Moshe Lewin (historian)

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Moshe Lewin, mid-1980s

Moshe Lewin (also Misha Lewin ) (born November 7, 1921 in Wilno , then Polish , (Lithuanian Vilnius ); † August 14, 2010 in Paris ) was a historian . He dealt mainly with the history of Russia and the history of the Soviet Union . Lewin was considered a doyen of the so-called " revisionist school "; Since the late 1960s, this has set itself apart from studies that can be assigned to the totalitarian theory .

Life

Early years

Levin was the child of a Jewish father and a Ukrainian or Russian mother; the parents later died in the course of the Holocaust . He spent the first 20 years of his life in Poland. In June 1941, he fled to the Soviet Union from the approaching German Wehrmacht .

For the next two years Lewin worked in a collective farm and as a blast furnace worker. His experiences as an agricultural and industrial worker in the Soviet Union later shaped his academic work. In the summer of 1943 he joined the Red Army . He was sent to an officers' school. There he spent the remainder of the war; on the last day of the war he was promoted.

In 1946 he went back to Poland before emigrating to France . As part of the Bricha, he promoted the immigration of Jews to Palestine ( Alija Bet ) and became a member of the socialist-Zionist youth organization Hashomer Hatzair . As a long-time supporter of left-wing Zionism , he immigrated to Israel in 1951 ; There he became a member of the Communist Party and worked as a kibbutznik and as a journalist .

In particular, actions by the Israeli armed forces such as the Qibya massacre and events in the Sinai War disappointed Lewin. They led him to reorientate himself and take up a degree. In 1961 Tel Aviv University awarded him a bachelor's degree . In the same year Lewin, who spoke Russian , Yiddish , Polish , German , Hebrew , English and French , received a research grant and enrolled at the Paris Sorbonne . At this university he researched the collectivization of Soviet agriculture . In 1964 the Sorbonne awarded him a doctorate ( Ph.D. ) for his dissertation .

Scientific career

From 1965 to 1966 Lewin worked as director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. During this time he also wrote a book manuscript on which his dissertation was based. The book was published in French in 1966 and the English translation was published in 1968 under the title Russian Peasants and Soviet Power .

In this monograph , Lewin dealt with the grain procurement crisis of 1928 and the associated political conflicts at the head of the communist party . At the time, these disputes led to the decision to forcibly collectivize Soviet agriculture. In his work, Lewin emphasized that collectivization was an expedient, albeit extreme, response of the Soviet regime to real problems. At the same time, he identified it as one of several possible solutions. Collectivization was by no means inevitable and predetermined, it was rather a brutal manifestation of realpolitik . His interpretation differed significantly from the traditional historiography of his time. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power was initially designed as the first part of a comprehensive study of the social history of Russia until 1934, the year Sergei Kirov died . However, this idea was dashed, possibly also because the British historians Edward Hallett Carr and Robert W. Davies pursued a similar project.

In 1968 Lenin's Last Struggle was also published . It was a lengthy essay that traced the evolution of Lenin's reflections on the growing Soviet bureaucracy . Moshe Lewin also worked out the succession struggles that raged in the final phase of Lenin's fatal illness. Here he also referred to “lost” alternatives to the real historical development. In this way, Lewin once again presented a historiographical perspective that clearly differed from the majority of all specialist studies. According to the theory of totalitarianism that dominates the academic world, these studies assumed that the Soviet Union was fundamentally a monolithic entity that was fundamentally incapable of change .

From 1967 to 1968 Lewin was a Senior Fellow at Columbia University in New York City . He then held a professorship at Birmingham University from 1968 to 1978 . During this period he published Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers . Within the academic discourse of the Soviet Union's 1920s, this study, along with the work of Stephen F. Cohen , historian at Princeton University , helped to underscore the importance of Nikolai Bukharin and his ideas. Lewin emphasized that many of the criticisms that Bukharin made in 1928 and 1929 against the policies of Josef Stalin were passed off as their own by reform communists decades later. This alone underlines the importance of historical studies for the present. After leaving Birmingham , Lewin returned to the United States and taught at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1995 . In 2007 he finally settled in France.

Lewin was regarded as the nestor of social history and the godfather of the “revisionist school” of young, socially-historically oriented Soviet historians that was emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, his work focused on the relationship between political history and economic history . A noticeable exception in this regard was the collection of essays The Making of the Soviet System , published in 1985. In this book, Lewin dealt with a number of core social-historical topics such as rural customs , popular beliefs , customary law in rural society, the social structure of the Russian peasantry and social relations in the Soviet industry. Lewin positioned himself as a critic of a political history-oriented Soviet Union historiography, which asks what individuals and groups are ready for; instead, he preferred a more apolitical approach that seeks to find out what makes Russians tick .

He always viewed theories with far-reaching claims with skepticism, but the writings of Karl Marx , Max Weber and the Annales School formed important reference points for his research on Soviet history.

Although he rejected the theory of totalitarianism, he was interested in the systematic comparison between Germany and Russia and between National Socialism and Stalinism . With his British colleague Ian Kershaw , Moshe Lewin organized several colloquia on this topic. Both published the collection of essays Stalinism and Nazism in 1997 . Dictatorships in comparison .

Some terms coined by Lewin to characterize the scope of social transformation processes in the Soviet Union found widespread use in the academic debate. For example, he established the terms “airline sand company”, “ruralization of cities” and “ruralization of the working class”.

The later work of Moshe Lewin dealt with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and his efforts to reform the communist system ( perestroika ). At the same time, Lewin endeavored to place the rise and fall of Soviet communism in a larger historical perspective. In his last book - The Soviet Century , published in 2005 - Lewin argues that the political and economic system of the Soviet Union was - similar to the bureaucratic monarchy of Prussia in the 18th century - a kind of bureaucratic absolutism . It gave in after it stopped doing what it was once able to do.

Honors, death and inheritance

In 1992 he was honored with a commemorative publication published by the historians Nick Lampert and Gábor Tamás Delphinium . It was titled Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath: Essays in Honor of Moshe Lewin. Economic historians such as Alec Nove and RW Davies as well as social historians such as Lewis Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny made contributions .

In 2006 the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies recognized him with its Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies for his “ monumental ” contributions to 20th century Russian history.

Moshe Lewin died at the age of 88 on August 14, 2010, lonely and withdrawn - according to Omer Bartov , probably because of increasing dementia and paranoia - in Paris.

Lewin's research papers are archived at the University of Pennsylvania.

Works

  • La Paysannerie et le Pouvoir Sovietique. Paris: Mouton, 1966.
    • English edition: Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization. Irene Nove with John Biggart, trans. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968.
  • Le Dernier Combat de Lénine. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967.
    • English edition: Lenin's Last Struggle. AM Sheridan Smith, trans. New York: Random House, 1968.
    • German edition: Lenin's last fight . From d. Franz. By Eva Gärtner. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-455-04399-2 .
  • Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.
    • Re-published under the title Stalinism and the Seeds of Soviet Reform: The Debates of the 1960s (1991).
  • The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
  • The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
    • German edition: Gorbachev's new policy. The reformed reality and the reality of reforms . From the American. trans. by Hans Günter Holl. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-596-24405-6 .
  • Russia - USSR - Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate. New York: The New Press, 1995.
  • Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Co-edited with Ian Kershaw . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  • The Soviet Century. London: Verso, 2005.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Omer Bartov : Moshe Lewin's century , in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History , Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 115-122. It is often stated that both of Lewin's parents were of Jewish origin.
  2. ↑ a b c Nick Lampert, "Preface" to Nick Lampert and Gabor Delphinium, Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath: Essays in Honor of Moshe Lewin. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1992; S. x.
  3. ↑ a b c Alain Gresh : Moshe Lewin (1921–2010), Historian of the “Soviet Century” , in: SoZ , No. 10/2010. (Accessed on July 25, 2011)
  4. ^ A b c d e Kaiyi Chen, Finding Aid for the Moshe Lewin Papers , University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1998.
  5. ↑ Nick Lampert, “Preface,” p. Xi.
  6. ^ Moshe Lewin, "Author's Foreword" to Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968; P. 11.
  7. ^ German 1970 by Hoffmann and Campe under the title Lenin's Last Struggle .
  8. ^ Moshe Lewin, "Introduction" to Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974; P. Xiii.
  9. ^ A b Alfred J. Rieber: Moshe Lewin. A Reminiscence and Appreciation , in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History , Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 127-139.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Eds): Stalinism and Nazism. Dictatorships in comparison, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge [and a.] 1997, ISBN 0-521-56345-3 .
  12. ^ Arfon Rees: Moshe Lewin obituary. Lively, provocative scholar of Soviet social history , in: The Guardian , September 27, 2010.
  13. ^ Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century. London: Verso, 2005; P. 383.
  14. ↑ Nick Lampert and Gabor Rittersporn, Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath: Essays in Honor of Moshe Lewin. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1992. Published in the United States by ME Sharpe.
  15. ↑ See the article about Nove in the English language Wikipedia.
  16. ↑ See the information about Siegelbaum on the Michigan State University website .
  17. ↑ See the article about Suny in the English language Wikipedia.
  18. ↑ See the corresponding explanations  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies website .@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.aseees.org  

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lewin, Moshe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lewin, Misha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American social and economic historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Vilnius
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 2010
Place of death Paris