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.
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