Whenever a major figure authors an encompassing monograph, one that reevaluates his more than half century of scholarship with new evidence, the profession should take due note. Moshe Lewin, an eminent social and economic historian, has written a major new work that covers Soviet social, economic, and political history from the Bolshevik revolution through the end of the USSR. Lewin's immersion in previously secret Soviet state and party archives became, as he writes, “my main activity for a number of years. The more I read, the richer the reality began to look to me” (p. viii). The Soviet Century tells us what Lewin has learned from these archives. Lewin's Soviet Century joins a growing number of studies based principally on the Soviet state and party archives. Much of this literature has emanated from the group of scholars associated with R. W. Davies at Birmingham University, which includes the eminent Russian historian, Oleg Khlevnyuk, writing on economic and political institutions and sectoral studies, as most recently represented by R. W. Davies and Steven Wheatcroft's The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004). A second group of archival researchers, that includes myself, Mark Harrison, Valery Lazarev, Eugenia Belova, Leonid Borodkin, Andrei Markevich, and Andrei Sokolov, has focused on the political economy of the administrative command economy and of the Stalin dictatorship. Much of this research is summarized in Paul Gregory's, The Political Economy of Stalinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The fruits of such archival research are summarized in Paul Gregory and Mark Harrison's, “Planning and Policy Under Dictatorship: The Stalin Archives,” Journal of Economic Literature, forthcoming, September 2006.

Lewin's book is the most ambitious in scope of archival-based studies to date. It addresses economic, social, and political history, and it is not confined to the Stalin years, despite the weaker archival base for later periods, as evidenced by Lewin's “renewed frustration with the lack of access to materials dealing with later stages of the Soviet era” (p. viii).

Lewin's work serves as a key test for other archival research, given that it was carried out independently and simultaneously with the other research initiatives. Archival researchers can only draw selective samples from the millions of documents at their disposal; hence points of agreement or disagreement among them serve as important checks.

Let me turn to Lewin's approach and findings: Part 1 is about the Stalin years, with a great deal of attention to Stalin himself and, as befits the interests of a social historian, to the social consequences of the Stalinist great leap. Part 2 deals with the 1960s—as the post-Stalin leadership searched for a new political and economic model to replace rigid Stalinism. Part 3 encompasses the “Soviet Century” from Lenin to the stagnation and corruption of the final decades of the Soviet system. Some chapters address social phenomena, such as social flux (chapter 5), the impact of collectivization on social structure (chapter 6), urbanization (chapters 16 and 23), and labor force and demography (chapter 24). Other chapters addresses the political history of Stalinism and Leninism (chapters 1, 2, 8, 9, 10), and institutional arrangements of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist systems (such as chapters 4 and 25). Lewin also examines the areas of Soviet life most hidden behind veils of secrecy—the Gulag and the NKVD-MVD-KGB—with a unique discussion of repression in the post-Stalin years in which the KGB lost the power both to judge and to punish (p. 183). Lewin presents and discusses rare data on political repression from the late 1950s through the mid 1970s (p. 191 and appendix), which allows researchers to extend the official repression data that end in 1955 or 1956 (N. Vert and S. N. Mironenko, eds., Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, Massovye repressii v SSSR, Vol. 1, Moscow: Rosspen, 2004, statistical appendix). Some chapters are directly based on archival evidence, in particular the chapters on the early years of Soviet power and the years of Stalin dictatorship; chapters covering later periods are based on more scattered archival sources, and on studies by Russian and Soviet economists, many previously unpublished.

Lewin's most important contributions are to provide: a logical account of the development of Stalinism and its consequences, a political-economy model of the collapse of the Soviet system, and a counter-factual of a “Leninist” Soviet Union. I suspect that Lewin's assessment of “the last revision of Leninism” will prove the most controversial point in this book.

Lewin's description of Stalin's accession to power begins with Stalin's dispute with Lenin about nationality policy, more specifically about the conditions placed upon other republics as they joined the Soviet Union. Lenin favored “a formal unification with the Russian Federation” (p. 22), versus Stalin's formulation of “joining under the Russian Federation.” The struggle between Lenin's federalism and Stalin's centralism proceeded through competing drafts and included Stalin's cronies in Georgia arranging votes against autonomy, events that contributed to Lenin's estrangement from Stalin and his growing perception that Stalin should be excluded from the leadership. With Lenin physically out of the way by 1922, Stalin was free to become Lenin's “disciple” and to impose his vision of government on hapless opponents who “woke up one after the other” to the danger posed by Stalin.

Lewin poses his “model of the irresponsible dictatorship” (p. 33) to capture the essence of Stalinism. In effect, “the leader is free to set tasks, but cannot be held responsible for poor decisions or results.” (p. 33). Rather “cadres decide everything.” Hence, any mistake or mishap must be attributable to human failure. “When something went wrong, Stalin demanded that the culprit be found and severely punished,” leading to an “insane logic”: “if there is no culprit for failures that occurred at lower levels, they might be attributed to those at the top. And that was out of the question” (p. 34).

Stalin cemented his hold on power by creating “systemic paranoia”—a system of competing authorities. As noted by one of Stalin's associates: “You will not find one uncontested authority in this system” (p. 80). Insofar as all officials were subject to the “condition of precarious power,” they were all dependent on the one source of absolute power—Stalin. Moreover, Stalin moved deliberately to disperse the influence of his closest associates to dilute their power. Although Stalin was both attracted and repulsed by great genius (such as military strategist Marshall Tukhachevsky), few independent thinkers survived Stalin's reign.

Unlike Lenin who allowed and perhaps even encouraged open discussion and was himself open to strenuous attack from fellow party members, Stalin constructed a system whereby any deviation from his “unified party line” constituted the “sin” of “deviation.” Lenin operated in the framework of party procedures. Stalin felt free to ignore procedures when it suited him (pp. 302–03). Lewin attributes Stalin's use of “heresy hunting” to his seminary training, and it was the sin of deviation and factionalism that Stalin cited in liquidating his most formidable enemies.

Stalin's creation was a system in which cadres worked in a permanent apparatus in which each had a responsibility and a precise post and in which there was no provision for change in leadership through elections. Moreover, these apparatuses inevitably became bureaucratized with a proliferation of agencies, ministries, and commissions, and characterized by inequality and privilege, though with a growing tedium of work, which drove 1.5 million party members to leave the party between 1922 and 1935 (p. 45). To quote Lewin: “An egalitarian apparatus is as realistic as a square circle” (p. 84).

Stalin's ultimate experiment with “cadres” was his decision to liquidate the old in order to bring in a new fresh elite, much akin to Mao's motivation for his Cultural Revolution. Stalin used his Great Purges to implicate his closest associates in his crimes, forcing them to “vote” on the fates of their former comrades, such as in the case of Nikolai Bukharin (p. 99). Stalin also insured the loyalty of his NKVD by adding financial resources and salary increases on the eve of the Great Terror.

Lewin's model of stagnation follows from Stalin's bureaucratization of the party and the state apparatus. As the state and party bureaucracy fused and mighty bureaucracies grew (a bureaucracy of over four million in the 1970s, p. 344), state ownership ceased to exist, to be replaced by ownership by the bureaucracy. At this juncture, according to Lewin, the USSR ceased to exist as a socialist state. Instead, it was an “ailing economy run by a flourishing bureaucracy,” and “stagnation was marked by the impossibility of extracting anything from the bureaucracy and a lack of will and ideas at the top about how to stop the rot” (p. 371). “The diagnosis was simple: the system was sick while the bureaucracy was in fine fettle. Reforming the system entailed reforming the bureaucracy: no one was in a position to impose this and why should it undertake the task itself? This meant that the writing was on the wall—of the Kremlin this time” (p. 371). And further: “Can a bureaucracy be controlled by another bureaucracy or even by itself? Our answer is a categorical ‘No’” (p. 374).

Could the emergence of a “lesser” Stalin have reversed the rot? Lewin does not rule out that a decisive but nonbrutal leader, such as Yury Andropov, could have reconstituted the Soviet system, but he passed from the scene before his reforms could be felt (pp. 374–75).

Lewin correctly notes that Lenin's short rule from 1917 to his incapacitation in 1922 has not been the subject of scholarly inquiry despite the importance of the issue of the “Leninist” vision of the future Soviet society. Contrary to a number of archival works emphasizing Lenin's own dictatorial and repressive tendencies (Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), Lewin depicts a more democratic and enlightened Lenin “willing to rethink our ideas about socialism” and “to learn from anyone who knows more about something than us” (p. 298). Lewin's Lenin wanted party democracy—the ultimate primacy of the party congress over its elected bodies (p. 300), a government run by accepted rules and procedures in which the most important issues were voted upon, and a general framework of civility among party leaders. Accordingly, a Soviet Union under a healthy Lenin, Lewin appears to argue, would have been much different from that created by Stalin.

Lewin's blame of the de facto “capture” of property rights by a privileged and ossified bureaucracy for the decline of the Soviet Union is a modern reflection of early criticisms of party dictatorship, such as by Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957). Whereas Djilas used his personal impressions as a former communist party leader to reach his conclusions, Lewin uses party records to form and illustrate his ideas. Although this is not clearly spelled out, Lewin can be interpreted as arguing that a single-party, state-ownership, administrative allocation system could have evolved into a quasi-democratic decentralized system under a “jockey” other than Stalin. F. A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944) argued to the contrary that such a system will inevitably create a Stalinist system— a position which I support in my Political Economy of Stalinism (chapter 3). One rationale for Lewin's thinking is his interpretation of an enlightened Lenin, whom he supposes to be expressing core beliefs in his writings dating to the liberal NEP period. Some scholars, such as Peter Boetke (Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy. London: Routledge, 2001) have shown that Lenin's support of NEP was dictated by political expediency and represented a tactical deviation from core values. I would argue that it is unwise to extrapolate Lenin's future actions from anything written in justification of his famous “one step backwards in order to later take two steps forwards” decision in March of 1921. On a final note, I find myself in complete agreement with Lewin's concise description of the “insane logic” of the Stalinist system.

Lewin's book is a masterful condensation of Soviet economic and political history into powerful models and analysis. He captures the flavor of Stalinism and its difficult aftermath with deep scholarship and wisdom.