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Richard Edgar Pipes (born July 11, 1923) is a Polish-American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union, who espoused a strong anti-communist point of view throughout his career. In 1976 he headed Team B, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes is the father of American historian and expert on American foreign policy and the Middle East, Daniel Pipes. Pipes was born to a Jewish family in Cieszyn, Poland, which fled the country as refugees after it was invaded by Nazi Germany.

The writings of Richard Pipes have provoked criticism in the scholarly community, for example in The Russian Review. Criticism of Pipes's interpretation of the events of 1917 has come mostly from "revisionist" Soviet historians, who under the influence of the French Annales school, have tended since the 1970s to center their interpretation of the Russian Revolution on social movements from below in preference to parties and their leaders and interpreted political movements as responding to pressures from below rather than directing them. Among members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick claim that Pipes has focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez (a one-time PhD student of Pipes') argued that Pipes has approached Soviet History as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the criminal intent of the "defendant" to the exclusion of anything else. Pipes' critics argued that his historical writings perpetuated the Soviet Union as "evil empire" narrative in an attempt "to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm". Other critics have written that Pipes writes at length about what Pipes describes as Lenin's "unspoken" assumptions and conclusions, while neglecting what Lenin actually said. Alexander Rabinowitch writes that whenever a document can serve Pipes' long-standing crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes will comment on it at length; if the document allows Lenin to be seen in a less negative light, Pipes passes over it without comment. Pipes, in his turn - following the demise of the USSR - has charged the revisionists with skewing their research, by means of statistics, to support their preconceived ideological interpretation of events, which made the results of their research "as unreadable as they were irrelevant for the understanding of the subject" to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror and acting as simpletons and /or Communist dupes. He has also stated that their attempt at "history from below" only obfuscated the fact that "Soviet citizens were the helpless victims of a totalitarian regime driven primarily by a lust for power".

Entity:
Richard Pipes