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Rethinking the Soviet experience : politics and history since 1917
This wide-ranging volume cuts through Cold War stereotypes of the Soviet Union to arrive at fresh interpretations of that country's traumatic history and its present-day political realities. Replacing simplistic explanations of Soviet development, Cohen challenges the popular view of the USSR as a totalitarian monolith and examines the possibilities for change that exist within the Soviet system today.
eBook
U.S.-RUSSIAN RELATIONS IN AN AGE OF AMERICAN TRIUMPHALISM
In an interview, Stephen F. Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies and History at New York University and Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University, talked about the US approach to Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, the role of history in shaping Russia's future, and the dangerous lack of debate within US policy-making circles. According to Cohen, modernization has been a political goal for centuries and it has almost always involved the same issue: whether people do it evolutionarily or through a revolutionary transformation imposed from above. The from-above, or \"leap,\" model is historically associated with Peter the Great and Stalin, and is non-democratic in nature. What worries him is that US policy toward Russia is abetting the neo-Stalinist side. Those people constantly remind Russia that in the 1930s Stalin used an impending foreign threat as the justification for an imposed, non-democratic modernization. Then the neo-Stalinists draw a parallel with today's NATO expansion to Russia's borders.
Journal Article
Was the Soviet System Reformable?
Stephen F. Cohen presents a critical analysis of the prevailing view that Mikhail Gorbachev's six-year attempt to transform the Soviet Union along democratic and market lines proved that the system was, as most specialists had always believed, unreformable. Ideological, conceptual, and historical assumptions underlying the nonreformability thesis are reexamined and found wanting, as are the ways in which generalizations about “the system” and “reform” are usually formulated. Cohen then asks how each of the system's basic components—the official ideology, the Communist Party and its dictatorship, the nationwide network of Soviets, the monopolistic state economy, and the union of republics—actually responded to Gorbachev's policies. Citing developments from 1985 to 1991, Cohen argues that all of those components, and thus the system itself, turned out to be remarkably reformable. If so, he concludes, most explanations of the end of the Soviet Union, which rely in one way or another on the unreformability thesis, are also open to serious question. Five distinguished scholars respond to Cohen's article.
Journal Article
