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Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath. Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin

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Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath. Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath. Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin. by Nick Lampert; Gabor Rittersporn Review by: Stephen Kotkin Slavic Review, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 164-166 Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2499631 . Accessed: 10/12/2011 16:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review. http://www.jstor.org 164 Slavic Review rogant diatribes against the few who dared develop more fundamentaland critical analyses (such as Hannah Arendt and Raymond Aron) do not support the respect some partiallyconverted epigones still wish to pay them. The mythof the USSR was discussed in Cortona in the atmosphereof the newly emergingmyth of Gorbachev's perestroikawhich quite a few among the participants were heartilyready to adopt as a welcome "third way," in spite of the very sober appraisal of Soviet reformsfrom the inside provided by L. Karpinskii and of the vibrantdefence of market-basedsocieties launched fromthe floor (and unreportedin the volume) by Adam Michnik.The conference and its proceedings would have ben- efitedfrom the inclusion of some ideologically and culturallydissenting voices from both the east and the west and from modestyin the discussion of mythsby some of the verypeople who had contributedto them. In lightof the knowledge and rethinkingcaused by perestroika,the conclusions of some of these papers seem more mythicalthan the mythsthey discuss. Sheila Fitzpatrickinsists that there were real sources of popular legitimacyand social support forStalin, namely the historicmission of Russia's revolutionaryproletariat from which Soviet administrators,managers and professionalswere drawn and who formed"the new Soviet elite of upwardlymobile exproletarians."For M. Reyfman,after the death of the Soviet model for the world, the USSR mightstill be able to adapt its systemto the necessities of effectivedevelopment, thus providing the European left with new values.John Barber's paper which,on the one hand, provides evidence of the horrors of Stalinism,on the other hand submits that any governmentafter the 1930s was exceptional "only in its categoricalconfidence of success and in the scale of unforseen consequences which resulted fromits actions." VittorioStrada takes for granted that the "socialist prejudice" must supplement the "democratic prejudice" that must not be renounced whenjudging Soviet communism.Robert V. Daniels maintainsthat the Soviet "systemembodied institutionalforms and social values that had nothing in common withMarxism except in the most superficialsense." Some of the most stimulatingapproaches to the debate are provided by Andrea Graziosi's overviewof the betterknowledge of Soviet reality(compared to the common people's knowledge) which governmentsgot through their diplomatic officials(an assessmentalso fruitfullydeveloped in Giorgio Petracchi's paper); and by Marcello Flores' comparison between the enthusiasticand naive understandingof Soviet reality by intellectualtravelers (mostly leftists) compared to the disenchantedreports coming fromwestern technicians working on the spot. But only Victor Zaslavskyraises the crucial question: why most westernintellec- tuals who remained unaffectedby 20th centurytotalitarianism got deeply "infected" by the Soviet type.The answer lies only in part in the consistentpractice of disinfor- mation which totalitarian,Soviet-type regimes where able to carry out. The main reasons for the infection,according to Zaslavsky,must be found in the socialist and utopian stream of westernthought, in its revolutionaryradicalism and in marxism. Within these cultural paradigms,western intellectuals could not criticizethe nation- alization of the means of production and the delegitimizationof private property. The Soviet regime lied, but westernintellectuals wished to be fooled. It would be possible to carryforward Zaslavsky's thesis, arguing, as in Toynbee, thatmarxism is but a leaf in the tree of christianity.The anti-marketand anti-capitalist culture which helped to sustain the mythof communismin the westernworld is still alive. A discussion on the negative mythof marketcapitalism should, perhaps, come next and challenge repentantintellectuals to come to termswith the world in which theylive. SILVANA MALLE Universityof Verona-Italy Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath.Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin. Eds. Nick Lampert and Gabor Rittersporn.Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1992. xv, 288 pp. Index. $45.00, hard bound. How do you honor a man who, during the course of a bar-loungeconversation at a AAASS convention,wields idiomatic expressions in more languages than there are Book Reviews 165 admiring interlocutorsgathered around him (and these are not a few)?A man who has directed nary a Ph.D. from startto finishand yet whose scholarship dominates the lectures of virtuallyeveryone who teaches a course on twentiethcentury Russia? A man who waftsyou throughthe tumultof Soviet historyby mixingsocial-scientific categories with cooking metaphors,whirling hand motions and dancing eyebrows, and then remindsyou thatthe country'sremarkable existence has not been verylong, really,just about the length of a man's life? A man whose name no one knows for sure how to pronounce and which the Wilno gaon himselfpronounces any number of ways? In a reflectionof the internationalmasshtabnost' of Moshe Lewin's influence,the twelvecontributors to this festschriftreside in France, Germany,England, Scotland, Brussels,the United States and Canada (the editors could well have added colleagues fromRussia, Italy,Israel, Lewin's nativePoland and manymore countries).The varied essays address subjects on which Lewin has often led the way. Lewis Siegelbaum ex- tends his own foraysinto Soviet labor relations with an essay on foremen-"the ser- geants of an industrialarmy," in Marx's piquant phrase-who as of 1941 "retained most of the power they had at the outset of industrialization."Maureen Perrie ex- amines the familiaranalogies between Stalin, Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, all of whom in their own way battled Russia's "backwardness." Alec Nove offersa partial annotated bibliographyof the derevenshchiki,reiterating the value of literature for the study of historyand the importance of "the rural nexus." Hans-Henning Schr6der summarizesthe research on upward mobilityand mass repression during "the big drive," focusingon changes in the structureand composition of the Com- munistParty. Jean-Paul Depretto, echoing Lewin on the socio-politicalsignificance of the dearth of mechanization in the constructionindustry, recapitulates the debate concerningthe extentand contributionof forcedlabor (without,however, the benefit of recentlydeclassified sources or Lewin's aperguconcerning the need to relate the prevalence of chernorabochie,"free" and slave, to the rule of an elite). Peter Solomon investigateslegality in Soviet political culture during "the Gorbachev phenomenon" and Peter Kneen testifiesthat Lewin's analysis of "political undercurrents"in effect "predicted" perestroika.(Unfortunately Kneen's essay was writtenbefore the collapse, so Lewin's pressentimenton that score is unexamined). As the principal influenceson Lewin, Roland Lew identifiesAnnales, Max Weber, marxism and the socialist tradition,arguing that Lewin's work presupposes the za- konomernost'of Russia undergoing a "modernization process" and the superiorityof the bolshevikversion of modernization(in the formexpounded by the late Lenin and then takenup by Bukharin). "Lewin shows littleinterest for anythingnon-Bolshevik," Lew writes,adding: "one sometimes has the impression that for him Bolshevism is unavoidable, not only because its victorymade it the historian'ssubject matter,but also because of its intrinsicmerits." Within this vein, R. W. Davies, the greateconomic historian and the person who in a sense "discovered" Lewin and brought him to Birmingham,asks whetherin the historyof socialism "Soviet developmentssince the 1920s (or since 1917?) may seem to have been a disastrous if educative false start?"In an answerthat one could envision gainingLewin's consenso,Davies observesthat "many of the traditionalsocialist argumentsagainst privatecapitalism remain as powerfulin 1990 as theywere a centuryago." Lewin has had a great deal to say about the pivotal civil war but not about na- tionalityor the two in combination. Ron Suny, reviewinga large literaturein order to establishthat class and nationalitymust be seen as "social constructions"and their emergence as "contingentand historicallydetermined," delivers another installment on his promised revision of Richard Pipes's account of the formationof the Soviet Union. Suny conteststhe view thatneatly divides 1918-1921 into a civil war forRussia and a series of national revoltsagainst Russia for the minorities."The civil war in the disintegratingRussian Empire was a civil war everywhere,"Suny writes."And though in the national peripheries
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