What the Soviets Call the Anti-Soviet Professor: Comrade

• In Event: Sovietology at the End of History: Academics Respond to the Soviet Collapse

Abstract

Beginning in the early 1960s, when Richard Pipes published a book (Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 [1963], aiming to show that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks were not the natural and indisputable leaders of the Russian working classes, he was consistently vilified in the Soviet press and scholarly journals and books as antisovetchik. Pipes returned the favor, producing some of the hardest-hitting Sovietological analyses of the Cold War, including “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War” (1977). Yet within a decade, Pipes's status in the USSR and post-communist Russia turned completely around, such that he was the only foreign expert invited to provide testimony to the Constitutional Court in 1992 on the legality of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Pipes enjoyed such manifestations of fame and glory and reveled in the hope that Russia would now embark on a path of Westernization. His efforts to undermine the USSR bore significant fruit; he was less successful in helping to foster a democratic transition.

Author

• Jonathan W. Daly, U of Illinois at Chicago