Richard Pipes
This chapter gives an obituary for Richard Pipes, who died in Boston, Massachusetts on 17 May 2018. It recalls Richard as an eminent historian of the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, as well as a public intellectual who made a major contribution to the formulation of US foreign policy in the last decades of the Cold War. It also mentions Richard's doctoral dissertation, which reflected his lasting interest in national questions and was published under the title The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 in 1954. The chapter looks into Richard's comprehensive studies of Russia, which stresses the conspiratorial nature of the Bolsheviks and the continuities between Russian and Soviet history. It explores Richard's final book Alexander Yakovlev: The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism that was published in 2015.