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Moshe " Misha" Lewin ( ; 7 November 1921 – 14 August 2010) was a Polish-born scholar of Russian and Soviet history. He was a major figure in the school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s and a socialist.
For the next two years, Lewin worked as a collective farm worker and as a blast furnace operator in a metallurgical factory. In summer 1943, he enlisted in the Soviet army and was sent to officers' training school. He was promoted on the last day of the war.
In 1946, Lewin returned to Poland before emigrating to France. A believer in Labor Zionism from his youth, in 1951 Lewin emigrated again, this time to Israel, where he worked for a time on a kibbutz and as a journalist. In his thirties, he took up academic studies, receiving his Bachelor of Arts from Tel Aviv University, in 1961.Kaiyi Chen, Finding Aid for the Moshe Lewin Papers , University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1998.
That same year, Lewin was awarded a research scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied the collectivization of Soviet agriculture.Nick Lampert, "Preface," p. xi. In 1964, he gained his Ph.D. there.
Lewin died on 14 August 2010 in Paris. His papers are housed at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
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 of realpolitik — a view in marked contrast to the traditionalist historiography of the day. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power was initially projected as the first part of a long study of the social history of Soviet Russia down to 1934,Moshe Lewin, "Author's Foreword" to Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968, p. 11. although the project seems to have been abandoned, perhaps as duplicative of the work of British historians E.H. Carr and R.W. Davies.
In this book Lewin again offered a perspective in marked contrast to the voluminous writings of the totalitarianism that then dominated academic writing about the Soviet Union, casting the USSR as a monolithic and fundamentally unchanging structure.
During this period Lewin published Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers, which, along with the work of Princeton University professor Stephen F. Cohen, helped to restore the name and ideas of Nikolai 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.Moshe Lewin, "Introduction" to Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. xiii.
After leaving Birmingham, Lewin returned to the United States. He took up a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement in 1995.
One notable exception came with the publication in 1985 of a collection of Lewin's essays and lectures entitled The Making of the Soviet System. In this work, Lewin visited a number of key topics of social history such as rural social mores, popular religion, 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?"Moshe Lewin, "Introduction" to The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia, New York: Pantheon, 1985, pp. 5-6.
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 the bureaucratic monarchy of the 18th century which had "ceased to accomplish the task it had once been capable of performing" and therefore given way.Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2005, p. 383.
In the Lewin Festschrift, 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 established ideology. The range of his intellectual debts is also broad, owing as much to Max Weber as to Karl Marx, 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, always eclecticism 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."
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