The lecture will be sponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Fund, the departments of History and Political Science, and the Ukrainian Students Club. It is free of charge and open to the public. Pipes, who has an international reputation as an historian of pre-Soviet and Soviet Russia, is the author of many authoritative studies. His claim that the weak nature and late appearance of private property is a major cause of Russia's predilection to accept authoritarian rule has had profound international influence in his field. Pipes also was one of the first American historians of Russia to realize the political significance of the tsarist and Soviet governments of the non-Russian nationalities.
Pipes is a controversial figure in academic and political circles.
His critics charge that he is not an objective scholar, but a politically tendentious historian who subordinates honest treatment of facts to his own right-wing ideological obsessions. He is presently engaged in a comparative examination of the relationship between private property and political liberty. Pipes was born in Poland and grew up in Warsaw between the world wars. After the outbreak of World War II, he escaped with his family to the United States and was educated at Cornell University and at Harvard, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1950. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.