76 SOCIAL SCIENTIST other socialist countries in eastern Europe, Lewin maintains, is the agony and ecstasy of an increasingly urbane system trying to come to terms, simultaneously, with both heredity and environment. The system is discovering that it is outgrowing itself; that does not mean that it is the helpless, inert victim of the law of change; on the contrary, it is the living proof of the validity of the law of change; it can legitimately take pride in the fact that its once-primitive paraphernalia succeeded in triggering off a process of transformation which has enabled the Soviet people to arrive at the advanced mileposts they have reached today. It is, however, in the nature of the law of change that the paraphernalia itself must now be re-tooled and re-fashioned. Lewin no doubt is partly right in some matters. In some others, he is however hopelessly wrong. There are two disturbing features in his analysis. First, it is devoid of a political content. Soviet history, he almost suggests, can be packaged in bland sociological descriptions, such that Soviet society has outgrown the muzhik phase and the muzhik modalities of behavior which ensured the success of the command system in the past; the nation is now transformed, and in search of sophisticated answers to the freshly emerging problems; such answers can only be provided by processes which too have to be progressively more sophisticated and complex; these processes, to be successful, will call for patient experimentation over the long haul. Secondly, Lewin, whether purposely or otherwise, rules out the role of ideology in what has happened in the Soviet Union during the past seventy years, or is happening now. His is a 'nationalist* model, almost a 'patriotic* model. It is as if the party and the ideology had nothing to do with Soviet accomplishments, good or bad: it was all the doings and misdoings of the Russian agrarian tradition. On both counts, Lewin deserves to be contradicted. The 'social*—very nearly 'anthropological*—explanation he proffers of Soviet developments is not devoid of historicity, but it is segmented, compartmental historicity. It can also, at least by implication, be subjected to a racialist interpretation. Some motivated individuals could easily claim that what Lewin hints at is that, for an excruciatingly long period spanning over seven decades, the Soviet people were held in thraldom by their primitive, Asiatic roots; all that is however done with, lo and behold, they are now entering the sophisticated European epoch, where everything will turn up roses. This kind of vulgarisation of history will not be much different from the absurdity of the point of view that Josef Stalin, that boorish Asiatic, son of a serf, had pushed Russia along wrong rails; now good, sensible men such as the Gorbachevs and the Dobrynins are repairing the damage done to the nation's European heritage, and, given the goodwill of the capitalist world, by golly, they are going to succeed. Moreover, is it not both outrageous andiudicrous to keep silent on the ideological process that has been sometimes quietly, sometimes