Moshe LewinReseñas

Moshe Lewin was certainly one of Lenin’s admirers. Though this short book is anti-totalitarian and sympathetic to Trotsky, it is surprisingly uncritical of Lenin on key issues. But it is clear from reading it that Lenin’s last struggle — his political activities in the final two years of his life — were focussed on what would now be seen as minor issues. Instead of doing his utmost to get rid of the toxic Stalin, Lenin suggested in one letter that perhaps the Communist Party should consider someone else for the job Stalin held. The one bit of genuine moral outrage that we see is Lenin’s fury at how Stalin addressed Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, in a phone call. That got Lenin’s attention and a demand for an apology (which Stalin then offered). For years I heard that this book was essential reading to understand Russian Communism and the Soviet Union. Having now finally read it, I don’t think that’s the case. Lewin is too much in Lenin’s thrall to take an objective and critical look at the dictator. Others have done better work on the subject.

Organization of the book could have been handled better. I understand that this is revisionist in that it undermines some capitalist propaganda (and some ML at that as well) but Lenin's actions can't be absolved just because of historical circumstance or necessity, his whole regime building was a betrayal to socialism and we're supposed to absolve him of these sins because he woke up in the last month's of his life? Lenin's sins against socialism can not be that easily forgiven but the book does place those sins I'm context and it calls them for what they are. It is honest and revealing and for that I gave it four.

"Lenin's Last Struggle" is basically an overview of Lenin's opinions and views on a great variety of policy matters in the period from the Revolution to his death, as portrayed by the Soviet historian Moshe Lewin. Lewin has a tendency to be too positive about Lenin (at least in a moral kind of estimation) than is perhaps warranted, and that goes for this book as well, but it is fortunately not uncritical. The overview of Lenin's views itself is excellent and his contrasting of Lenin to Stalin well-done. The book's main flaw is that it is too short, with a mere 141 pages of actual content, and that Lewin generally assumes a pretty strong knowledge of history of the Soviet Union. In that sense, this book is mostly useful as a good summary of the Lenin of 1918-1924 for people already interested and somewhat knowledgable about the USSR.

The book includes a series of appendices with primary documents by Lenin. Very useful is the inclusion of Lenin's famous essay "Better Fewer, But Better", which is crucial for understanding Marxism-Leninism in practice.½

Lewin has outdone himself in this overview of the history of the USSR. Some potential readers might perhaps be somewhat dismayed by the fact that this book was published with radical leftist publisher Verso, but have no fears: this is no apologia for totalitarianism.

On the contrary, Lewin gives a balanced and very thorough overview of each of the periods of Soviet history, beginning with its Leninist inception and ending with Gorbachov. Most of the book deals with his description of the Stalinist period, and this is also the book's main strength. On the one hand Lewin effortlessly dispels the myths around the gigantic numbers of deaths that have been 'credited' to Stalin by less informed writers such as Conquest and Montefiore; using both statistical records of Chrushchov's period (hardly a fan of Stalin) and the most up-to-date Russian research by Khlevniuk and others, he shows that in fact the death toll of Stalin will have been in the millions rather than tens of millions.

Nevertheless, that is evil enough, and Lewin has no qualms in showing the horrid, oppressive and stifling side of communism. Not only Stalin gets this deserved treatment, but Brezhnev and similar people equally. Lewin also takes the time to look at the development of various socio-economic factors in Soviet history, such as the too often overlooked effects of rapid urbanization in the 1970s.

The only downside of the book will be to some that it pays relatively little attention to World War II, preferring instead to concentrate on the political and social history of the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, the best in its kind, and far to be preferred over more mainstream works.½

Focuses on the key features of the Soviet Union: For those already familiar with the history of the USSR, Moshe Lewin's "The Soviet Century" is a very exciting book. Instead of offering a comprehensive overview of Soviet history, Lewin focuses on the aspects of the country and its system that have been neglected by previous scholarship. Amazingly, he identifies these phenomena as central to actually understanding the Soviet Union, and blames their neglect on both the unavailability of the relevant documents as well as plain "ideological frenzy" (1). Promising not "to play the role of counsel for the prosecution or for the defence" (274-5), Lewin bases his book almost exclusively on recent Russian-language scholarship dealing with the newly-discovered documents, hinting at a more comprehensive future work that will incorporate English-language scholarship as well.

Lewin focuses primarily on the means through which the rulers of the Soviet Union controlled the country and their subordinates. The first of three parts, "A Regime and its Psyche", focuses on Stalin, how he obtained absolute power, and how he protected it through purges, terror and elaborate structures of control over the party and bureaucracy. It begins in the 1920s with the "de-politicization" of the Communist Party, its abandonment of socialism and absorption by the bureaucracy. Lewin explores in great detail the apparatus set up by Stalin to control the Party, especially the NKVD and its "industrial empire" of labor camps (113). He concludes by characterizing Stalin's rule as an "agrarian despotism", a combination of old-style Tsarism with a new focus on industrialization (146). "Focused on the cult of a supreme leader", it was "a despotism that allowed free range to one individual's delirium... and a huge repressive system" (147).

The second part of the book, "The 1960s and Beyond: From a New Model to a New Impasse", focuses on the second great neglected aspect of Soviet history, the bureaucracy, which cemented its hold on power after Stalin's death, despite efforts by Khrushchev and some others to put the Party back on top. The result was "bureaucratic absolutism... much more modern than that of the Tsars or Stalin [but of] the same species" (380). Lewin includes in this section a lot of nitty-gritty details of the structure and functioning of various bureaucratic institutions (especially Gosplan and Gossnab), and also profiles some post-Stalinist leaders such as Kosygin, Andropov, Mikoyan, Khrushchev and Gromyko. In addition, he addresses the "avalanche of urbanization" (202) and other social development in these decades.

Themes such as urbanization and long-term developments in society are the focus of the third and final part, "The Soviet Century: Russia in Historical Context". This section is in many ways the most interesting, as it addresses thematic issues over the whole of soviet history: backwardness, modernity, urbanization, bureaucracy, demography, etc. Lewin describes "a social and cultural landscape undergoing massive changes" (319) and criticizes other authors for focusing exclusively on the regime and its leaders, as though Soviet society did not exist or were unimportant. Lewin also criticizes those who tend to "Over-Staliniz[e] the whole of Soviet history, by extending it backwards and forwards", and he argues that the changes following Stalin's death "should be acknowledged, and not dismissed with contempt on the grounds that a democratic system offers much more" (324). He distinguishes two different comparisons that can be made: between the Soviet Union and the democratic West, and between Stalinism and the bureaucratic stagnation that followed it, when "improvement in social conditions" (324) led to high levels of development in terms of "demography, education, health, urbanization, [and] the role of science" (373), which were to positively decline during the 1990s.

"The Soviet Century", though focusing for the most part on nitty-gritty details of apparatus and bureaucracy, deals with the largest questions of the central nature of the Soviet Union. Thus Lewin can conclude that the sorry story of the Soviet Union "cannot be described as the 'failure of socialism', because socialism was not there in the first place" (308) and that the USSR never actually "represented the alternative to capitalism it sometimes claimed to be" (359). It should be of great interest to all students of the history and nature of the Soviet Union.