Moshe "Misha" Lewin ( ; 7 November 1921 – 14 August 2010) was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history. He was a major figure in the school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s. Biography Moshe Lewin was born in 1921 in Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), the son of ethnic Jewish parents who were later murdered in the Holocaust. Lewin lived in Poland for the first 20 years of his life, fleeing to the Soviet Union in June 1941 just ahead of the invading Nazi army. For the next two years, Lewin worked as a collective farm worker and as a blast furnace operator in a metallurgical factory. In summer 1943, he enlisted in the Soviet army and was sent to officers' training school. He was promoted on the last day of the war. In 1946, Lewin returned to Poland before emigrating to France. A believer in Labor Zionism from his youth, in 1951 Lewin emigrated again, this time to Israel, where he worked for a time on a kibbutz and as a journalist. In his thirties, he took up academic studies, receiving his Bachelor of Arts from Tel Aviv University, in 1961. That same year, Lewin was awarded a research scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. In 1964, he gained his Ph.D there. Lewin died on 14 August 2010 in Paris. His papers are housed at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Academic career and major publications Newly qualified with his doctorate, Lewin was named Director of Study at l'École des hautes études, Paris, where he served from 1965 to 1966. During this time he converted his Sorbonne dissertation into a book, published in French in 1966 and in English two years later as Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (1968) This monograph dealt with the Soviet grain procurement crisis of 1928 and the associated political battle, a bitter fight which resulted in a decision to forcibly collectivize Soviet agriculture. In this work, Lewin emphasized collectivization as a practical (albeit extreme) solution to a real world problem facing the Soviet regime, one out of several potential solutions to a crisis situation. Rather than an inevitable and predestined action, collectivization was cast as a brutal manifestation of realpolitik — a view in marked contrast to the traditionalist historiography of the day. Russian Peasants and Soviet