His Soviet Century

This, from Neal Ascherson’s review of Moshe Lewin’s “My Soviet Century”, caught my eye:

…Lewin is anything but an apologist for the old system. Certainly, he blasts Cold War writers for exaggerating the scale of Stalin’s repression…

Exaggerating the scale of Stalin’s repression? Not a phrase many would dare to come up with now, after the publication of books like Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag“. George Walden, in the Telegraph (via AL Daily), is less impressed.

Lewin’s thesis “that we must see the Russian 20th century not simply in ideological terms but as social history” would be defensible, were it not that the book turns out to be a covert apology for Soviet socialism, complete with double-speak and poisonous, Pravda-style innuendo against the West: “Cold War pressures, and the whole complex put in place by the West (with the intelligence services playing a leading role), to identify the slightest crack in the other camp, were not invented by paranoia.”

It soon becomes clear that Lewin has it in for the West in a big way. Amongst other things we are accused of “demonising” Stalin – “a quaint notion, which becomes all the quainter when the author himself describes him as a “half-crazed actor” inclined to fits of “dementia”, and the people close to him as “human scum”. When the dictator drags the soon to be slaughtered but for the moment just badly beaten up Field Marshal Tukhachevsky into his presence, for the pleasure of it, Lewin comments: “We are dealing with a maniac.” You said it.

There is a perverse logic to this and many more inconsistencies. If there is one thing Lewin wants to do even more than snarl at the West, it is to deify Lenin.