Carr’s friend, Isaac Deutscher, was a life-long rebel: a Jew who broke with religious orthodoxy and wrote poetry in Polish; a bourgeois who joined the outlawed Communist Party of Poland; a Communist who in 1932 was expelled from the party for his anti-Stalinist opposition; a Trotskyist who remained independent and critical of the movement; and finally a historian who produced some of the most important works on Soviet history in his day, but was shunned by academia.107 In exile in England, both from his native Poland and the Communist milieu in which he had matured, Deutscher turned first to journalism and then to a biography of Stalin, which appeared in 1949.108 A “study [of] the politics rather than the private affairs of Stalin,” this monumental work by “an unrepentant Marxist” challenged the liberal and conservative orthodoxies of the Cold War years and sought to rescue socialism from its popular conflation into Stalinism.109 Deutscher laid out a law of revolution in which “each great revolution begins with a phenomenal outburst of popular energy, impatience, anger, and hope. Each ends in the weariness, exhaustion, and disillusionment of the revolutionary people … The leaders are unable to keep their early promises … [The revolutionary government] now forfeits at least one of its honourable attributes—it ceases to be government by the people.”110 As in Trotsky’s treatment, so in Deutscher’s: Stalin had been hooked by history. He became “both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative revolution.”111
A year later, Deutscher reviewed a powerful collection of memoirs by six prominent former Communists, the widely-read The God That Failed, edited by the British socialist Richard Crossman. At that time, a parade of former Communists—among them André Malraux, Ruth Fischer, and Whittaker Chambers—had become public eyewitnesses of the nature of the movement and the USSR, all the more credible and authentic in the eyes of the public by virtue of their experience inside and break with the Party. Within a few years, those who stayed loyal to Communist parties would be regarded by much of the public, particularly in the United States, as spies for the Soviet Union. Deutscher was pained, not so much by the apostasies of the ex-Communists, as by their embrace of capitalism. While he saw the ex-Communist as an “inverted Stalinist,” who “ceases to oppose capitalism” but “continues to see the world in black and white, [though] now the colours are differently distributed,” Deutscher believed that the god was not bound to fail.112 Himself a passionate opponent of Stalinism, Deutscher sought to distance what the Soviet Union had become from what the Bolsheviks had originally intended and from the possibility of a different socialism. His idealism and utopian aspiration distinguished him from Carr’s pragmatism and realism. His three-volume biography of Trotsky at once celebrated the intellectual and revolutionary, and soberly revealed his faults and frailties.113 Summing up his interpretation of the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, he wrote: “In the whole experience of modern man there had been nothing as sublime and as repulsive as the first Workers’ State and the first essay in ‘building socialism.’”114 “There can be no greater tragedy than that of a great revolution’s succumbing to the mailed fist that was to defend it from its enemies. There can be no spectacle as disgusting as that of a post-revolutionary tyranny dressed up in the banners of liberty.”115
In the small world of British Sovietology, Carr, the Deutschers, R. W. Davies (b. 1925), and Rudolf Schlesinger (1901–1969), the Marxist founder of Glasgow’s Institute of Soviet and East European Studies and the journal Soviet Studies, stood on one side. On the other were the liberal Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), London School of Economics historian Leonard Schapiro (1908–1983), Hugh Seton Watson (1916–1984), David Footman (1895–1983), and much of the academic establishment. Carr was extremely critical of Schapiro’s Origins of the Communist Autocracy (1955), and fought with Berlin over its publication.116 Never receiving the appointment he desired at Oxford, Carr ended up back at his own alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of sixty-three. His collaborator, Davies, became a leading figure at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Birmingham, established in 1963, and it was to Birmingham that Moshe Lewin came to teach Soviet history in 1968.
A socialist Zionist from his youth, Lewin escaped from his native Vilno ahead of the advancing Germans, thanks to peasant Red Army soldiers who disobeyed their officer and winked him aboard their retreating truck. In the wartime USSR, he worked on collective farms, in a mine and a factory before entering a Soviet officers’ school. He then returned to Poland and later emigrated to Israel. Upset with the direction that the Israeli state took during the 1950s, he began studying history, moving on to Paris where he worked with Roger Portal and was deeply influenced by the social-historical Annales school and by his friend, the sociologist Basile Kerblay. After teaching in Paris and Birmingham, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, where he and Alfred Rieber organized a series of seminars that brought a generation of younger historians from the study of imperial Russia to the post-1917 period.
Lewin considered himself a “historian of society,” rather than simply of a regime. “It is not a state that has a society but a society that has a state.”117 His Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (1966) was the first empirical study of collectivization in the West, and it was followed by his influential study, Lenin’s Last Struggle (1967).118 In sprawling essays on Stalinism he enveloped great social processes in succinct and pungent phrases: “quicksand society,” “ruling class without tenure.”119 Lewin resurrected a Lenin who learned from his errors and tried at the end of his life to make serious readjustments in nationality policy and the nature of the bureaucratic state. Although he failed in his last struggle, Lenin’s testament remained a demonstration that there were alternatives to Stalinism within Bolshevism. Lewin’s reading of Leninism challenged the view of Bolshevism as a single consistent ideology that supplied ready formulae for the future. For Lewin, Bukharin offered another path to economic development; but once Stalin embarked on a war against the peasantry, the massive machinery of repression opened the way to a particularly ferocious, despotic autocracy and mass terror.120
From Political Science to Social History
By the time Lewin arrived in the United States, in the late 1970s, the privileges of material resources, state support, and perceived national interest had made the American sovietological establishment the most prolific and influential purveyor of information on the Soviet Union and its allies outside the USSR. A veritable army of government employees, journalists, scholars, and private consultants were hard at work analyzing and pronouncing on the Soviet Union. In a real sense, the view of the other side forged in America not only shaped the policy of one great superpower, but determined the limits of the dialogue between “West” and “East.” While the interpretations produced by American journalists and professional Sovietologists were by no means uniform, the usual language used to describe the other great superpower was consistently negative—aggressive, expansionistic, paranoid, corrupt, brutal, monolithic, stagnant. Exchange students going to the USSR for a year of study routinely spoke of “going into” and “out of” the Soviet Union, as into and out of a prison, instead of the conventional “to” and “from” used for travel to other countries. Language itself reproduced the sense of Russia’s alien nature, its inaccessibility and opaqueness.
Before the 1960s few professional historians in American universities studied Russia; until the 1980s fewer still ventured past the years of revolution. The doyen of Russian imperial history at Harvard, Michael Karpovich (1888–1959), stopped at the fall of tsarism in February 1917, “announcing