From Stalin to Gorbachev: Moshe Lewin on Soviet History

Abstract

There is a superb caricature in the form of a diptych by Josh Brown introducing the Moshe Lewin section of Visions of History, a collection of interviews with thirteen contemporary historians (by the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization [MARHO], New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). Brown bases his two sketches on a famous photo of Lenin and Trotsky among the delegates to the second Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1920. In the first sketch, Moshe Lewin, in a tall fur hat, looking like a proud and happy delegate, stands just behind Trotsky. In the second, Stalinized sketch, Trotsky has vanished, leaving a slightly puzzled Lewin eyeing the space, his smile still there, but wondering about the missing figure. Hmmm, what is going on here? What a wonderful pictorial metaphor for the dilemmas of studying the Soviet past, particularly for a historian like Lewin, who identifies with the Russian people and with the ideals propelled them to revolution in 1917. Overall, as in the second sketch, Lewin has responded coolly, a bit saddened, a bit bemused, skeptically, not hysterically or polemically, about the subject he decided, at middle age, to make his life's work?the fate ofthe Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian masses it affected. Lewin's life was saved by Russian soldiers during the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941, and for the next five years he lived and worked with Russian peasants and workers. knew, he tells us in the MARHO interview, that if I ever had the chance to write history, it would be the history of those layers. Strictly speaking, he has not always kept to mission, as a brief look at his published work shows. Traditional political, economic, and ideological subjects loom large in his bibliography, but the popular layers are never far from view. Indeed, his general theoretical standpoint?it is not a novelty, but Lewin has most