The Man Who Knew Russia
About this episode
The episode explores the life and impact of historian Richard Pipes through the insights of his former student Jonathan Daly.
Everyone has an opinion about the late Russian historian Richard Pipes. Some loved him. Many hated him. He was a conservative and anti-communist. A hardliner on American policy toward the Soviet Union. Some would even say he was a Russophobe and cultural essentialist. But Pipes was a far more complicated figure. A Polish Jew whose family fled before the Nazis arrived, Pipes possessed a strong moral center that stood at the heart of his rejection of the USSR. He eventually applied his vision to his work as a Russian historian at Harvard. Pipes was also at the ground floor of a new academic discipline. He studied under Michael Karpovich, the founder of Russian studies in the US, and was part of a grad cohort that included Russian history Brahmins Leopold Haimson, Marc Raeff, Martian Malia, and Nicholas Raisonovsky. All these men would staff history departments at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia, and train a generation of scholars. Pipes knew his stuff, and eventually applied his knowledge in public debate and advice to the Reagan Administration. Pipes was a man of the 20th century, and in my opinion, one of the last serious intellectual conservatives. So who was he? How did he…
People in this episode
Guest: Jonathan Daly
Topics covered
- Russian history
- historical analysis
- intellectual conservatism
- academic discipline
- Soviet Union
- biography
Keywords
- Richard Pipes
- Russian historian
- Soviet Union
- biography
- intellectual conservatism
- Harvard
- academic discipline
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Harvard, Reagan Administration
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