Dr. Richard Pipes was born in 1923 in a small Silesian town where his father had a chocolate factory. In 1928, his father sold the factory and moved the family to Warsaw, Poland. There, Pipes attended gymnasium for ten years, as well as studying privately, and learned the English language. Pipes followed the progress of Hitler's [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] Third Reich very closely because he felt it posed a menace to the people. Beginning in 1938, his classes at the lyceum included military drills, which led him and his father to believe that war was inevitable. The family moved from a neighborhood near the Warsaw train station to a suburb, but within a week they returned to town because the German army was approaching. Pipes said the siege began very quickly, and when Warsaw refused to surrender, the city was bombarded day and night. The Pipes family moved from building to building as housing was destroyed. Many neighborhoods were burning, there were dead horses in the street, and Pipes said it was "horror." On 6 October 1939 Hitler claimed victory, parading in an open car down the main street of Warsaw, and Pipes wondered if he would be shot. Attempts were made, he said, but it didn't happen. According to Pipes, the well educated Jews in conquered Poland knew they needed to find a way out. But, he said, the vast majority of Jews, particularly the elders, relied on their experience from World War 1 when the Germans occupied Warsaw and behaved very well, so the community wasn't very worried. Pipes' father, however, studied the international papers and realized they would not survive in Warsaw. Through the consulate of a Latin American country, Pipes' father acquired passports and obtained permits for the family to travel to Italy and, despite a brush with the Gestapo [Annotator's Note: Secret State Police], they were allowed to go to Rome, on the condition that they never return to Germany.

His family lived under Mussolini’s [Annotator's Note: Italian dictator Benito Musolini] regime until 1940, and Richard Pipes said life in Italy was not as bad as it was in Germany or Russia at that time. His ambition was to become an art historian, and he studied in several museums before enrolling in the University of Florence. He was not there long when his family's American visas came through, and they traveled through Spain to the United States. Pipes arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey on his birthday, 11 July 1940 and his family went to live on an upstate New York farm with Austrian friends they had known in Poland. He said he had no particular expectations, but knew he was bound for college, and applied to 100 schools for a fellowship. He was accepted at Muskingum Presbyterian College in New Concord, Ohio. Pipes thought the Americans friendly, and felt very much at home quickly. Pipes was giving talks about what was happening in his home country, but noticed that Americans were not terribly interested in the war that was raging in Europe, and hoped the United States could avoid getting involved. He felt the war broadened immensely when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and decided to learn the Russian language. Pipes was consripted into the Army Specialist Training Program [Annotator's Note: Army Specialized Training Program, or ASTP], and applied to study Russian. He was sent to Cornell University, and because the language was so similar to Polish, he learned Russian in three months. He followed the war very closely, and developed an interest in Russian history.

It was the habit of Richard Pipes' college fraternity brothers to sit around and listen to the radio, and it was a radio broadcast that brought the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor to his attention. Pipes said they knew what it meant. After the attack, Pipes was drafted; he said he didn't have to join the armed forces, but if he refused he would have waived his rights to American citizenship forever. He agreed to induction, and shortly afterward went from Saint Petersburg, Florida, where he was living, to Tampa, Florida to be sworn in as an American citizen. One thing about life in the American military that impressed Pipes was the food. When he was in the Polish training camp, breakfast for the troop was a bucket of black coffee and a loaf of rye bread; at the American boot camp they asked how he would like his eggs prepared. He also found the American officers' attitude toward enlisted men better than what he had experienced in Poland. In the United States, the soldiers were treated more like friends, not slaves. As a member of the Army Specialist Training Program [Annotator's Note: Army Specialized Training Program, or ASTP], he was among 75 men assigned to work at Soviet Union air bases, coordinating planes coming and going from Italy that were reloading and refueling for bombing missions in Europe. The Russians didn't want Russian-speaking Americans there, so he never went. His group was moved from one base to another and never did anything about Russia.

Richard Pipes said he and his family didn't learn about the Holocaust until after the war. The information came partly from the newspapers, and partly from members of his family who survived the horrors. Pipes said his father thought the Germans would persecute and humiliate the Jews, but liquidating six million of them was beyond comprehension. Pipes felt the Holocaust strengthened his religious beliefs; that it was part of a divine plan which is beyond his understanding. As a historian, he thinks it inconceivable that the Germans would do such a thing, as they are known to be the best educated and law-abiding people in Europe. But the Germans, "to their eternal shame," did what Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] told them, unlike the Italians who ignored many of the Jewish measures that Mussolini [Annotator's Note: Italian dictator Benito Mussolini] introduced. In the postwar period, Pipes took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend graduate school at Harvard. Had it not been for the United States government’s largess, Pipes doesn't know if he could have continued his education. He studied Russian history at what turned out to be the beginning of the cold war, and initially hoped the relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and Europe would be good, but his optimism failed when Russia seized Czechoslovakia. From then on, Pipes became very anti-Soviet. Pipes does not think his Polish background influenced him; he relied on his observations of what the Russians were doing to form his opinions. At his masters' commencement in 1947, General George Marshall gave the keynote speech, wherein he described the Marshall Plan. Pipes said he doesn't remember being particularly impressed, and had no idea what an impact it would have. Neither did the newspapers. His retrospective is that without the Marshall Plan Europe would have collapsed, Russia would have taken over, and it would have been "tragic." He and his wife traveled to Europe in 1948 because they feared another war, and that they might never see France, Switzerland or Italy or the people they knew there again. Things were not as bad as they feared, and they had a good time.

In 1948, Richard Pipes began his teaching career because that was the course that interested him, and never thought of himself as a veteran or otherwise indicative of the war generation. He dealt with the Bolshevik Nationalist Theory in his PhD dissertation, not because he had gained particular insights as an American soldier, but because he thought the Soviets were trying to persuade Europeans that they were like Americans and everybody was equal. Pipes saw this as a tremendous problem, and observed that the Soviets were amassing an Empire. He spent three years writing his first book. He said the Bolsheviks greatly influenced the Nazi movement. In the long term, Pipes thinks, the Communist regime was worse than the Nazi tyranny except for the Jews, because of its duration. Asked his reaction to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pipes remembers being horrified by the news that the United States had struck the Japanese cities. But today he considers it a good thing because it ended the war. His believes that without nuclear weapons, the cold war may have been a hot war, and on that basis, again, they were a good thing. Pipes said he thought President Truman [Annotator's Note: President Harry S. Truman] performed very well at the beginning of the cold war, standing up to Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premiere Joseph Stalin]. In the early 1980s Pipes served on the National Security Council, and commented that President Reagan [Annotator's Note: President Ronald Reagan] played a very big role at the end of the cold war, but he cannot take credit for the collapse of the USSR, which was an internal process. Pipes' thought the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a "great" event, and wrote many articles for newspapers and magazines about it at the time. Many Europeans viewed 1991 and 1992 as the real end of World War 2 and Pipes says, for them, it's true.

In the 21st century, Richard Pipes feels the central legacy of World War 2 is the knowledge that wars today are so horrible that they must be avoided at all costs; he believes that the Russians, Americans and Europeans recognize this, but he is not so sure about the Muslims or the Arabs. Pipes said that people understood how horrible Nazis were, but don't realize how bad the Soviet system was, and the truth needs to be revealed. He holds that Lenin [Annotator's Note: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, also known as Valdimir Lenin] was the founder of the Soviet state and Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premiere Joseph Stalin] was not an aberration but a natural product of the system. In Pipes' personal assessment of Stalin's statesmanship over the World War 2 period, he grants him only one thing: he resorted to extreme nationalism for motivation and managed the system in such a way that they won the war. Pipes opined that Churchill [Annotator's Note: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill] was outstanding, without question, not only for Great Britain, but for the Allies as a whole. He feels Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] should be praised for helping Great Britain and the Soviet Union, for anticipating that America would have to get into the war, and for being a good president throughout the war.