D., were his attacks on the lefty Sovietologists who downplayed the sheer evil of the Soviet regime for so long. I only wish Dr. Pipes mentioned more of their names so they can be more thoroughly discredited. But they know who they are.
The other particularly interesting section was on his service in the Reagan administration during the height of the nuclear freeze/peace movement in the U.S. and Europe. Hmmm...a tough, principled President, domestic know-nothings, peacenik Europeans, undependable allies, rampant anti-Americanism...how little has changed! But of course we were right then, and we're right now. One point Pipes discusses repeatedly is the tendency of those in academia and government toward shirking away from confronting enemies and viewing the world as they wish it to be instead of as it really is.
The book also works as a great life story as well as an intellectual autobiography. Dr. Pipes truly lead an interesting life, one inspiring to many others. I'm particularly inspired by his unending and seemingly boundless curiosity. My only complaint is that he might have added a little more about his family life, particularly about his wife and sons.
I'm a little puzzled by the review of academician Ravitch below. First, it should be made clear that Dr. Pipes' "disillusionment" with service in the Reagan Administration did not stem from its aims but from bureaucratic politics and personality clashes, such as with Alexander Haig and Richard Allen. He wholeheartedly supported Reagan's desire to move beyond detente and adopt a tougher line toward the Soviets. Second, with regard to the Holocaust, Pipes states quite clearly in the book that while it had a great role in shaping his personality, thinking and religious beliefs, he refrains from writing more on it simply because so many others have done so, and there is not much he can add. Gee, humility from a Harvard professor! Pipes is indeed a wise man. Finally, I see no reason for attacking Dr. Pipes and/or his son Daniel as "uptight," "fanatics," or "crazy." These are personal attacks completely outside the scope of the book. How regrettable.
Rating: 3
Summary: Vixi! You call that living?
Comment: Sharing with Pipes the status of a retired professor of History I can attest to the accuracy of his comments about the Academic Life. He has shown with brevity the congenital disabilities of academics, plagued as they are with insecurity and ambition. He has also shown well the foolishness of leftist historians of Communism and the Soviet Union. His experience as a Reagan official in the foreign policy field was disillusioning, as one might have expected.
But I bring away two additional reactions. One is that Pipes, for all his erudition and ability, is hardly a mentor, an inspiration for students. I have myself found few if any great scholars to be particularly inspiring as anything but narrow role models and Pipes certainly is in line with this. Secondly, Pipes is far too reticent to discuss the Holocaust which almost took his life. He does reflect on the special pervisity of the Polish people who would rather forget that for half a millenium large numbers of Jews shared their lives, but he is far too reluctant to say much more about this. He also claims that while the Holocaust made his own father doubt divine providence, his own reaction was in the opposite direction. Anyone whose faith is strengthened by Auschwitz needs to do some explaining. Pipes would rather bury himself in Russian history than reveal himself to his audience. This is his way of self-preservation.
Another uptight academic pretending to be something he cannot be -- a wise man.
Pipes has been accused of a "Polish" bias in his view of Russia as essentially Asiatic and barbaric. With his rather justified contempt for Poland and its unfulfilled promise he does not deserve to be considered pro-Polish. The Poles like to think they are superior to the Russians, but they are not. Pipes is a Zionist above all. One hopes he is not as crazy a Zionist as his son, Daniel Pipes, the leading Likudnik fanatic among American academics.
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Title: The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0300098480 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Property and Freedom by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0375704477 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Art: A New History by Paul Johnson ISBN: 0060530758 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr ISBN: 1893554724 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Anti-Americanism by Jean Francois Revel, DIARMID CAMMELL ISBN: 1893554856 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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