1938–2020
○ Lung cancer
American Russia scholar who argued through Bukharin's biography that the Soviet Union had reformable alternatives and collapse was avoidable
"At each of the most fateful moments, the rise of Stalin, the fall of Khrushchev, the end of the Soviet Union, there was an alternative."
Stephen F. Cohen was the American Sovietologist who built the most sustained scholarly case against the inevitability of the Soviet collapse. His landmark 1973 biography Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution recast Nikolai Bukharin's program (gradual collectivization, continuation of the NEP, intra-party pluralism) as a viable alternative to Stalinism, challenging the totalitarian school's insistence that Leninism led inexorably to Stalin. Cohen championed Gorbachev's perestroika as proof that the system was reformable, helped rehabilitate Bukharin's memory in the USSR, and after 1991 condemned America's 'failed crusade' (the triumphalist treatment of post-Soviet Russia as a defeated power). In his final decade, vilified as pro-Putin, he argued that U.S. media coverage of Russia had become more ideological than during the Cold War, and remained the field's most stubborn contrarian.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1968–1998Professor of Politics, Princeton University
- 1982–1987'Sovieticus' columnist, The Nation
- 1985–1991Consultant and commentator on Gorbachev reforms, CBS News
- 1998–2011Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, NYU
- 2011–2020Professor Emeritus, NYU; continued writing and broadcasting
- 2015–2020Founding Director, American Committee for East-West Accord
Related historical events
Bukharin’s biography and alternatives in Soviet history
In Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, published in 1973, Cohen placed Nikolai Bukharin’s political life at the center of debates about Soviet history. A contemporary review called it the first full-scale study of Bukharin and a milestone in Soviet studies, reflecting the growth of both available source material and scholarly analysis. Through Bukharin’s ideas and his conflict with Stalin, Cohen presented post-revolutionary history as something other than a predetermined path. Examining Bukharin’s political role meant not only documenting repression under Stalin, but also asking how alternative political possibilities were defeated amid the conflicts and choices through which that system consolidated.
Cohen’s account did not make Bukharin an unblemished alternative. The contemporary review also noted Bukharin’s collaboration with Stalin until 1928 and his support for repressive measures against others. By considering both Bukharin’s opposition to Stalin’s policies and his own earlier political choices, Cohen examined the existence and limits of alternatives together. This concern broadened in his later Rethinking the Soviet Experience, which considered alternatives to Stalinism within Bolshevism. It informed assessments of Cohen as an opponent of inevitabilist accounts of Soviet history, but his interpretation should not be treated as an academic consensus.