Moshe Lewin

“For no matter how stern or cruel a regime, in the laboratory of history only rarely can state coercion be so powerful as to control fully the course of events. The depth and scope of spontaneous events that counter the wishes and expectations of a dictatorial government are not a lesser part of history than the deeds and misdeeds of the government and state.”
― Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation

“Stalinism in its turn would be ‘buried’. It would be a mistake to think that the dictator’s death, eventually inevitable, was the decisive factor in this. After the end of the war, the system was in decline and Stalin, notwithstanding the impression of omnipotence he created, was in search of something to give it a new lease of life. The primary cause of the decline lay in the regime’s internal contradictions. Its absolutist features, befitting another age, were profoundly incompatible with the effects of a forced industrialization in response to the challenges of new times. The government that had summoned these furies was unable to accommodate the emerging realities, or interest groups, or constraints embodied in the social structures and layers generated by the developmental process. The pathological purges attested to this: Stalinism could not live with the fruits of its own policies, starting with its own bureaucracy; it could not live without it, but could not live with it either.”
― Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century