Young People's Socialist League

For those already familiar with the history of the USSR, Moshe Lewin's "The Soviet Century" is a very exciting book. Instead of offering a comprehensive overview of Soviet history, Lewin focuses on the aspects of the country and its system that have been neglected by previous scholarship. Amazingly, he identifies these phenomena as central to actually understanding the Soviet Union, and blames their neglect on both the unavailability of the relevant documents as well as plain "ideological frenzy" (1). Promising not "to play the role of counsel for the prosecution or for the defence" (274-5), Lewin bases his book almost exclusively on recent Russian-language scholarship dealing with the newly-discovered documents, hinting at a more comprehensive future work that will incorporate English-language scholarship as well.

Lewin focuses primarily on the means through which the rulers of the Soviet Union controlled the country and their subordinates. The first of three parts, "A Regime and its Psyche", focuses on Stalin, how he obtained absolute power, and how he protected it through purges, terror and elaborate structures of control over the party and bureaucracy. It begins in the 1920s with the "de-politicization" of the Communist Party, its abandonment of socialism and absorption by the bureaucracy. Lewin explores in great detail the apparatus set up by Stalin to control the Party, especially the NKVD and its "industrial empire" of labor camps (113). He concludes by characterizing Stalin's rule as an "agrarian despotism", a combination of old-style Tsarism with a new focus on industrialization (146). "Focused on the cult of a supreme leader", it was "a despotism that allowed free range to one individual's delirium... and a huge repressive system" (147).

The second part of the book, "The 1960s and Beyond: From a New Model to a New Impasse", focuses on the second great neglected aspect of Soviet history, the bureaucracy, which cemented its hold on power after Stalin's death, despite efforts by Khrushchev and some others to put the Party back on top. The result was "bureaucratic absolutism... much more modern than that of the Tsars or Stalin [but of] the same species" (380). Lewin includes in this section a lot of nitty-gritty details of the structure and functioning of various bureaucratic institutions (especially Gosplan and Gossnab), and also profiles some post-Stalinist leaders such as Kosygin, Andropov, Mikoyan, Khrushchev and Gromyko. In addition, he addresses the "avalanche of urbanization" (202) and other social development in these decades.

Themes such as urbanization and long-term developments in society are the focus of the third and final part, "The Soviet Century: Russia in Historical Context". This section is in many ways the most interesting, as it addresses thematic issues over the whole of soviet history: backwardness, modernity, urbanization, bureaucracy, demography, etc. Lewin describes "a social and cultural landscape undergoing massive changes" (319) and criticizes other authors for focusing exclusively on the regime and its leaders, as though Soviet society did not exist or were unimportant. Lewin also criticizes those who tend to "Over-Staliniz[e] the whole of Soviet history, by extending it backwards and forwards", and he argues that the changes following Stalin's death "should be acknowledged, and not dismissed with contempt on the grounds that a democratic system offers much more" (324). He distinguishes two different comparisons that can be made: between the Soviet Union and the democratic West, and between Stalinism and the bureaucratic stagnation that followed it, when "improvement in social conditions" (324) led to high levels of development in terms of "demography, education, health, urbanization, [and] the role of science" (373), which were to positively decline during the 1990s.

"The Soviet Century", though focusing for the most part on nitty-gritty details of apparatus and bureaucracy, deals with the largest questions of the central nature of the Soviet Union. Thus Lewin can conclude that the sorry story of the Soviet Union "cannot be described as the 'failure of socialism', because socialism was not there in the first place" (308) and that the USSR never actually "represented the alternative to capitalism it sometimes claimed to be" (359). It should be of great interest to all students of the history and nature of the Soviet Union.