The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia

by Moshe Lewin

In this now-classic book, Moshe Lewin traces the transformation of Russian society and the Russian political system in the period between the two world wars, a transformation that was to lead to Stalinism in the 1930s. Lewin focuses on the changes stemming from war, revolution, civil war, and industrialization, and he discusses such topics as rural society and religion in the twentieth century; the background of Soviet collectivization; Soviet prewar policies of agricultural procurement; the kolkhoz and the muzhik ; Leninism and Bolshevism; industrial relations during the five-year plans of 1928–1941; and the social background of Stalinism. Through this comprehensive approach to understanding the origins and problems of Stalinism, Lewin makes a significant contribution to the study of Russia's social history before the revolution as well as in the Soviet period.

Genres: History, Russia, Soviet Union

368 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 1985

Reviews

[Austin Barselau · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Making of the Soviet System (1985) examines the transition from the Russian Civil War through the rise of Bolshevism and the chaotic reorientation of Soviet society under Stalin. A social historian of twentieth-century Russia, Moshe Lewin argues that the Soviet state emerged through a complex and often contentious relationship with the country's predominantly peasant population. Seeking to uncover the origins of Stalinism, Lewin contends that it was not an inevitable outgrowth of Bolshevism; rather, it was an "autonomous and parallel phenomenon" and ultimately Bolshevism's "gravedigger." Stalin and his arbitrary, repressive policies, Lewin argues, proved more effective at generating economic dislocation, terror, and extracting resources from the peasantry than at increasing production.

Lewin articulates how, after the Civil War, the Bolsheviks, shaped by a militarized political culture and authoritarian impulses, initially pursued socialist economic management through the short-lived policy of War Communism. When state planning produced inefficiencies, managerial shirking, and thriving black markets, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which restored limited market mechanisms, private enterprise, and agricultural production. Lewin identifies Lenin's death and Stalin's rise as the pivotal turn toward "disequilibrium." Emergency grain requisition policies undermined agricultural production and weakened peasants' incentives to bring grain to market. The campaign for the "liquidation of the kulaks" was applied arbitrarily, eventually encompassing virtually any peasant who attempted to evade state procurement.

Lewin describes a decline in agricultural output from the late 1920s through 1937 alongside the rapid expansion of a state bureaucracy that eroded existing social structures. By the early 1930s, he argues, open warfare existed in the countryside, with peasants and the state increasingly viewing one another as existential threats. He highlights the plight of Soviet peasants, including their lack of social protections, punitive taxation, compulsory labor obligations, and restrictions on movement under collectivization. Stalin's system, Lewin concludes, was ultimately better suited to extracting resources than to producing them.

Because it was written before the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s, some of Lewin's interpretations are dated. The prose can also be dense and often assumes substantial prior knowledge of Soviet history. Furthermore, because the book is a collection of largely independent essays rather than a chronological narrative, its discussion of the USSR's social crises and political structures can at times be difficult to follow. Despite these limitations, The Making of the Soviet System remains a foundational work on the social and institutional underpinnings of the Soviet state, particularly its analysis of state-peasant relations, bureaucratic expansion, and socioeconomic transformation.

[Leonardo]

...acerca de cómo la propaganda de la guerra fría (de ambos lados) nos cegó a los movimientos reales de la historia social dentro del régimen soviético.

Imperio Pág.209

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is really dry. It is very dated, but still a fundamentally important piece of scholarship in the social history of the soviet Union. Lewin argues that Stalinism was not the inevitable result of Leninism, but instead argues that the social dynamics of Russia after WWI and the Civil War led it to be open to a "mushroomed" lateral authoritarian system such as Stalinism. It's a struggle to read for me. Experts in the field will have no problem with it.