The Soviet Century. By Moshe Lewin

Moshe Lewin was a collective farmer in the USSR and a soldier in the Soviet army. He later became director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, a fellow of the Kennan Institute, and a senior fellow of Columbia University's Russian Institute; he is now emeritus professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. This book is not the work of a hack anti-Soviet propagandist, but a very well-researched account, both tragic and sobering, of the rise and fall of the USSR. It is a hard read for any present, former, or future Communist or left socialist. However, after facing up to the economic, political, and criminal character of Stalinism and the Stalinist state, without lapsing into the stupidities of latter-day Trotskyism and Maoism, Lewin skillfully draws a well-documented and welcome historical line clearly separating Leninism and Bolshevism from what came after.

Some will argue he overstates the distinction in some respects, but he makes a powerful argument. It is an important contribution to rescuing communism and socialism, the ideology of the emancipation of labor from wage slavery to capital in an advanced technological society, from the unredeemable fate of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the century's most notable effort to advance these very ideas.

I have little doubt as to the book's basic accuracy. It extensively and professionally surveys a vast amount of recently available juridical records from the Soviet era, both at the national and republic levels. The author's economic and historical analysis is complex, well balanced, and in general accord with the available data series published and analyzed extensively by R. W. Davies (UK) and William Easterly (U.S.). His analysis of the post-Stalin years shows how, despite major efforts at reform and important successes in recovering quickly from World War II in space and defense technology, fateful decisions in the transition to Stalin's dictatorship had fundamentally hampered the quality and efficiency of economic development. The USSR needed politics. But it turned out that Stalin's chief legacy was not a single political party, but really no political party--only a combined state-party bureaucracy.

The author inadvertently underplays the positive role played by the Soviet state in the postwar struggle against imperialism and colonialism, but this is less an error of...