Living in the Soviet Century: Moshe Lewin, 1921-2010

Fig. 1.

Moshe Lewin, Paris, summer 2008. Photograph.

'The history he wrote', a colleague said at his memorial, 'was inseparable from his life.' Another added, 'He didn't fit in the world in which he lived. He was always trying to save the Soviet Union, which was the country that had saved him'. His convictions were as strong as his biceps, which he enjoyed showing off to friends. And so was his heart. We at that small, intimate gathering, fellow travellers along the pathways of Soviet history, recognized the man, Moshe Lewin, as a maestro in his field, more a guru than an academic mentor, a teacher and scholar of enormous interpretive power who introduced novel conceptualizations into the understanding of Russia's experience. Self-absorbed, a talker rather than a listener, Misha (as almost all of us called him) was a pioneer in the Western writing of Soviet history, a singular light for many younger scholars in the intellectually obscure years of the Cold War, a contrarian who offered alternative ways to understand what had happened to the emancipatory aspirations of 1917. Without much provocation he poured out firmly founded ideas and strongly held opinions on how a popular revolution of extraordinary ambition had degenerated into the nightmare of Stalinism. He lived most of his life alone but never complained of loneliness. He loved long late-night calls from his friends and was always ready to receive visitors, plied them with schnapps and sausages, and held forth with his puckish humour on the latest possibilities for change (for better or worse) in Russia and (why not?) the rest of the world. His death at nearly eighty-nine left a personal vacuum, but his work remains as a foundation for present and future generations to ponder. Though he was unwavering in his convictions, as one of the principal 'revisionists' in Soviet historiography, he would have appreciated that his own oeuvre like that of his admired predecessors - E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Naum Jasny, and Lev Trotsky - would be debated, contested, and revised.

Born in Wilno (Vilno), Poland, on 6 November 1921, Moshe Lewin was the product of a unique cosmopolitan culture in which Jews, Poles, Lithuanians and Russians lived uneasily together. His own family reflected the cosmopolitanism of the city: his father was Jewish, his mother a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, and though he would self-identify throughout his life as a Jew, Misha defined his 'nationality' autonomously from any of the standard categories. Certainly not religious, his ethnic culture was broadly eastern European and his intellectual culture self-consciously internationalist. His own city of birth would pass in his lifetime from Poland to Lithuania to German occupation to the Soviet Union, finally to become the capital of the independent Lithuanian republic. In a city where Jews were the second largest ethnicity, behind Poles but well ahead of Lithuanians, anti-Semitism was rampant. As Misha later told an interviewer, because the hostility against Jews was frequently expressed in physical violence, Jews referred to it as 'zoological'.¹ Life in a place of such intense ethnic conflict and political activity forced one to choose one's movement literally as an act of self-defence. For young Misha the choice was Hashomer Hatsa'ir (Youth Guard), a Zionist socialist youth movement that proposed a non-nationalistic, bi-national state for Arabs and Jews in Palestine. 'Zionism', he later said, 'offered a dignified and honorable way out of the predicament, a way to save one's sanity as well as one's physical and cultural identity, and to say loudly "no" to a virulent national and human discrimination'.² Experiencing the pain inflicted by national chauvinism, Lewin came 'to understand the power of nationalism without acquiring any taste for it'.³

When his home city, then the capital of Soviet Lithuania, was invaded by the Germans, Lewin escaped eastward. He tried to join fleeing Soviet soldiers but an officer refused to let him board the evacuating truck. The conscripts, however, ordinary peasants, winked at him and pulled him...