#  Richard Edgar Pipes 

 

 



   ![Picture of Richard Pipes](/sites/g/files/omnuum4421/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/history/files/richard_pipes_2004.jpg?itok=L4uJhf1g) 

 



 





 

 Richard Edgar Pipes died on May 17, 2018. A Harvard Ph.D., he spent his entire academic career at the university, teaching Russian and Soviet history from 1958 until his retirement in 1996. After a two-year tenure as director of East European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council (1981–82), he returned to Harvard and continued to work regularly in Widener Library after his formal retirement. Although he dubbed himself a “nonbelonger,” Harvard was the place to which he belonged for most of his long and dramatic life.

 A refugee from Nazi rule, Pipes was born to an assimilated Jewish family in Poland on July 11, 1923. He spoke German at home and Polish on the streets of Warsaw. In 1939, his father used governmental and diplomatic connections to smuggle his family out of Nazi-occupied Warsaw to Italy and then the United States. Most members of his family who stayed behind perished in Nazi concentration camps. Richard Pipes called himself a refugee from the Holocaust. He became an American citizen in 1943 while serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

 ***[Continue Reading](https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/display/secfas/Memorial%20Minutes?preview=/216662529/233081178/Pipes%20Memorial%20Minute.pdf)***  
**Image: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pipes)**



 

 

 





 

 

- ## People Categories
    
     [In Memoriam](/people-categories/memoriam)