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“... past – which is only seven decades old – and the Soviet present in separate analytical boxes. Richard Pipes resisted the pressure to choose between historical and political specialisms. He matched his articles on Khrushchev and Brezhnev with works on the origins of Russian Marxism. His first book, on the foundation of the Soviet Union as a ...”

“... Richard Pipes, Russian historian at Harvard and sometime member of President Reagan’s National Security Council, is famous for his hatred of Communism. He doesn’t like Russia much, either. Nor does he particularly care for most Russia and Soviet experts, regarding them as given to romanticising and whitewashing their subject ...”

“... trend’, exemplified by the works of émigré or foreign historians, such as Alexander Yanov and Richard Pipes. He decries the ‘archetypes’ which these authors find in the Russian psyche: a lack of self-worth, intolerance of the opinions of others, and a mixture of spite, envy and worship of external power. Worst of all is the sadomasochistic ...”

“... American citizen and, by 1897, professor of mathematics at the new University of South Dakota. Richard Pipes’s The Degaev Affair is the first book-length treatment of the extraordinary lives of Sergei Degaev: his double role as revolutionary and agent provocateur up to 1883, and his subsequent life in America, a life so utterly distinct from what ...”

“... good or even brilliant in terms of historiography) falls into three camps: the conservative right (Richard Pipes), neoliberal right (Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder) or the cravenly apolitical centre (Timothy Colton). They all treat Russia as a problem to be solved. What is the underlying reason, they ask, for Russia’s deviance from the ...”

“... a line of historical inevitability.’ In an attack on the whole ‘what if?’ genre of history, Richard J. Evans has suggested that ‘in practice … counterfactuals have been more or less a monopoly of the Right’ with Marxism as target. That’s not necessarily true of the Brenton volume, despite the inclusion of right-wing political historians like ...”

“... The story of the birth of the science as we know it is one of learned men abandoning their pipes for the hammer, witnessing volcanic or sedimentary phenomena in the field and then circulating papers to their fellows, who might find travel to Auvergne or the Alps too arduous an undertaking at a time of rutted tracks and lawlessness. For much of this ...”

“... new material on Lenin’s more bloodthirsty and ruthless side (see The Unknown Lenin, edited by Richard Pipes) or even the human side uncovered by Service. Lewin might also be called Leninist in his analysis of what went wrong with the Soviet Union: bureaucratism spoiled everything. ‘Bureaucracy’ has always been a dirty word in Soviet ...”

“... re-estimating of Soviet military potential in 1976. The more or less openly crazed Team B, led by Richard Pipes, was invited in by the CIA to re-work the Agency’s established estimates of its rival’s strength in such a way that the only possible thing for the US to do was to conduct a massive and feverish arms build-up. The figures arrived at by Team ...”

“... this outcome was less gratifying. It infuriated anti-revisionist stalwarts like Martin Malia and Richard Pipes, who consider that in 1991 their side won the Sovietological argument along with the Cold War, and that this victory should be duly acknowledged. Malia’s complaint that he has been marginalised in an academic field whose members refuse to ...”

“... of overlapping agencies, each competing for Presidential attention, and believing, in the words of Richard Helms (DCI 1966-73), that it had ‘to have a publication that arrives in the White House every morning’. Because of presidents’ short attention spans and crowded time-tables, the ‘publications’ have increasingly resembled tabloid newspapers ...”

“... to the US to decide what constitutes allowable and non-allowable changes. A like-minded colleague, Richard Pipes of Harvard, suggested that the new Administration reclassify the world into two simple camps: pro-Communist nations and anti-Communist nations. If the return to the Cold War seems on one level to entail a new assertiveness, it has also ...”

“... had none of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an anomalous figure in international Sovietology, which – apart from Abe ...”

“... honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the Right’s greater prescience in ...”

“... and disparate assembly of scholars, from Robert Tucker, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch to Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest. His reading in secondary sources is broad, and includes s0me Russian and German. It’s a lesser work in every sense than Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which came out first though it deals with a later period. The ...”