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“... interpenetration of political and economic, social and cultural forces, has long been the basis of Moshe Lewin’s great reputation as an historian of the Soviet Union. Here he brings this talent to bear powerfully on the analysis of contemporary Soviet society. In the process, the stereotypes of an immutable system and static society, faithfully ...”

“... Soviet Union in the Thirties have resulted. Historians such as R.W. Davies, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Moshe Lewin have in different ways substantially revised the conventional picture of the period. Instead of a monolithic regime systematically implementing its strategy for constructing a totalitarian system, their research shows both state and society ...”

“... too, including Leninist conspiracy, though their politics were usually strongly anti-Communist. Moshe Lewin’s politics are different, and fate never landed him in Australia. Yet he has something in common with these figures from my youth, starting with a kind of gnomic (in both senses) charisma, an exotic life story, a first-hand view of Soviet ...”

“... the semi-public space of the Ringstrassen-Café or the Parisian salon. The permanent flux in what Moshe Lewin has called a ‘wind sand society’ – one of crowded communal apartments with dozens of inhabitants, endless queues outside department stores or NKVD offices, an atmosphere of omnipresent fear and suspicion – meant that the formation of ...”

“... were far-reaching, making the Stalin-era USSR an especially turbulent place – what the historian Moshe Lewin called a ‘quicksand society’. Modernisation was achieved at a tremendous human cost, with gruelling constraints imposed on the bulk of the population, even as it opened up new horizons.The Gulag intrudes throughout The Soviet Century. Even ...”

“... The revisionists (Sheila Fitzpatrick and J. Arch Getty are perhaps the best known, although Moshe Lewin pioneered the social history of Soviet Russia in the interwar period) have questioned how far Stalin was able, in practice, to exercise such autocratic powers. Fitzpatrick (unknown to McNeal) has depicted a Communist Party responding to changing ...”

“... growth of scientific culture, but also of the collapse of everything familiar. As the historian Moshe Lewin wrote, the USSR of the 1920s and 1930s was a ‘quicksand society’, in which every institution and social stratum was unstable. Just as in later decades, pursued by war and repression, Bazhov and Platonov would use folklore to reflect on ...”

“... of the doyens of ‘totalitarianism’, to modify his earlier certainties. Then in the Seventies, Moshe Lewin’s work on Russian peasants and Soviet society and Stephen Cohen’s outstanding biography of Bukharin presented a Soviet society in flux, and a Communist policy which was not fixed in one mould but contained competing trends within itself. For ...”