The hard-liner discusses Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian whose support for confrontation over containment helped shape the Reagan administration’s aggressive approach to the Soviet Union. His support for confrontation over containment prefigured the Bush foreign policy of today:
Pipes’s journey from the archive to the cabinet meeting is related in his newly published autobiography “Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger” (Yale). A compact volume, modest in scale if not in tone, “Vixi” (Latin for “I have lived”) might as well be titled “Vinci,” for it is very much a record of unlikely triumph over formidable odds, beginning with its gripping account of Pipes’s days as a young Jew living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.Pipes’s father, a successful businessman, plied his many contacts and at last secured passports for his family. They fled in 1939, when Pipes was 16, escaping through Italy to the United States. The son, recreated as an American, served in World War II, received a doctorate from Harvard, stayed on as an instructor and was tenured in 1958. He soon established himself as one of his generation’s leading experts on Russia.
Beginning with his 1954 book “The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923,” Pipes focused on the endurance of Russia’s autocratic traditions. His thinking derived in part from his own brief experience of totalitarianism. “When I was in Poland under the Germans, any German in uniform could take out his revolver and shoot me just because he didn’t like my face,” Pipes said in a recent interview. “When you see this violence, when you see these cruel barbarities, you tend to look at things more realistically.” More realistically, he means, than do most Americans, to whom such barbarity “all seems very remote.”