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Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger

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It might seem unlikely that the autobiography of a professor of Russian History should be of interest to the general reader. However, Professor Pipes has written a book that deserves to be read by a wide audience. In fact, I would especially recommend it to intelligent high school and college readers.
Pipes recounts three main stages of his life: His youth in and flight from prewar Poland; his education and building of a career in America; and his two-year service on President Reagan's National Security Council. The first section is like other Holocaust escape memoirs in having some excitement and danger, but the difference here is that Pipes minimizes these elements. Traveling through Germany and Italy on a phony passport, he is determined to visit art museums, seemingly placing his intellectual passion ahead of safety. Indeed, Professor Pipes's intellectual intensity is the main theme of this book. After his arrival in America his intellectual passion takes him from a backwater college to a professorship at Harvard. Pipes is frank about the careerism involved in academia, and scathing about the abuses to which scholarship is put. One example that stands out is his mentioning a well-known professor of Soviet political science who absurdly "found no significant difference between the way New Haven was administered and any city of similar size in the Soviet Union."
Pipes finds similar attitudes in government, where some of his superiors averted their eyes from unpleasant truths. I found that the most interesting aspect of his section on government service was his observations of his colleagues. For example, Pipes didn't hold then-Vice-President Bush in high regard, and perhaps the only instance of humor in this book is directed at Henry Kissinger.
Professor Pipes is very self-assured and in this book he makes a good case for his pride. Whether or not one agrees with Pipes's judgments, it is hard not to be inspired by his love of learning and breadth of intellectual interests. It is for this reason that I would especially recommend the book to motivated young readers.

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.

A wonderfully engaging autobiography of a man who, as a teenager. was present when the Germans entered Warsaw in 1939, and who, as an adult, was a close adviser of President Reagan and one of the very few people to understand the Soviet Union. A story told with wit and panache. The best autobiography to come out of Harvard since that of J.K. Galbraith. It will live.

This is the autobiography of one of those Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe (in this case Poland, from which he and his family escaped after the German invasion of 1939) who became an American academic, then an expert on a European country (in this case the Soviet Union) and who became involved in the formation of United States policy: he was for two years a member of the National Security Council during the Reagan Presidency and played a part in shaping that Administration's policy towards the Soviet Union.

His experience as a youth shaped his attitudes and interests; he saw it as his mission to fight totalitarianism. He wrote nothing about the Holocaust: he shied away from that subject because it was for him too much of `a morbid reminder of a monstrous crime'. Instead, as a specialist on Russian history at Harvard, he focussed on communism to show `how evil ideas lead to evil consequences'.

From the beginning Pipes' views of Russian history were unconventional. He saw the Soviet Union not as a radical state but as a conservative one, owing more to the Russia of Nicholas I than to that of the 19th century radicals - a theme he worked out in several ways, and one that made him unpopular both with Marxists and with those conservatives who wanted to draw a sharp line between tsarism and communism. Equally unconventional at the time (so he says) was his insistence that the Soviet Union was not a multi-ethnic state whose citizens saw themselves as Soviet citizens in the way in which the ethnic groups in the United States saw themselves as Americans; rather it was an empire, in which Russians ruled over Ukrainians rather as the British had ruled over Indians.

In 1957 he paid the first of several visits to the Soviet Union and had all his negative views of it confirmed: on his return to the United States his colleagues found his antagonism to communism `an obsession'.
So well known was his hostility to the Soviet Union that in 1978 he was invited to lecture in communist China. (Nixon had perceived China as a check on the Soviet Union, and the Chinese saw the United States in the same light.) Pipes' hosts would lecture him on the need for America to be less `flabby' in its dealings with Moscow. Pipes found China far more vibrant, dynamic and optimistic than Russia, before or after the fall of communism there.

Pipes proudly acknowledges his role as a `cold warrior'. There were, he thought, only two alternatives to the Cold War, both unacceptable: appeasement (which he maintains was advocated by the American sovietological community) or hot war. He was therefore a vigorous critic of the policy of détente practised between 1969 and 1975 and again between 1977 and 1979. In 1970 he testified at a Senate hearing against the SALT I Treaty (which was however concluded in 1972).

The dominant opinion in the CIA at the time was that the purpose of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was not to win superiority for a possible nuclear war, but was essentially defensive, making sure that no nuclear war could happen because that would simply guarantee MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). President Ford agreed to a proposal that this assumption should be subject to an external audit. The intelligence material was to be analyzed by `Team A' from the CIA and by `Team B' made up of outsiders. Pipes was asked to head Team B, which concluded that Soviet policy WAS aiming at nuclear superiority. Such a conclusion suited neither the CIA nor the new President Carter; but it made a deep impression on Ronald Reagan, and contributed to the massive expansion of the American arsenal which the Soviets could not match. Pipes argued consistently that the Soviet Union was close to economic collapse, and that American policy should be designed to speed up that process which alone could bring about reform and peaceful relations; and he reminds us several times that he was proved right by events.

When Reagan came to office, Pipes was recruited into the National Security Council, in charge of the East European and Soviet desk. `Because Reagan knew what he wanted but could not articulate his feelings in terms that made sense to foreign policy professionals at home and abroad, I took it upon myself to do so on his behalf.' (p.194) Naturally Pipes thought that the Western Europeans, who were alarmed by Reagan's hard line on the Soviet Union, were appeasing it (and that the professionals in the State Department were not only soft in the attention they paid to Western European sensitivities, but, says Pipes, themselves `[thought and behaved] in a manner not very different from the British appeasers of Hitler', p.189.) When the Polish government suppressed Solidarity at the end of 1981, Reagan was furious, and Pipes was partially responsible for the imposition of sanctions on Poland and the Soviet Union. This was against the wishes of America's European allies and therefore of Secretary of State Haig. Haig resigned; but his successor Schultz, to Pipes' dismay, persuaded Reagan to lift sanctions again.

I have concentrated on Pipes' ideas about the Soviet Union; but there is much more in this autobiography than that. There is the unusual story of how he and his family were able to leave German-occupied Poland. There is a fair amount about the academic life American universities, and sketches of the many personalities he came across. He is pretty scathing about university academics as an insecure and envy-ridden tribe, and he prides himself, here as elsewhere, as the self-described `Non-Belonger' in the subtitle of his book. Whereas many non-belongers feel some sense of exclusion and therefore inferiority, Pipes conveys a sense of superiority and at times a vanity which do not always make for pleasant reading. Near the end there are some wise comments on how one should avoid monocausal explanations of history.

"On October 6, Hitler came to survey the conquered capital of Poland. I watched him from our window on the fourth floor; there were German soldiers with guns posted every few feet along the route on Marszalkowska, the city's main thoroughfare, and below our house. He rode in an open Mercedes, standing up in the familiar pose, giving the Nazi salute." Richard Pipes was 16 then, and by October 30 was in Rome with his parents desperately trying to make their way out of Europe. Thanks to his father, having saved and safeguarded $3,348 in a foreign bank account, they were ultimately successful.

Flash forward to 1981-1982 and the White House. There one would find Ronald Reagan in the Oval office, oft inclined to ask, according to others present when matters concerning Poland, Eastern European politics, or the Soviet Union's behavior was discussed, "What does Dick Pipes think?" Professor Pipes (author of A Concise History of the Russian Revolution & Communism: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) was then responsible for Soviet issues at the National Security Council.

"Reagan delivered stirring speeches against communism, but he never spelled out, unemotionally, the theoretical underpinnings of his policies," at least not in public. A secret directive was crafted, however, under Mr. Pipes' direction, to promote Reagan's goals. National Security Directive 75 (NSDD 75): "To promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged elite is gradually reduced. The U.S. recognizes that Soviet aggressiveness has deep roots in the internal system, and that relations with the USSR should therefore take into account whether or not they help to strengthen the system and its capacity to engage in aggression."

"We must put the Soviet Union on the defensive," Pipes, behind closed doors, repeatedly advised. "In none of these countries [Ethiopia, Angola, Ghana, N. Korea, N. Vietnam, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua] did Moscow establish hegemony by military conquest. As our unfortunate war in Vietnam demonstrated, it was impossible to stanch communist expansion by military means, for communism had metastasized globally. Hence, it was hopeless undertaking to try to prevent its further spread at the periphery: one had to strike at the very heart of Soviet imperialism, its system."

"...it was the system that drove the Soviet Union to aggression. This being the case, we had to do all in our power to change the system, mainly by a policy of economic denial and a vigorous rearmament program. The former would require Moscow to reform its command economy; the latter would demonstrate to it the futility of attempting to gain military superiority over us."

The thinking that colored this view became apparent whence Polish generals attempted to crush the Solidarity movement in Poland. Reagan's mounting fury at the communists was very much in evidence then, Mr. Pipes says herein. Reagan felt, as he put it at a meeting of Dec 22 that this was "the last chance of a lifetime to go against this damned force." "On Reagan's insistence,' and despite the opposition of many in his cabinet, "quite severe punitive measures were adopted." US sanctions against Poland cost that country billions of dollars a year, billions of dollars that the USSR was forced to cover. All the time the Polish underground was supported financially, as well. The land of Mr. Pipes was to be free again shortly thereafter, thanks in large part to Ronald Reagan (in conjunction with Pope John Paul ll---they coordinated strategy on this, and with able input from a doggedly focused Mr. Pipes himself.

Peter Struve, a Marxist in tsarist, then Soviet Russia, predicted in the 1920s that communism was unreformable. Professor Pipes wrote a biography of this man, fascinated, he tells us, by Struve's "uncompromising intellectual integrity and civil courage: the readiness to follow his thoughts to their logical conclusion no matter how unpopular they might prove to be." And Mr. Pipes became very unpopular himself, not only with the powers-that-were within the USSR, but within the field of Soviet history, and in the political arena while he was in Washington. Professor Pipes was in the minority, of those studying the USSR, willing to call a spade, a spade, and rail against repression when he saw it. He was one of the few scholars focusing on the USSR who did so bereft of sympathetic or accommodative blinders. Russian nationalists repeatedly accused him of `Russophobia, and liberals repeatedly accused him of hating Russia. To which he responds herein: "I would hardly have devoted my life to studying a people I disliked." He just couldn't countenance the repression inherent in the Soviet system. The "deliberate eschewal of the human and the moral in dealing with the Soviet Union characterized the entire profession of `Sovietology' and accounted in good measure for its dismal failure to foresee that country's fate."

"The Sovietological community," in Professor Pipes' words, "was first and foremost committed to bringing the two adversaries together and in so doing ignored or downplayed whatever ran counter to this objective." Pipes posits herein that "...a scholar has no such fixed criteria by which to judge success..." "His principal criterion of success is approval of peers. This means he must cultivate them, which makes for conformity and `group think.'" Mr. Pipes didn't swim in that pond, however, and thank God for that. As Mr. Pipes explains: "The main effect of the Holocaust on my psyche was to make me delight in every day of life that has been granted to me, for I was saved from certain death. I felt and feel to this day that I have been spared not to waste my life on self-indulgence or self-aggrandizement but to spread a moral message by showing, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences."

It accounts, moreover, why this engaging and most worthy book of a very respectable individual is subtitled: "Memoirs of a non-belonger." (08Jul) Cheers

Those born into Polish Jewry did not expect or want extraordinary lives, but if they escaped the conflagration, as Richard Pipes and his parents did, they involuntarily gained such lives.

Pipes writes with his usual eloquence, such a rare trait among today's inept and jargon-fouled academics, and fascinatingly tells of the vanished multiethnic Poland he knew, acclimation to college in Ohio, and his distinguished academic career.

It is a shame that this page is being abused by paltry detractors -- undoubtedly resentful over the loss of their political dreams -- to attack him personally.

Pipes is the greatest living student of imperial Russia and the revolution. His influence on a generation of scholars and commentators is only matched by Conquest's. Anyone interested in policymaking relative to the Soviet Union will enjoy this book, as will people interested in the evolution of a distinguished intellectual. How many people could invite Isiah Berlin, Bunny Wilson and George Kennan to dinner and expect them all to accept?

The reviewer jillenium is mistaken in his/her Latin translation. Vixi means "I lived" or "I have lived"; vixeram is the pluperfect tense and means "I had lived." Give the Yale University Press some credit!

..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.

In his very condensed and interesting autobiography, Vixi ('I have lived'), Richard Pipes focuses on three phases of his life. First, his childhood in Poland where he experienced the German occupation, before his family escaped to the United States. Second, his experiences at Harvard as a student and as a professor during what he calls its golden age between the end of WW II and the full-scale Vietnam War. Third, his involvement in US policymaking regarding the USSR during the 1970s and the 80s.

Bilingual in German and Polish Pipes grew up in Poland at the very center (then) of Europe. Pipes presents a more differentiated picture of life as a Jew in Poland than usual and blames Soviet propaganda for much of the post-WWII critique of anti-semitism in inter-war Poland under the dictatorship of Pilsudski, but underscores that the situation worsened dramatically after Pilsudski's death.

Pipes presents a vivid and koncentrated personal account of the German attack on and occupation of Poland, clearly indicating when he describes his own experiences, and when he takes advantage of information obtained later on.

Pretending to be citizens from a Latin American country Pipes and his parents emigrated to the U.S. by way of Italy in the autumn of 1939. Pipes left for college as soon as possible and provides a very warm and grateful but unsentimental description of his reception and studies at Muskingum College in Ohio.

In 1942, amid growing American interest in the USSR, Pipes became aware that his Polish background made it comparatively easy for him to study Russian and he started studying on his own. When drafted to the Army Air Corps he was assigned to study Russian and went to Cornell, followed by a number of reassignments within the U.S. until the war was over. During one of these assignments he read a series of lectures by French historian Francois Guizot and decided to study history. After the Holocaust he wanted to write about how evil ideas lead to evil consequences - with the second totalitarian ideology, communism, as his case - and he went to Harvard, which is described with great enthusiasm and warmth, time and again interspersed with sudden dissecting analyses, as in the rest of the book.

A sceptic in general and towards the government of the USSR in particular, Pipes' analyses of Soviet policy aroused interest in some Republican circles, while other people considered him a war-monger, and in 1980 Pipes joined the National Security Council, where he worked for two years. His description of inter- and intradepartemental infighting is very interesting but hardly likely to attract readers to government service. Pipes' description of how national security adviser Richard Allen was sidelined is especially illustrative, as are his portraits of Kissinger: "His self-conscious smile seemed to say:'Yes, indeed, it is I, Henry Kissinger, in your midst: your eyes are not deceiving you, even as I myself am astonished by my existence.'" Pipes explains that his experience in government affected his writing by making him much less likely to consider policy-making a careful and rational process!

Few autobiographies are so condensed, rewarding and easy to read as "Vixi".

Though the book isn't so new, it's a biography of the one of the greatest American historians