popular religion, customary law in rural society, the social structure of the Russian peasantry, and social relations within Soviet industry. He emerged as a critic of the politicized "What are they up to?" orientation of Soviet studies, favoring a more apolitical perspective that attempted to answer the question, "What makes the Russians tick?" The Soviet Century (2005) Lewin's final works attempted to analyze the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, and his brief efforts at top-down reform of the communist system, and to set the rise and fall of Soviet communism in historical perspective. In his last book, The Soviet Century (2005), Lewin argued that the political and economic system of the former Soviet Union constituted a sort of "bureaucratic absolutism" akin to the Prussian bureaucratic monarchy of the 18th century which had "ceased to accomplish the task it had once been capable of performing" and therefore given way. Legacy In 1992, Lewin was honored with a Festschrift edited by historians Nick Lampert and Gábor Rittersporn entitled Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath: Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin. Contributors to the volume included economic historians Alec Nove and R.W. Davies as well as key social historians such as Lewis Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, among others. In the Lewin Festschrift, co-editor Lampert summarized Lewin's work in the following manner: "The scope of Lewin's explorations has been very wide, dealing with a panorama of social classes and groups, with the lower depths of society as well as the bosses, with informal social norms as well as formal law, with popular religion as well as established ideology. 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. The key thing is the perception of society as a socio-cultural whole, though Lewin always remained open to new pathways that might appear in the course of research, always eclectic in the best sense, always eschewing the pursuit of a grand theory for all history — a pursuit which only leads you away from the rich canvas of concrete human experience." Footnotes Works La Paysannerie et le Pouvoir Sovietique. Paris: Mouton, 1966. English edition: Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, translated by Irene Nove with John Biggart, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968. Le Dernier Combat de Lénine, Paris: