Defending the Marxist citadel

In the last several years, English-speaking readers have been treated to a plethora of Soviet history books unlike others before them. The opening of Soviet archives has given us everything from Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad to Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s book on Stalin’s court, to new biographies of Rasputin, Lenin and Trotsky. Now, however, we have The Soviet Century, the work of a respected American academic. It is a book whose qualities are not easy to describe.

Speaking frankly, my first reaction to Lewin’s book was one of puzzlement. Despite reading the introduction, which promised a ‘presentation of general aspects of the system’, it took me quite a long time to work out what the professor was getting at. The book is written out of chronological order — not in itself a fault, but in this case without any clear purpose. It makes use of new archival material, but not in a way that seems designed to shed profound new light on any particular issues. Much old ground is covered, and what new material there is generally seems to involve dull administrative reforms or statistics. Why bother? Only about three quarters of the way through did I finally work out the purpose of this otherwise baffling work: to defend what remains to be defended of Soviet Marxism.

It’s an uphill battle, to say the least. For starters, it requires Lewin to spend a certain amount of time redefining Marxism, or at least socialism, so that it doesn’t include the USSR — usually thought of as the ultimate socialist state — at all. ‘Socialism involves ownership of the means of production by society, not by a bureaucracy,’ he opines. Yes, maybe, but what on earth can that mean in real life? ‘To persist in speaking of “Soviet socialism” is to engage in a veritable comedy of errors,’ he says at another point.