Lewis Siegelbaum

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University (retired in 2018). His interests include 20th century Europe, Russia and Soviet Union. He has been with MSU since 1983.

Biography

Lewis Siegelbaum was born in New York to a secular Jewish family. He states that the initial selection of the area of scientific interest was influenced by Communist views of his father, who was member of the Communist Party of the USA since 1939. As a student of Columbia University, Lewis Siegelbaum took part in protests against the Vietnam War. (In retrospection Siegelbaum stresses the naivete of the student rebels.)

His doctorate (Oxford University, 1975) was on the history of the Central War-Industries Committee, an organization which tried to coordinate Russian industry during World War I. After the doctorate he was with the La Trobe University, Australia, and in 1983 he moved to Michigan State University

Books

• 2023: Making National Diasporas: Soviet Migration Regimes and Post-Soviet Consequences (Cambridge University Press, 2023) co-authored with Leslie Page Moch for the series Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History
• 2019: Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian (Northern Illinois University Press)
  • 2020: (Russian translation) Не расстанусь с коммунизмом. Мемуары американского историка России, ISBN 978-1-6446935-8-2
• 2014: Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia's Twentieth Century (with Leslie Page Moch)
• 2008: Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell)
  • from a prize citation: "This may well be the perfect subject for an historian of the Soviet Union who teaches in Michigan. Engagingly written with considerable wit and close attention to evidentiary detail, Cars for Comrades successfully combines technological, institutional, economic, social, and cultural history. Siegelbaum uses the automobile to shed considerable light on multiple facets of the Soviet experience, including urbanization, consumption, economic relations with the West, and the culture of everyday life. The book will enlighten and entertain specialists and students alike. "
• 2000: Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Documentary Narrative (with Andrei Sokolov), Yale University Press
  • In a book review, Richard Pipes criticized Siegelbaum's interpretation of the presented primary sources: "He seems to have difficulty accepting the texts at their face value, and feels compelled to interpret them in sociological jargon that robs them of their force and dilutes their message."<...>"There is a reluctance in Siegelbaum's discussion to concede the totalitarian nature of the Stalinist regime."
• 1995: Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989-1992 (with Daniel J. Walkowitz), SUNY Press, 1995
• 1992: Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge University Press)
• 1988: Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge University Press)
• 1983: The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914-1917: A Study of the War-Industries Committees (St. Martin's Press) (book review in: The American Historical Review, vol. 89, issue 5, December 1984, p. 1360, doi:10.1086/ahr/89.5.1960-a)

Awards

• 2006: MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources, in History category, for the online resource "Seventeen Moments in Soviet History" (shared with James von Geldern)
• Cars for Comrades earned two prizes from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies:
  • 1989: Ed A. Hewett Book Prize
  • 1989: Honorable mention of the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History

Further reading

• Saving Seventeen Moments in Soviet History. An Interview with Lewis Siegelbaum and James von Geldern, by Amy Nelson, Virginia Tech, NewsNet. News of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, vol. 56, no.1, 2016, pp. 20–23