Born in Poland, Richard Pipes fled the country with his family when Germany invaded it in 1939. After reaching the United States a year later, Pipes began his education at Muskingum College, which was interrupted in 1943 when he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and sent to Cornell to study Russian. He completed his bachelor's degree at Cornell in 1946 and earned his doctorate at Harvard University four years later. Pipes taught at Harvard from 1950 until his retirement in 1996, and was director of Harvard's Russian Research Center from 1968-1973. A campaigner for a tougher foreign policy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in 1976, he led a group of analysts in a reassessment of Soviet foreign policy and military power. He served as director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs at the National Security Council from 1981 until 1983, after which he returned to Harvard, where he finished his career as Baird Professor Emeritus of History.