IN: 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".
QUESTION: Who was Richard Pipes?
IN: Little Richard was born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia. He was the third of twelve children of Leva Mae (nee Stewart) and Charles "Bud" Penniman. His father was a church deacon who sold bootlegged moonshine on the side and owned a nightclub, the Tip In Inn.

Little Richard stated that as a child, he only played with girls and felt feminine, which was the source of jokes and homophobic ridicule at his expense. Caught wearing his mother's makeup and wardrobe at times, he was brutally punished by his father. He began having sexual encounters with boys by his teen years and also occasionally had sex with older women. Because of his effeminate mannerisms, his father kicked him out of their family home at 15. As Richard later explained in 2010, "my daddy put me out of the house. He said he wanted seven boys, and I had spoiled it, because I was gay." He first became involved in voyeurism in his early twenties, when a female friend would drive him around and pick up men who would allow him to watch them have sex in the backseat of cars. He was once arrested after a gas station attendant in Macon reported sexual activity in a car occupied by Little Richard and a couple. Cited on a sexual misconduct charge, he spent three days in jail and was temporarily banned from performing in Macon, Georgia.  During the early 1950s, Little Richard had appeared as a drag performer in various burlesque shows. By the time he entered the Chitlin' Circuit, he began using makeup regularly, influenced by Billy Wright, who recommended his brand of makeup to him, Pancake 31. Later, as he began experiencing success in the mid-1950s, he made members of his band use makeup as a means to gain entry into white clubs during performances. He later told a columnist, "I wore the make-up so that white men wouldn't think I was after the white girls. It made things easier for me, plus it was colorful too." In 2000, Richard told Jet magazine, "I figure if being called a sissy would make me famous, let them say what they want to." Though he was gay, Little Richard recalled female fans sending him naked photos and their phone numbers.  While attending Oakwood College, Richard recalled a male student exposed himself to him. After the incident was reported to the student's father, Little Richard withdrew from the college. In 1962, he was again arrested after he was caught spying on men urinating at men's toilets at a Trailways bus station in Long Beach, California. Richard returned to participating in sexual orgies after his return to secular music in the 1960s. In 1984, while he claimed homosexuality was "unnatural" and "contagious", he would tell Charles White that he was "omnisexual" after he was asked about his sex life. In 1995, Little Richard told Penthouse that he always knew he was gay, saying "I've been gay all my life". In 2007, Mojo Magazine referred to Little Richard as "bisexual".
QUESTION:
Did he ever marry or date a woman for "cover"?