On February 24, 2022, the world was shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many people naively thought that wars of aggression were more inconceivable in Europe than anywhere else after the bloody 20th century on the Old Continent. Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Polish-Jewish American historian Richard Pipes. It is worth recalling his life and thoughts, especially his views on the past, which will help us better understand Putin’s brutal imperialist aggression.
Escape from the Holocaust
Richard Edgar Piepes was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Cieszyn, Poland, on July 11, 1923, just five years after the restoration of the Polish state after more than 100 years of foreign partition. In the late 18th century, the internally weakened Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, once Europe’s largest state stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, was divided into what Herman Melville aptly named Russia, Prussia, and the Russian Pirate Triumvirate. It was swallowed up by the great powers. Austria. Cieszyn found itself under Habsburg rule. Of the three invaders, Austria’s enlightened monarchy was the most tolerant of Jews and granted the Poles the highest level of autonomy.
Polish patriots saw World War I as an opportunity for independence. Thus, a Polish corps was formed under the command of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrians promised the Poles independence if the Central Powers won.
One of the Polish legionnaires was Marek Piepes, the father of the future historian. The Central Powers were defeated by the Entente in World War I, but an independent Polish state was created under the Treaty of Versailles. Cieszyn was located near the disputed border between Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Orza River separated the Polish towns of Cieszyn and Cesky Teszyn.
In post-war Cieszyn, Marek Piepes founded a chocolate factory called Dea. He eventually sold it and moved with his family to Krakow, but less than a year later the family settled in Warsaw, where he also worked in the confectionery industry. Dea has since renamed his Olza and manufactures his popular Prince Polo wafer bars that can be purchased at grocery stores in Poland.
The interwar period was a period of cultural prosperity for Poland’s Jewish minority, but after the death of the country’s autocratic but tolerant leader Józef Piłsudski in 1935, institutional and violent popular rebellion began. Judaism grew. This was consistent with trends in other regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Of greatest concern were developments in neighboring Germany, which had been under the control of the Nazi party since 1933. In addition to official anti-Semitism, Germany increasingly threatened to invade its eastern neighbor, but its foreign minister, Colonel Josef Beck, refused to give in to Hitler’s territorial demands.
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, and 16 days later the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Although Polish troops fought bravely, they were no match for the Wehrmacht, who began a brutal six-year occupation of Poland. The Piepess quickly realized that being Jewish could be potentially deadly in what was about to happen. Warsaw, where the Piepes family lived, was heavily damaged by German bombing. In addition to huge material damage, 25,000 Varsovians were killed in September 1939.
Thanks to the help of old acquaintances from the Polish Legion, some of whom became important figures in the Polish military, government and diplomatic corps, Marek Piepes and his family escaped from Cieszyn through Breslau in Germany and then to Italy. I headed to Eventually settled in the United States.
russian expert
A few years after arriving in the United States, Reichard, who Anglicized his name to Richard Pipes, enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He enrolled in the Army’s professional training program, which allows U.S. military personnel in college to study engineering and foreign languages. Pipes attended Cornell University because his parents had settled in upstate New York. His Polish and Russian are both Slavic languages, so according to Mr. Pipes’ own account, of the latter he was able to gain rudimentary knowledge within three months.
After learning Russian and learning about the geopolitical context of the war, in which the United States was allied with the Soviet Union, Pipes became interested in Russian history. In 1950, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the formation of the Soviet Union at Harvard University, and Pipes taught there until his retirement in 1996.
Over the course of several decades, Pipes became a prominent Russian scholar, particularly famous for his unofficial trilogy consisting of: Russia under the old regime (1974), russian revolution (1990), and Russia under the Bolshevik regime (1994). The U.S. government took advantage of his expertise in Russia. In 1976, the CIA appointed him head of Team B, which analyzed the military threat posed to the United States by the Soviet Union.Pipes and his team were particularly criticized detentewhich later became the basis of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy.
Meanwhile, under the Reagan administration, Mr. Pipes served as director for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on the National Security Council. Pipes’ service in this capacity from 1981 to 1982 coincided with the birth of Solidarity in his native Poland and its crushing by the military regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense. They accurately called him “a Soviet general in a Polish uniform.” During this time, Pipes recommended sanctions be imposed on Jaruzelski’s government and that the United States provide aid to Solidarity ($20 million of which was via the CIA).
Pipes and Russian imperialism
Even after half a century, Russia under the old regime The issue appears to be of vital importance as we watch in horror at President Putin’s continued attacks on Ukraine. In his book, Pipes argues that due to a variety of circumstances, Russia has developed a deeply imperialist and authoritarian political culture that is difficult to change. He points out that between 1462 and his 1533 Muscovy’s territory expanded six times as much as his. Meanwhile, from the mid-16th century to the late 17th century, its area increased to an area comparable on average to the area of the present-day Netherlands. per year.
But Pipes is not a xenophobic Russophobe. In various interviews and writings, he professed his love for Dostoevsky and other gifts of Russian high culture.in Russia under the old regime, he attempts to explain the various circumstances that led to such a legacy of imperialism and invasion. For example, he argues that Russia’s constant conquests in sparsely populated agricultural countries with unfavorable environmental conditions were motivated by the pursuit of new and more favorable soils.
Pipes, on the other hand, believed that Russia had patrimonialism (a term he borrowed from Max Weber), a formidable system in which landowners were absolute masters of the territory and peasants had no rights. They claim that there was no room for development. ‘civil society’ could weaken their power. This intensified authoritarian rule took place at the highest levels.
in Russia under the old regime, Pipes analyzes why various groups that seemed able to resist tsarist absolutism did not. It is well known that the Catholic Church played an important role in the overthrow of totalitarian rule in communist Poland, for example, just as Catholicism posed a major challenge to right-wing dictatorships throughout Latin America and in the Philippines. is the same as In Russia, by contrast, the Orthodox Church has always enjoyed close ties with the state, regardless of the type of regime (although it should be noted that in his book: Communism: HistoryPipes laments the tragedy of the tens of thousands of Orthodox priests shot to death under Lenin and Stalin).
Pipes explains that the concept of separation of church and state is a very Western one, with its modern understanding dating back to Pope Gregory VII and the political debate. However, in the Byzantine Empire, the Orthodox Church was under the strict control of the emperor. The Moscow Patriarchate has traditionally played the role of a vassal of the state, as Russia’s leaders see themselves as the successors of Byzantium. Pipes points out that although Russian peasants had a tradition of anti-clericalism, this did not bother Orthodox priests and bishops because they could always rely on state protection. .
Other potential challengers to Tsarist absolutism may have been the middle class and intelligentsia. However, Pipes points out that both of these groups were very small in pre-revolutionary Russia. One chapter of his paper is titled “The Lost Bourgeoisie.” He further pointed out that the intelligentsia was small enough that it could be effectively suppressed by brutal police and military forces.
Naturally, such an interpretation of Russian political culture was criticized by many Russian intellectuals, including anti-communists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The latter accused Pipes of promoting a “Polish view of history”.in him Vicky: Memoirs of a Nonbeliever (vixi (meaning “I have lived” in Latin), Pipes praised Solzhenitsyn’s courage in writing the truth about the sadistic concentration camp system. Still, he points out:
Western Solzhenitsyn’s Russian anti-communists quickly turned into anti-Western Russian nationalists. His ideal was a benevolent theocratic despotism, which he believed had its roots in Russian history, but which existed only in his imagination. ”
Communism: a unique evil?
The next two volumes of the Unofficial Russia Trilogy outline the horrors of Soviet rule. especially, Russia under the Bolshevik regime That’s a terrible criticism. One of the book’s central arguments is that the seeds of Stalinism’s demons arose from Lenin. Pipes points out that Stalin was a confidant of Lenin, and that many of the most unpleasant aspects of Stalinist rule, from the paranoid and ruthless elimination of real and imagined enemies to engineered starvation, were attributed to Lenin’s Bolsheviks. They claim that it has its origins in dictatorships.
in BixiHowever, Pipes writes:
Scandinavian Marxism, with its relatively strong property and law traditions, evolved first into social democracy and then into democratic welfare states. In Russia, both traditions were less developed, but it strengthened the autocratic and hereditary traditions.
This is from a passage describing Mr. Pipes’ visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1978. In this part of the book, he contrasts Scandinavian social democracy as well as Chinese communism with the Soviet model. “The Chinese did not lie brazenly, as the Russians were wont to do,” he wrote.
This visit took place just two years after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, which caused more deaths than Hitler and Stalin combined. Almost all of those deaths occurred during peacetime. Even as China moves closer to adopting Western free-market models, it continues to repress Tibetans and Uyghurs after committing cultural genocide and imprisoning thousands of political prisoners. . Meanwhile, China’s censorship is among the worst in the world. Aside from its war of aggression against Ukraine, China’s modern human rights record is probably worse than Russia’s.
Marxist regimes are rooted in extremely diverse cultures on multiple continents, including Europe, Asia (China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and North Korea), the Americas (Cuba, Nicaragua), and even Africa (Ethiopia). The rotten fruit was the same everywhere: the murder of political opponents, starvation, censorship, and sometimes ethnic cleansing. Although Pipes acknowledges the brutality of communist regimes outside Russia in his book, Communism: Historyhis idea that Russia’s kind of communism is particularly evil is unconvincing.
However, his analysis of Russian political culture is of great value to all those disturbed by the recent resurgence of Russian imperialism. Both the tsarist and Soviet regimes have long since disappeared, but Moscow’s desire for new horizons remains. Meanwhile, Russia still lacks a significant civil society that opposes state authoritarianism and foreign aggression. Readers begin to understand why Putin enjoys such wide support among the Russian public. Patriarch Kirill is not the Gospel (or the Fifth Commandment) but the apostle of Russian imperialism, and the anti-war protests in Russia are insignificant compared to, for example, the US anti-war protests against the Vietnam and Iraq wars. While helpful, reading Pipes’ work is a sobering and depressing experience, as it shows how deeply ingrained the fatal flaws of Russian political culture are, and therefore how difficult it is to eradicate them. It may happen.