A Question of Sourcing

The distinguished historian and Polish-American Richard Pipes passed away earlier this year.

Pipes is sometimes said to have taught and studied the "Polish version of Russian history," a line sometimes attributed to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The idea behind the phrase, which is intended as a criticism is this: some anti-Communist Russians (Solzhenitsyn among them) see the influx of Marxist-Leninist ideas into Russia as a disastrous accident, a hijacking of a country that had until then been following a quite different path. Eastern European anti-Communists, though, see the same influx as a natural convergence, as when someone with a genetic predisposition to the gout starts showing symptoms thereof. The "Polish version of Russian history" is the latter.

The jailed are seldom inclined to make excuses for their jailers.

I had encountered the quote before, but had never been curious enough to track down the source.

Recently, I became curious and did a little googling. The phrase "Polish version of Russian history" with regard to Pipes apparently originated with Mark Falcoff, writing in COMMENTARY in 2003, who claimed that he had heard an (unspecified) Russian emigre refer to Pipes' work with that phrase. In the broader context of Falcoff's article it certainly seems that the emigre he had in mind might have been Solzhenitsyn, although Falcoff is not explicit about that.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/vixi-by-richard-pipes/

Curiosity sated.

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