Moshe Lewin

A leading historian draws on an archive of previously unavailable material and guides us through the inner workings of Soviet power, from October 1917 to the final collapse in the early 1990s.

The Soviet Century

Tony

I think that I have to start this review with a disclaimer: I am not a Stalinist, and by no means am I defending Stalin. That said, I found that some of the criticisms that Lewin presents are good and factual, while some are purely polemical, and I was left wondering why this book is recommended on Reddit as a guide to understanding the Soviet government. I will give the most egregious example of the polemical anti-Stalin rhetoric. On page 33, Lewin writes:

This becomes clearer if we refer to one of his later declarations to ‘future cadres’, students at the Sverdlov Party University. Here he basically explained that ‘for us, objective difficulties do not exist. The only problem is cadres. If things are not progressing, or if they go wrong, the cause is not to be sought in any objective conditions: it is the fault of the cadres’.

The real enemies were objective limitations (which Stalin declared non-existed 'for us' in 1924)[...]

I was pretty surprised that there's no citation of this speech since all the writings and speeches of Stalin are published somewhere. If it's a quote from an archive, I would still expect a citation. But this quote also stands out because Lewin extrapolates a lot from Stalin's character traits from it. It's mentioned over and over again, so I decided to try and find it myself. Fortunately, as I speak Russian, I tried to google something akin to "speech Stalin Sverdlov Party University 1924." As it turns out, it's not a speech, but a series of lectures called "Foundations of Leninism" that Stalin gave at the aforementioned university in 1924. These lectures do not contain the said quote. If it's from memoirs, why not mention who wrote the memoir or whatever the source might be? How should the reader verify that the quote even exists if it's ungoogleable and basically impossible to verify?

Lewin writes this in the preface:

Here reliance on new materials – archives, memoirs, autobiographies or documentary publications – is an objective in itself

Why, then, are a lot of characterizations of Stalin not sourced? Why is Stalin attributed a quote that potentially doesn't exist? It's baffling to me that citations are that weak in a source recommended by academics. There are loads of instances where Lewin says something like "Historians seem agreed," "In a very gloomy letter," and "In a handwritten note" without attribution of the source.

All that said, the statistical work is solid, and if I were writing this book, I would stick to the criticisms of institutions and the actually verified crimes that the Soviet regime committed, rather than indicting the personal character of Stalin over and over again.

One conclusion that Lewin comes to, which I think is valuable and should be paid attention to, is the rise of nationalist rhetoric. The consequences of those policies are still visible in modern Russia.

2024: Edited for grammar

The Soviet Century

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