Try to imagine the intellectual life of the post-war West without the Polish emigration. The Polish impact has been especially immense when it comes to views on Russia. Czeslaw Milosz lectured at Berkeley with uncanny empathy on Dostoyevsky. Leszek Kolakowski entombed Soviet Marxism as well as Western Marxism in his monumental trilogy, and composed an immortal parody of revisionist scholarship on Stalinism (for the pages of Survey, edited by Leo Labedz). Andrzej Walicki of Notre Dame struck brilliant portraits of Russian populism and the Slavophile-Westernizer divide. [...] And beyond the history of ideas, Zbigniew Brzeziński, the grand strategist and perceptive analyst of the Soviet Bloc, served as National Security Adviser (under Carter); while Richard Pipes, the grand synthesizer of imperial Russian history, also found his way into the National Security Council (under Reagan). The University of Pennsylvania’s Moshe Levin became the acclaimed leader among historians of Soviet Russia’s peasant inheritance. The itinerant Isaac Deutscher, achieved biographical mastery over Stalin. And there have been many others, notably Adam Ulam.^[1]

This list, enumerated in Adam Ulam’s posthumous book review, is far from complete. One could also have added the names of pre-war Polish scholars who continued their careers in the post-war West: Wacław Lednicki, the leading “Pushkinologist,” was Miłosz’s predecessor at Berkeley; Oskar Halecki taught medieval history of Eastern Europe at Fordham, presenting “Limits and Divisions of European History” (1950); Henryk Paszkiewicz added his monumental trilogy to a debate on the “Origin of Russia” (first volume in 1954, the last one in 1983); Jan Kucharzewski presented to American audiences an abridged version of his seven volume “From White Tsardom to Red” (1948); Stanisław Swianiewicz, a pioneer of Soviet studies, teaching at Halifax (Canada), continued his research over the “Forced Labour and Economic Development” in the Soviet Union (1965); and a younger generation could be represented by Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, an associate at the Russian Research center at Harvard and a prominent student of Soviet ethnic politics; Piotr Wandycz, professor at Yale and the leading expert in Soviet and European diplomacies and international relations history in the twentieth century; Seweryn Bialer, the “Kremlinologist” at Columbia; Andrzej Sulima Kamiński, professor of Russian history at Georgetown; or Roman Szporluk (of Polish-Ukrainian origin), author of path-breaking studies of eastern European nationalisms as well as other “Empire-breaking” forces, and for several years director of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute.
Is it possible to find any common denominator to all these scholars’ perspectives on their studies subject? Is the simple fact that all of them were born in Poland, and all of them were compelled or decided to leave their country of origin, important not only to their reflection about homeland but about its powerful, historical neighbor, Russia, as well?
It is quite possible, especially when we take this specific warning seriously: “You don’t give Russia to the Poles: they don’t think straight.”^[2] The problem is, however, that these words were offered by one of the scholars from the list above, Professor Moshe Levin, in his polemic against another scholar from the list, Richard Pipes. The latter answered justly and curtly: “This ethnic slur would be merely offensive were it not also ludicrous, given that Professor Levin happens to be himself a native of Poland.”^[3]
From this short exchange we may deduce that being a native of Poland (even an expatriate one) is definitely not enough to form a common ground for opinions on Russia. We have to dig deeper to find one. It is advisable however not to completely disregard the remark of Moshe Levin. It expresses a stereotype outside/Western view of a Polish stereotype of Russia. What is this stereotype? It is well reminded by another of Richard Pipes’ polemists, Martin Malia, in his latest book Russia Under Western Eyes, where he accuses Polish political propaganda influence of creating a distorted view of Russia as “Imperium perennum” – an essentially un-European, aggressively imperialistic force: “the Poles used it [i.e., this view] to explain their oppression by Russia.”^[4] The very title of Malia’s book forms an obvious allusion to the most prominent exponent of this “Polish view of Russia” in the West, namely Joseph Conrad, the author of Under Western Eyes.
This specific view permeated a large part of not only Polish political propaganda during the partitions, but school curricula and even historiography after Poland regained its independence and defended it in a fierce struggle against the Soviet invasion of 1920. Jan Kucharzewski, an independent scholar in interwar Poland, who lived his last years in the United States (after 1945), and is mentioned above as the author of a monumental, seven volume study From White Tsardom to the Red, could be named here as a perfect representative of this tendency. It might be said that he accumulated centuries of Polish political experiences (or prejudices, some would say) connected to Russia as the neighbor and the contender for the leadership of all of Eastern Europe. This vision stresses continuity between “White Tsardom” and “Red Tsardom”:

“The system so extreme in destroying..., so maximalist and dictatorial was the result of centuries and had a deep, historical, internal foundation.... This spontaneous anarchism of the masses, hatred of any authority, besides an inveterate passive resignation of submitting to the commands of force, favors the calling to life of a new organization of absolute, dictatorial, ultra-police coercion.... The age-old despotism regenerates aided by a number of factors constituting the inheritance of the past: the instinct of despotism inherent in the souls of the new rulers, the urge of conquests, of dominating foreign nations..., finally the lack of democracy, of a historical school of civic development of the masses.”^[5]

That the Soviet system was a product of Russian history and political culture at least as much as of Bolshevism seemed quite natural to any Pole immersed in traditions of the struggle for Polish independence. This perspective, dominating an educational atmosphere of the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939), was proved again in September 1939, when the Soviet Union met the Third Reich halfway, simply to crush and dismember the Polish state once more. A nightmare of history was really hard to resist in this particular place and time. Still, it was perceived from different angles by different observers in Poland – and this we have to take into consideration. Not all of the emigrants from the fallen Second Republic of Poland were Poles sharing the sentiments of the Kucharzewski, or, say, Halecki. There were some Jews among them who never identified themselves with that state, seeing even sometimes (like Deutscher or, possibly, Levin) one of their oppressors in this very state, and not in its eastern invader. It is obvious that one has to take nationality, and not only the original statehood, when analyzing attitudes of emigrants towards other nations. However, neither ethnic factor can be treated as the decisive one. Generational differences could also be very influential. People are different, even those born in pre-war Poland.
Instead of looking for a general pattern of influences imprinted in their reflection on Russia and the Soviet system by their “Polish connection,” it is probably more advisable to look for a more particular and detailed set of relations in this respect within a much narrower group of scholars who share more than just the fact of being born in Poland. I propose here to follow a somewhat atypical “group,” consisting not of conscious Poles active in emigrant circles, but of three Jews born in Poland between 1920 and 1923, who after World War II made careers as Russian/Soviet studies specialists quite apart from any Polish emigrant politics: Leopold Łabędź (his name written frequently without Polish diacritics as “Labedz”), Adam Bruno Ulam, and Richard Pipes.
Leopold Łabędź was born on January 22, 1920, into an assimilated Jewish family. He attended the private Michael Kreczmar gymnasium in Warsaw, where half of the students were Catholics and half Jews. Following his father’s profession, he entered medical studies, first at the Warsaw University, then at Sorbonne (in 1938). In Poland during the fateful September of 1939, he was overtaken by the Soviet invasion in Lwów. His father was forced to work at an NKVD clinic. This fact postponed the arrest and deportation of Łabędź to Central Asia, but only for a few months. Eventually, he was deported together with hundreds of thousands of other Polish citizens who were sent to Soviet labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia. Leopold’s uncle was among the six thousand Polish officers shot in April, 1940 by the NKVD in Katyn. Leopold managed to get out of the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion in June, 1941, when Poles suddenly became allies and were allowed to form an Army. This Army was eventually released by Stalin to go through the Middle East and to fight against Germans on the Italian front in 1944-1945. After his service in the Army, Łabędź renewed studies, this time sociology and economics at the London School of Economics (under Karl Popper). In 1955 while in London, he established and co-edited together with Walter Laqueur the journal Survey, the first serious forum for sovietological studies in Western Europe, which was regularly read by the most influential politicians of the West during the Cold War. He frequently lectured on the Soviet Union at the most prestigious universities of the US and Western Europe. As one of the members and close collaborators of Encounter magazine – one of the leading intellectual magazines in the English speaking world – Łabędź was able to influence a broader public with his views on the Soviet system and Communism. He expressed his views in many publications, such as Revisionism: An Essay in Marxist Ideas (1963); Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (edited by Labedz in 1962); Polycentrism (coedited with Walter Laquer in 1962); Literature and Revolution in Soviet Russia 1917-1962 (edited in 1963); International Communism after Khruschev (edited in 1965); Khruschev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964 (edited in 1965); On Trial: the Case of Siniavsky and Daniel (edited in 1967); Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (edited in 1974); and Poland Under Jaruzelski: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on Poland During and After Martial Law (edited in 1983). His final collection of essays, Use and Abuse of Sovietology (1988), stands for his intellectual testament. He died in London on March 22, 1993.^[6]
Adam Bruno Ulam was born on April 8, 1922, in Lwów, the second largest center of Polish cultural and intellectual life after Warsaw, at that time. He was the son of Dr. Józef Ulam, a respected lawyer in private practice, and his wife, Chana, née Auerbach. The Ulams “stood as high on the social ladder as a Jewish family could at that time.”^[7] Young Adam attended Public High School (No. 7, named for Tadeusz Kościuszko). His brother Stanisław, thirteen years older, and an extremely gifted mathematician (this gift would make him the co-inventor of the American hydrogen bomb in the future), had an appointment as a Junior Fellow in mathematics at Harvard. Spending the summer of 1939 at home, Stanisław decided to take his younger brother with him to the US. They departed from Gdynia (the main Polish port) just a few days before the outbreak of the war. They never saw their father and elder sister again, who together with all their relatives perished in German-occupied Poland after 1941. Adam Bruno Ulam studied at Brown University until 1943. Then, following his elder brother to the University of Wisconsin, he got a job in a special training program in Russian and Polish, set up by the Slavic department for the army. In 1945 he began his studies in politics and history at Harvard. He graduated two years later – exactly at the moment when General Marshall announced at Harvard his plan to save democratic Europe. Ulam immediately became an instructor in the Government Department at Harvard. After teaching a course on the British Empire, he switched his interest towards “an expanding rather than to a contracting subject” – the Soviet Union. His first teacher, Merle Fainsod, was also an associate in the subject at Harvard. They both joined the Russian Research Center when it first opened at Harvard in 1948. Ulam would serve as the director of this prestigious institution for Russian and Soviet studies for many years (1973-1976, and 1980-1992). As a professor at Harvard (Gurney Professor of History and Political Science), Ulam established his position as the leading expert in Russian revolutionary thought, Communist ideology, the Soviet system, and its place on the global theatre of twentieth century history. Many of his twenty books achieved the status of classics in the field: The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual, Personal and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (1965); Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-1967 (1967); Stalin: The Man and His Era (1974); Ideologies and Illusions: Revolutionary Thought from Herzen to Solzhenitsyn (1976); and Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982 (1983). Though often asked to serve as an expert for politicians in Washington, DC, and frequently testifying on Soviet affairs before congressional committees, Ulam resisted a temptation to be a professional policy maker. Instead, he preferred his work at Harvard, and his quotidian social pleasures and torments as a keen Red Sox fan, and as an avid mystery novels reader (later, he even wrote one on the Kirov affair). He died March 18, 2000.^[8]
Richard Edgar Pipes was born on July 11, 1923 in Cieszyn, a small town in Polish Silesia. His father, Marek, came from Lwów, where his family was well established within a Jewish community. The extent to which Marek was assimilated into the Polish community was exemplified by his enrollment in the Legions, which Józef Piłsudski organized in 1914 to fight against Russia for the independence of Poland. Pipes’ mother, Zofia Sara Haskelberg was one of eleven children of a well-to-do Hassidic Warsaw businessman. Pipes’ family moved – together with his father’s business ventures (mostly in chocolate factories) – from Cieszyn to Krakуw, and then to Warsaw. Pipes attended the same Kreczmar gymnasium as Labedz had three years earlier. However, he was not as lucky as Ulam to escape just before the war. On the contrary, he was even luckier: after surviving three week German siege of Warsaw in September 1939, seeing Hitler’s triumphal entrance into the captured capital, and then witnessing the first weeks of the Nazi occupation, Pipes and his parents escaped Poland on forged papers as citizens of a Latin American country. Through Italy, Spain, and Portugal they landed eventually in the US, in New Jersey, in July 1940. Richard started his US education at Muskingum College in Ohio. Drafted in 1943, he was chosen to a special training program for instruction in Russian, which he took at Cornell University. His next, graduate school, after the war, was Harvard. He studied Russian history there, under the tutorship of Michael Karpovich.^[9] After completing his dissertation (on Bolshevik nationalities theory) in 1950, he decided to expand it into his first book dealing with the subject of a Russian/Soviet imperialism, Formation of the Soviet Union: Nationalism and Communism, 1917-1924 (1954). After a few years of teaching Harvard undergraduates, he was offered a professorship in Russian history at Harvard in 1958. Associated with the Russian Research Center at Harvard, Pipes served as its director from 1968-1973. His following academic books – on Nicholas Karamzin’s political ideas (1959), the St. Petersburg Labor movement (1963), and the two-volume biography of Peter Struve (1970, 1980) – established Pipes’ position as a leading authority in nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian history. His most discussed book – Russia under the Old Regime (1974) – a brilliant work on the evolution of Russian statehood from the earliest times to the late nineteenth century, stressed a continuity between the patrimonial tradition of the old Russian statehood traditions and the Communist party totalitarian control over both politics and economy.
He became involved in politics as a consultant of senator Henry Jackson’s campaign against shortcomings of the US detente policy towards the Soviet Union. In 1976 Pipes headed the so-called “Team B,” a group of independent specialists, summoned by President Ford to audit the CIA assessment of the Soviet strategy. Pipes’ team (with Paul Nitze and Paul Wolfowitz among others) proved that the Soviet military was not looking for a balance, but were seeking decisive nuclear superiority. The “Team B” advice was that this strategy must be countered by appropriate measures from the United States. Pipes became notorious as “hawkish” after his team report leaked out to the press in the end of 1976. Four years later, after Ronald Reagan’s victory, he joined the National Security Council staff as head of the East European and Soviet desk. Pipes took a two year leave from Harvard, serving through 1982 in Reagan’s administration. He is considered one of the main architects of this administration’s “tough policy” towards the Soviets, symbolized in Reagan’s description of the adversary as the “evil empire.” After returning to Harvard, Pipes continued his political commentaries on the Soviet Union and the prospects of US relations with it (in 1984 he presented his views in the form of a book, Survival Is Not Enough). His main achievement as a historian came just when the Soviet Union was crumbling apart: in 1990 Pipes published his monumental The Russian Revolution, covering the years 1899-1919. In 1994 he added a sequel, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (dealing with the years 1919-1924). After retirement, Pipes continues to produce new important themes and books, such as Property and Freedom, The Unknown Lenin, and The Degaev Affair, as well as commentaries on events in Russia and Russian-American relations.^[10]
There is one memory snapshot that captures all three heroes of this essay together. We owe it to Adam Ulam’s recollections of 1962, and the Cuban crisis. Leo Łabędź came to Harvard to criticize American foreign policy for allowing the Soviets and Castro to stage a black-mail situation against the US. He came straight to Ulam’s office to express his outrage:

“Leo along with Dick Pipes, professor of history, and Zbigniew Brzeziński, then still an assistant professor in my department, sent a message to one of the powers-that-be in Washington urging no retreat on the blockade of Cuba. It would be interesting to know which government official in those feverish days took the time to notice and ponder this message from three Polish-born scholars.”^[11]

Were all three “heroes,” Ulam, Pipes, and Łabędź, Polish-born? Not exactly. Łabędź was born in Simbirsk, the town where Lenin had been born fifty years earlier. Łabędź’s family was displaced to this central Russian region due to World War I and the vagaries of the Bolshevik Revolution, but they happily repatriated soon after Leo’s birth.
So re-patriated? Could Poland be treated as patria, a homeland, for Łabędź? And for Pipes, for Ulam? To some extent – yes. The problem is, to what extent? For Łabędź and Ulam, Polish was the first language; for Pipes it was his second (his family spoke German at home), but even for him, through Polish school and friendships, Polish probably became his most familiar language before 1939 (Professor Pipes now says that when he starts forgetting some English words, Polish, and not German equivalents come to his mind). They all could speak Polish into their old age, not only fluently but with some elegance – characteristic of their pre-war Polish high school education (which is lacking in, for example, Professor Brzeziński’s much worse Polish).
Łabędź’s family was probably the most assimilated to Polish culture among the three considered here. In Ulam’s case, his family regularly read the Polish liberal press (Wiadomości Literacki – the most important cultural weekly), the popular Polish daily Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny, along with the liberal-Zionist, Polish-language Chwila. For Pipes’ family, the Polish-Jewish daily Nasz Przegląd was their basic newspaper. Both Adam and his older brother’s correspondence with family in Lwów was written in Polish.
Assimilated Jews, or rather Poles of Jewish origin, shared an educational experience virtually indistinguishable from that of their Christian peers. For example, Adam Ulam recalled with fondness the classes in Polish literature, Latin, and history at a Lwów high school. Already early on, like “everybody else,” Ulam learned to dislike Germans. Otherwise, “like most Poles of my background I was brought up in the belief in the enormous power and masterful diplomacy of Great Britain. In politics we were all Anglophiles, just as when it came to the arts and culture in general most educated Poles were enamored in France.”^[12]
Ulam’s attachment to his Polish cultural roots lasted until the end of his life, literally. He organized in his Harvard office his everyday coffee break as a remembrance of happy Lwów days, where coffee houses were the most important social places – and important for his family, too. There, he usually regaled his guests at the Russian Research Center with recitations of Polish poetry. When he was dying of cancer in a Boston hospital, his very last wish, as it happened, was to see a new film With Sword and Fire, based on the popular Polish historical novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, which depicts Polish-Ukrainian fights in the seventeenth century. A few months before, while discussing a few things he still hoped to do, he mentioned a brief visit back to Poland and western Ukraine and Lwów (which he jokingly called “Ukrainian-occupied Poland”) in second place as things he most wanted to do – with returning to the Russian Research Center being in first.^[13]
One can joke that Polish literature also played an important part in Richard Pipes’ life. He met his future wife at Cornell University in 1943, after listening to a record with her recitation passages from the national epic of Poland, “Pan Tadeusz” by Adam Mickiewicz. The girl, Irene Roth was from a Jewish family, assimilated in Poland.^[14] Although Pipes was evidently less enamored with the Polish educational system and stereotypes ingrained within it,^[15] for him pre-war Poland was still the site of a happy childhood and relatively safe years as a youth.
The problem of anti-Semitism in the pre-war Poland, though mentioned in all three heroes’ memoirs, was presented by them as not nearly as afflicting as some Western stereotypes of the problem depict it. As Pipes writes:

“Assimilated Jews, such as we were, lived in... an in between world, but I must say that I felt more in common with educated Poles than with Orthodox Jews.... We led normal lives: skating and skiing in the winter, driving out of town for picnics and swimming in the big “Legia” pool in the summer, going to the movies.”^[16]

Pipes, Ulam, and Łabędź were abruptly chased away from this homeland: the homeland of their innocent youth. It cannot be identified completely with Poland, but in many dimensions it was coterminous. For Ulam his homeland was represented probably by his native city, Lwów, to which he was faithful to the end (lying in his deathbed he decided to found his own publishing company, named Leopolis Press – Leopolis being the medieval name of Lwów, city of Lions). For Pipes and Łabędź more territorially dispersed aspects of pre-war Poland probably influenced their respective identities. Though none of them considered themselves just Polish or Polish patriots, all of them could be described by the term used by Pipes for his self-portrait – “non-belonger” – as they all still had many sentiments (more positive rather than negative) with regard to Poland.
This is the first among vague characteristics that they share. A second chracteristic, which can also be derived from the memory snapshot of their 1962 Harvard meeting, is their common antipathy towards Communism and the Soviet system, seen as a real danger to the free world. This antipathy probably did not have much to do with any historical or political science reflection on these subjects in pre-war Poland. While living in Poland, they were simply not interested in Russia and the Soviet Union. Łabędź was studying medicine, Pipes was interested in art history, and Ulam was fascinated with the British empire. Pipes, “accused” on many occasions of being an exponent of a Polish historical bias towards Russia, dismisses outright any suggestions of his intellectual “borrowings” from Kucharzewski’s monumental study of the transformation from White tsardom to Red.^[17] Ulam acknowledged, half jokingly, only one identified Polish influence on his thinking on Communism and Revolution: that of his Polish nanny who answered for the young boys constant queries – “why this or that?” – with a conservative wisdom: “because this is the way it used to be”.^[18]
The formative experience that shaped their basic relations towards the Soviet Union, came on August 23, 1939, together with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
It seems quite meaningful that this is the event that opens historical narration both in Pipes’ and Ulam’s memoirs. As Ulam notes: “My brother and I never shared the belief, so widespread in the East [should be: the West] among the Left, the liberals, and even the Communists, that an accomodation between the two dictators was unthinkable.”^[19] A Polish geopolitical perspective, which tends to diminish ideological differences of the two neighboring powers that can always organize a common aggression against the Polish divide between them, was quite naturally absorbed in all three assimilated Jewish families – and was proved true.
With the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and its rapid consequences, totalitarian reality confronted their lives. Pipes personally witnessed “Warsaw in flames, resembling Dante’s inferno.” He saw the end of his Poland, crushed by Hitler with the help of Stalin.^[20] He managed to escape right after the fall. Though Ulam had escaped just a few days before, the tragedy of the rapid fall of his homeland reached him dramatically with the subsequent news about deaths of his closest family members. The destruction of his (Polish-Jewish) Lwów, occupied first by the Soviets, then by Germans, and then once again by the Soviets, became a great personal trauma for him.
As mentioned earlier, Łabędź had the possibility to learn about the Soviet role in the totalitarian pincers that destroyed Poland in September 1939. While living under Soviet occupation near Lwów he first learned a very prominent feature of this system: an everpresent totalitarian lie, which he called a “Soviet surrealism.”^[21] The new lords of the eastern part of the former Polish state presented a primitive material level of their “civilization” with an official faith as the peak of human possibilities and needs. “We have everything in the Soviet Union,” they tended to repeat. Łabędź tried the scope of this “surrealism” with his question, posed to his new overlords: “Do you have Copenhagen there as well?” “Of course, we have lots of Copenhagens,” he was answered with great assurance.^[22] Deported afterwards (simply due to his being “a Polish bourgeois”) deep into Stalin’s interior system (Gulag), he could see how these Soviet Copenhagens, these wonders of the Soviet utopia looked like.^[23]
Though only Łabędź experienced firsthand Soviet communism in practice right after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, all three Polish-Jewish boys, future experts in the subject, acquired a distinct association of the end of their first, happy period of life with the brutal intervention of Soviet power. This association, shared with hundreds of thousands of Poles that experienced the Soviet expansion in practice, was probably much more fundamental for the three “Sovietologists” opinions on their common subject than any influence of some pre-war Polish studies in this field.^[24]
I presume that it is in this very real experience, or in this very connotation, that one has to look for a future unity of the three in their intransigence towards so-called revisionism in Soviet studies, as well as to other “sophisticated” methods of interpretation of Soviet realities.
The beginning of their careers coincided however, happily for them, with the beginnings of the Cold War, when there was a great demand for specialists in Soviet and Russian matters due to the fact that the Soviet state and system started to be perceived as the main rival of the US and the “free world.” This created opportunities for institutions, university chairs, and political expertise that young emigrants from Eastern Europe were ready to fill. They did not identify themselves as Polish emigrants by then, which made them less susceptible to accusations of possessing a “typically Polish Russophobia,” and made their merger with the new, “Anglo-Saxon” academic mainstream easier.^[25] At the same time they were able to write their first scholarly works without violating their experience of Communism and its Soviet “representative,” describing it as not some beautiful Utopia but a real and aggressive political force.
They had slightly divergent opinions on the origins of this aggressiveness, but they all stressed the fact that this was real phenomenon and had real victims: millions of individuals, and whole nations. This was restated eloquently in Ulam’s conversation with George Urban:

“In the West, we have been spared the imposition of a totalitarian Utopia which has haunted the world for the best part of two centuries; but we have managed to keep our heads above water only because we are standing on the shoulders of submerged Russians, Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians.”^[26]

Actually, neither Pipes, Ulam, nor Łabędź identified themselves fully with some generally “Western” point of view of the Soviet Union and Russia. To the contrary, they criticized a certain myopia of Western politicians and “specialists” dealing with these phenomena. Ulam wrote extensively on “the incredible obtuseness of Western diplomacy,” and on a “totalitarian prudence, almost incomprehensible to the Western mind.”^[27] On many occasions Pipes criticized a “typically Western” mistake of “mirror-imaging” the presumption that “the Soviets thought just as we did.” Łabędź’s career as the editor of “Survey” might be considered as one, uninterrupted crusade against all Western misconceptions and sometimes misplaced infatuations – differently motivated apologies of the Soviet system and Communist ideology.^[28]
What could they see that many of their Western colleagues could not? As Pipes succinctly put it: many of the latter tried to write bloodless histories about a time that was drowned in blood. Having narrowly escape from the carnage perpetrated by Stalin’s agreement with Hitler, future historians of Russia and the Soviet system from Warsaw and Lwów could not forget this basic fact. While they tried to understand the system they analyzed, they never discarded a “judgmental” side of their job. This aspect of their works led them toward a confrontation with so-called revisionists who rejected the concept of “totalitarianism,” denigrated politics and ideology of the Bolsheviks, tried to interpret October 1917 and its consequences as effects of the “wishes of the masses” (Leopold Haimson, Alexander Rabinovitch, Moshe Levin, and others), deny or diminish Stalin’s genocidal history (J. Arch Getty, Robert W. Thurston, and Stephen Wheatcroft come to mind here as new paragons of this tendency), and regard communism as a great idea that got diverted (Jerry F. Hough, David Mandel or Stephen Cohen – to name just a few who were quite openly criticized by the heroes of these article).^[29] According to Ulam, “Revisionism was based on bad history, and on the inappropriate assumption that there must be two sides to every political argument.”^[30]
Ulam, Pipes, and Łabędź, however, were by no means alone in their opposition against a tide of revisionism in the sixties and seventies, though they belonged to the most prominent (along with Robert Conquest perhaps) critics of this new “perspective.” What singled them out more distinctly was the concept of empire that they used to describe and to understand the conduct of the Soviet Union. They remembered that besides individuals, there were nation-victims in the system.^[31] Pipes was the first scholar in the US to present a systematic view on the Soviet Union as a new imperial system built on the ruins of the old, Russian-tsarist one. His 1954 book, The Formation of the Soviet Union, reminded readers of the fact that there were not only Russians, but many other nations too, that should be taken into account when describing the nature of the system and its functioning. This fact was quite obvious to any emigrant from Poland (as well as from the Baltic republics, Ukraine, or Hungary), but seemed rather exotic to most Western specialists of Soviet affairs. George Kennan wrote at the time that Ukraine was as fully integrated into the Soviet Union as Pennsylvania into the US – and his “understanding” was for a long time more absorbed by Western audiences than Pipes’. Ulam, in his analyses of Soviet behavior in the international arena, always tried to remind his readers of how important the task of controlling over some 100 million non-Russian people in Eastern and East-Central Europe was. This point of view, taking into account the simple fact that the Communist system expanded not through a “natural” revolutionary process but rather through an external, military aggression stemming from the Moscow-center to non-Russian peripheries, strengthened all three historians rejection of the revisionists’ tenets. In most of their works they remembered and stressed that Communist regimes were widely unpopular – not only because they represented Communist ideology, but also because they represented subjugation to a foreign, that is to Russian power: “The Soviet Union was not only a police state, but also an empire with the Russians as the dominant nation. If the veil of fear were lifted from society, would Ukrainians, Balts, and other ethnic groups continue to acquiesce in Russian domination?”^[32]
This rhetorical question resounded through all, so to speak, Polish traditions of (Russian) empire-breaking efforts, and the permeated historical analyses and Sovietological assessments of Ulam, Pipes, and Łabędź.^[33]
Pipes went up to the last consequences of this particular perspective, stressing – functionally first, and later structurally – a continuation between the two empires, Russian and Soviet. He set out this concept historically in his hotly debated Russia Under the Old Regime (1974), and soon drew political lessons from it:

“To understand some of techniques presently employed on a global scale by Soviet diplomacy one can do no better than study the history of Moscow’s conquest of Novgorod (fifteenth century), the Golden Horde (sixteenth century), and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (eighteenth century), as well as the efforts of Imperial Russia in nineteenth century (largely frustrated by Western countermeasures) to partition the Ottoman Empire and China. No other country has a comparable wealth of accumulated experience in the application of external and internal pressures on neighbors for the purpose of softening them prior to conquest.”^[34]

While he served as the NSC Soviet and East European Desk Director during the first years of Ronald Reagan’s administration, Pipes was at first “suspected” of being the author of the resounding phrase of one of his patron’s speeches – namely, “the Evil Empire.” When Pipes was asked many years later during one of his visits in Yeltsin’s Russia, whether he was really the author of this formula, he answered characteristically: “K sozhaleniu net” (Unfortunately, not).^[35]
Ulam never identified the two imperialisms, and even openly criticized a suggestion implied in some of Pipes’ statements that the Soviet system could be understood as a logical continuation of Tsarist autocracy. The author of Ideologies and Illusions noted a lot of tempting historical parallels between White and Red Tsardom, and acknowledged a Russian element in the Soviet form of Communism, stemming from a “particularly authoritarian conception of socialism in the 19th century, to which were added a very Russian form of xenophobia and Russian nationalism.” But, with all that, he stressed in most of his works that “the totalitarian character of Communist regimes stems from the basic tenets of Communism itself. ...Communism has to be tyrannical and imperialistic because it is Communism”.^[36]
In his rejection of a simplistic version of Kucharzewski’s (or Pipes’) equation between “Russian” and “Soviet,” Ulam intended to imply that Russia is by no means doomed to stay in a vicious circle of autocracy and totalitarian imperialism. He saw the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia, as well as particular traits of its expansionist policy, not merely as a result of the cultural and historical complexities of Russian heritage. Ideology, of course, as well as personalities (that of Lenin or Stalin), and sheer chance have played their part alongside the economic forces and general tendencies of European politics.^[37] As one of his (and Pipes’) pupils, Nina Tumarkin, aptly observed,

“…for Ulam there was no Soviet system, but rather a collection of knowable and comprehensible (to an extent) actions taken by strangers in a strange land, a way of being in the world, pieced together, often ad hoc, by particular men (and, rarely, women) born to particular parents in certain geographical and historical settings.”^[38]

Nonetheless, Ulam, along with Pipes, saw at least this one obvious trait of continuity: the imperial one. He quoted on many occasions one of Catherine II chancellor’s adage – “That which stops growing begins to rot” – as a warning that was still very much on the mind of his Soviet successors. And he kept repeating in many of his Soviet foreign policy analyses that its guiding principle was imperial rather than ideological (Communist), and so it could be countered appropriately: that it

“…simply moved in any direction where there appeared to be vacuum and lack of resistance. Wherever the vacuum threatened to be filled up by the interest and active support of the other great power... aggressive policies were given up or indirect methods were substituted for direct ones.”^[39]

Ulam, Pipes, and Łabędź all shared this particular view, which identified the Soviet Union and its outer sphere of domination as an empire. But, what is even more important for their specific stand in “Sovietological” community, is their common rejection of a “realistic” justification of empire. Some “realists,” especially during the detente era (Henry Kissinger,^[40] and to some extent, George Kennan after 1956, can be seen as the most outspoken representatives of this school of thought) expounded a view that it is possible and even advisable to keep the imperial nature of the Soviet adversary satisfied with a stabilization of its sphere of influence. They tended to view chaos as the only alternative to empire.
Pipes, Łabędź, and Ulam did not accept this alternative as real. They knew that spheres of influence, treated by Kennan or Kissinger so abstractly as obvious means of diminishing international clashes, consist of real people and living nations that do not like to perceive themselves as anybody’s spheres of influence, but as living communities, with their own traditions and natural rights. In contrast with “realists,” they not only saw the imperial nature of the adversary but they judged it – from a point of view of the oppressed, and from a point of view of the viability of the Soviet empire. While Kennan kept asking “What would you expect to put in place of the Soviet government?”^[41] he presented his deep conviction that the Soviet system could be abolished only from outside, and that the only forces that matter in the great game of international competition are the great powers. Pipes, Łabędź, and Ulam remembered that there – that is within the Soviet empire – lived real people, who might dislike the system, but could foment decisive pressure for its demise, and also create a – and better – order by themselves. And that they deserved it.^[42] It seems that this perspective had something to do with both the place of birth (put under the Soviet rule), and historical experiences of the three historians. “There are dangers attending the fall of any great empire, but on balance I am inclined to think that the disintegration of the iniquitous Soviet system is infinitely less destabilizing than its continuing existence would be” was Ulam’s firm answer to a “realistic” fear, dominating the State Department as late as 1990, and is quoted here as an example of a common stance for all three “heroes” in this respect.^[43]
They analyzed the historical and political phenomenon of the Soviet system as scholars, but they looked forward its final collapse as people whose relatives and most of their friends of youth were victims of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. They observed signs of an imminent crisis of the empire in Eastern Europe, and in Poland in particular (since 1978, Pope John Paul II’s election, and 1980, the beginning of Solidarity movement), while at the same time this perspective was mostly disregarded by the “realists”, as well as by the vast majority of Western observers of the Soviet system who saw either American pressure or Gorbachev’s reforms as the only important reason for the final collapse.^[44]
Their common perspective combined elements of a serious warning of a real danger of the Soviet expansionism with a firm conviction that the enemy had its weaknesses. They all knew the empire’s soft underbelly, and they wanted to expose it to the Western public. To compel the Soviet Union to turn inward – from conquest to reform – was a common thread in numerous appeals made by Pipes, Ulam, and Łabędź in their publications throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties.^[45] By identifying the source of the international aggressiveness of the Soviet system in its oppressive internal nature, they were all well aware of the consequences of reform for the empire. Adam Ulam expressed this conviction when he wrote:

“I had no expectation that the Soviet system could evolve peacefully into “socialism with a human face.” ...I, on the contrary, believed that any attempt at a basic reform would lead not to democracy but to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”^[46]

Was this belief somehow typically Polish? Ulam, Pipes, and Łabędź never shared the opinion (which had dominated the Sovietological community since the sixties) that the Communist government was popular and therefore stable. They understood that though the Soviet system enjoyed a degree of control of domestic and foreign affairs that no democratic state could match, it was exactly this control that deprived the system of the public support that democratic states are usually able to muster in times of crisis.^[47] It seems that there was nothing particularly Polish in this observation – it was expounded in the most eloquent way by an astute French observer of a contrast between democratic and autocratic systems, Alexis de Tocqueville, almost one and a half centuries before the demise of the Soviet Union. Maybe what the three emigrants from the Second Republic of Poland could take from their homeland’s political perspective on Russia was a tendency to reveal the creaky machinery of deception that tried to hide the internal weaknesses of the seemingly monolithic empire. Maybe, but even in this respect we can mention another nineteenth century intellectual French, Marquis Astolphe de Custine, with his La Russie en 1839 depicted as “l’empire des façades,” as the best, symbolic exponent of this view.
Probably not one common trait of historical perspective of the three Polish-born ethnically-Jewish English-writing scholars can be contested as exclusively Polish. It is rather their combination that allows us to guess some influence of their homeland’s historical and geographical influence on their perception of Russia and the Soviet Union. The nature and the extent of this influence is obviously hard to precisely determine. And even more so that the three authors never bothered seriously with this question. They never consecrated any important part of their scholarly efforts to their Polish homeland’s history – none of them became a “specialist” in Poland. Neither did they personally identify themselves with “Polishness.”^[48] All of them would, however, have probably subscribed to the following confession expressed by Richard Pipes when he reached his eightieth birthday: “Coming from Poland, a country which had bordered Russia for a thousand years and lived under its occupation for over century, I unconsciously shared Polish attitudes toward Russia.”^[49]
Whatever these attitudes are – and we tried to find at least a few of them here – Pipes, Ulam, and Łabędź were probably more effective in their distribution throughout the Western intellectual and political imagination after 1945, than most of their Polish colleagues who were making a conscious effort to propagate a Polish view on the “Russian/Soviet enigma.” As far as I can judge, none of the three “heroes” expressed a similar ambition. For Ulam, Pipes, and Łabędź, the answer to the most vital question of any emigrant – who are we? – would be neither obvious nor simple. A different question, also prominent on any political emigrant’s mental map – where is the enemy, and who is the enemy? – would however be answered by them probably with much greater certainty. This answer to a large extent fits a Polish mental map, where a real experience of Russian imperial expansion, a “bequeathed instinct” of the weak spots of the enemy, as well as an even much more vivid memory of the Communist system coming from the East first with a naked force of Tukhachevsky’s armies in 1920, and then of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact consequences – all this coexisted for decades, and during which proved to be formative for Leopold Łabędź, Adam Ulam, and Richard Pipes.
These three eminent “non-belongers” never succumbed to “group think,” but their common fate and memories, their common “victimization” sealed with the pact of August 23, 1939, made them susceptible for at least one, negative, side of Polish historical experiences: the one that was filled up by Poland’s powerful eastern neighbor’s political activities. They were able to analyze these activities with new instruments, and from new perspectives, which they reached during their academic training at American and British (in Łabędź’s case) universities. But they all remembered too well that their field of studies is not a theoretical model. This was their Polish years, the final, tragic days of their youths’ remembrance. To some extent, at least. That is all we can guess.