Moshe Lewin

[1] Moshe Lewin was born in 1921 in Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), the son of ethnic Jewish parents who were later murdered in the Holocaust.

Lewin lived in Poland for the first 20 years of his life, fleeing to the Soviet Union in June 1941 just ahead of the invading Nazi army.

[3] During this time he converted his Sorbonne dissertation into a book, published in French in 1966 and in English two years later as Russian Peasants and Soviet Power.

Rather than an inevitable and predestined action, collectivization was cast as a brutal manifestation of realpolitik — a view in marked contrast to the traditionalist historiography of the day.

In it, Lewin additionally chronicled the politics of the post-Lenin succession struggle during the time of Lenin's final illness, emphasizing "lost" alternatives to the actual path of historical development.

Lewin noted that many of the same criticisms which Bukharin leveled against Stalin during the political battles of 1928 and 1929 in the USSR were later "adopted by current reformers as their own," thereby adding a contemporary importance to the study of the historical past.

orientation of Soviet studies, favoring a more apolitical perspective that attempted to answer the question, "What makes the Russians tick?

The range of his intellectual debts is also broad, owing as much to Weber as to Marx, emphasising as much the power of ideologies and myths in human behaviour as the weight of economic structure.