Moshe Lewin - Biography - Academic Career

Academic Career

Newly credentialed with his doctorate degree, Lewin was named Director of Study at l'École des hautes études, Paris, where he served from 1965 to 1966. During this time he converted his Sorbonne dissertation into a book manuscript, which was published in 1966 in French and translated into English in 1968 as Russian Peasants and Soviet Power.

This monograph dealt with the Soviet grain procurement crisis of 1928 and the associated political battle, a bitter fight which resulted in a decision to forcibly collectivize 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 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, although the project seems to have been abandoned, perhaps as duplicative of the work of British historians E.H. Carr and R.W. Davies.

Lewin's other 1968 book, Lenin's Last Struggle, was an extended essay charting the evolution of Lenin'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 historical development. In this Lewin again presented a perspective which again stood in marked contrast to the voluminous writings of the totalitarianist school that dominated academia, which cast the USSR as a monolithic and fundamentally unchanging structure.

From 1967 to 1968, Lewin was a senior fellow at Columbia University in New York City. Upon completion of his Columbia fellowship, Lewin took a post as a research professor at Birmingham University, England from 1968 until 1978. During this interval he 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 had 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.

After leaving Birmingham, Lewin returned to the United States, where he assumed a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement in 1995.

Although regarded as a doyen of social history and a godfather of the so-called "revisionist" movement of young social historians who came to the fore in the field of Soviet studies during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Lewin's own work largely centered on the relationship between high politics and economic policy. 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 book, 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. Lewin emerged as a critic of the politicized "What are they up to?" orientation of Soviet studies in favor of a more apolitical perspective attempting to answer the question "What makes the Russians tick?"

Lewin's final works attempted to analyze the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and his brief efforts at top-down reform of the communist system and to put the rise and fall of Soviet communism into historical perspective. In his final book, The Soviet Century, published in 2005, Lewin argued that the political and economic system of the former Soviet Union constituted a sort of "bureaucratic absolutism" akin to the Prussian bureaucratic monarchy of the 18th Century which had "ceased to accomplish the task it had once been capable of performing" and therefore given way.