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Moshe Lewin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lewin as he appeared in the middle 1980s

Moshe "Misha"Lewin (/ˌləˈvin/lə-VEEN; 7 November 1921 – 14 August 2010) was a scholar ofRussian andSoviet history. He was a major figure in the school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s and asocialist.[1]

Biography

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Moshe Lewin was born in 1921 inWilno,Poland (nowVilnius,Lithuania), the son of ethnicJewish parents who were later murdered in theHolocaust. Lewin lived in Poland for the first 20 years of his life, fleeing to theSoviet Union in June 1941 just ahead of the invadingNazi army.[2]

For the next two years, Lewin worked as acollective farm worker and as ablast furnace operator in a metallurgical factory.[2] In summer 1943, he enlisted in theSoviet army and was sent to officers' training school. He was promoted on the last day of thewar.[2]

In 1946, Lewin returned to Poland before emigrating toFrance. A believer inLabor Zionism from his youth, in 1951 Lewin emigrated again, this time toIsrael, where he worked for a time on akibbutz and as ajournalist. In his thirties, he took up academic studies,[2] receiving hisBachelor of Arts fromTel Aviv University, in 1961.[3]

That same year, Lewin was awarded a research scholarship to theSorbonne inParis, where he studied thecollectivization of Soviet agriculture.[4] In 1964, he gained hisPh.D there.[3]

Lewin died on 14 August 2010 inParis. His papers are housed at theUniversity of Pennsylvania inPhiladelphia.

Academic career and major publications

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Newly qualified with his doctorate, Lewin was named Director of Study at l'École des hautes études, Paris, where he served from 1965 to 1966.[3] During this time he converted his Sorbonne dissertation into a book, published in French in 1966 and in English two years later asRussian Peasants and Soviet Power.

Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (1968)

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Thismonograph dealt with theSoviet grain procurement crisis of 1928 and the associated political battle, a bitter fight which resulted in a decision to forciblycollectivize Soviet agriculture.

In this work, Lewin emphasized collectivization as a practical (albeit extreme) solution to a real world problem facing the Soviet regime, one out of several potential solutions to a crisis situation. Rather than an inevitable and predestined action, collectivization was cast as a brutal manifestation ofrealpolitik — a view in marked contrast to the traditionalisthistoriography of the day.Russian Peasants and Soviet Power was initially projected as the first part of a long study of thesocial history of Soviet Russia down to 1934,[5] although the project seems to have been abandoned, perhaps as duplicative of the work of British historiansE.H. Carr andR.W. Davies.

Lenin's Last Struggle (1968)

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Lewin's other 1968 publication,Lenin's Last Struggle, was an extended essay that charted the evolution ofLenin's thinking about the growing bureaucracy of Soviet Russia. In it, Lewin additionally chronicled the politics of the post-Lenin succession struggle during the time of Lenin's final illness, emphasizing "lost" alternatives to the actual path of historical development.

In this book Lewin again offered a perspective in marked contrast to the voluminous writings of thetotalitarianist school that then dominated academic writing about the Soviet Union, casting the USSR as a monolithic and fundamentally unchanging structure.

Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (1974)

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From 1967 to 1968, Lewin was a senior fellow atColumbia University inNew York City.[3] Upon completion of his Columbia fellowship, he took a post as a research professor atBirmingham University,England from 1968 until 1978.[3]

During this period Lewin publishedPolitical Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers, which, along with the work ofPrinceton University professorStephen F. Cohen, helped to restore the name and ideas ofNikolai Bukharin to the academic debate concerning the Soviet 1920s. Lewin noted that many of the same criticisms which Bukharin leveled against Stalin during the political battles of 1928 and 1929 in the USSR were later "adopted by current reformers as their own," thereby adding a contemporary importance to the study of the historical past.[6]

After leaving Birmingham, Lewin returned to the United States. He took up a professorship at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement in 1995.[3]

The Making of the Soviet System (1985)

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Although regarded as a doyen ofsocial history and a godfather of the so-called "revisionist" movement of young social historians who came to the fore in Soviet studies during the 1970s and 1980s, Lewin's own work largely centered on the relationship betweenhigh politics and economic policy.

One notable exception came with the publication in 1985 of a collection of Lewin's essays and lectures entitledThe Making of the Soviet System. In this work, Lewin visited a number of key topics of social history such as rural socialmores, popularreligion,customary law in rural society, the social structure of the Russian peasantry, and social relations within Soviet industry. He emerged as a critic of the politicized "What are they up to?" orientation of Soviet studies, favoring a more apolitical perspective that attempted to answer the question, "What makes the Russians tick?"[7]

The Soviet Century (2005)

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Lewin's final works attempted to analyze the rise ofMikhail Gorbachev, and his brief efforts at top-down reform of the communist system, and to set the rise and fall of Soviet communism in historical perspective.

In his last book,The Soviet Century (2005), Lewin argued that the political and economic system of the former Soviet Union constituted a sort of "bureaucratic absolutism" akin to thePrussian bureaucratic monarchy of the 18th century which had "ceased to accomplish the task it had once been capable of performing" and therefore given way.[8][9]

Legacy

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In 1992, Lewin was honored with aFestschrift edited by historians Nick Lampert and Gábor Rittersporn entitledStalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath: Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin.[10] Contributors to the volume included economic historiansAlec Nove andR.W. Davies as well as key social historians such asLewis Siegelbaum andRonald Grigor Suny, among others.

In the LewinFestschrift, co-editor Lampert summarized Lewin's work in the following manner: "The scope of Lewin's explorations has been very wide, dealing with a panorama of social classes and groups, with the lower depths of society as well as the bosses, with informal social norms as well as formal law, with popular religion as well as establishedideology. The range of his intellectual debts is also broad, owing as much toWeber as toMarx, emphasising as much the power of ideologies and myths in human behaviour as the weight of economic structure. The key thing is the perception of society as a socio-cultural whole, though Lewin always remained open to new pathways that might appear in the course of research, alwayseclectic in the best sense, always eschewing the pursuit of a grand theory for all history — a pursuit which only leads you away from the rich canvas of concrete human experience."[4]

Footnotes

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  1. ^Suny, Ronald Grigor (2011).Moshe Lewin, 1921-2010. pp. 240–242.
  2. ^abcdNick Lampert, "Preface" to Nick Lampert and Gábor Rittersporn,Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath: Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1992, p. x.
  3. ^abcdefKaiyi Chen,Finding Aid for the Moshe Lewin PapersArchived 2007-06-18 at theWayback Machine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1998.
  4. ^abNick Lampert, "Preface," p. xi.
  5. ^Moshe Lewin, "Author's Foreword" toRussian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968, p. 11.
  6. ^Moshe Lewin, "Introduction" toPolitical Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. xiii.
  7. ^Moshe Lewin, "Introduction" toThe Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia, New York: Pantheon, 1985, pp. 5-6.
  8. ^Moshe Lewin,The Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2005, p. 383.
  9. ^"Moshe Lewin - What should be known about USSR?".pages.uoregon.edu. Retrieved2022-11-03.
  10. ^Nick Lampert and Gábor Rittersporn,Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath: Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1992. Published in the United States by M.E. Sharpe.

Works

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  • La Paysannerie et le Pouvoir Sovietique. Paris: Mouton, 1966. English edition:Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, translated by Irene Nove with John Biggart, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968.
  • Le Dernier Combat de Lénine, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967. English edition:Lenin's Last Struggle, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Random House, 1968.
  • Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Reissued asStalinism and the Seeds of Soviet Reform: The Debates of the 1960s (1991).
  • The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia, New York: Pantheon, 1985.
  • The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
  • Russia — USSR — Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate, New York: The New Press, 1995.
  • Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, Co-edited withIan Kershaw. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  • The Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2005.

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