lost alternatives

What the concept argues

Lost alternatives is an interpretive framework Stephen F. Cohen developed out of his work on Bukharin. Cohen presented Bukharin's NEP-era programme, gradual development through market relations, the worker-peasant alliance (smychka), and voluntary cooperatives as the "high road" of "growing into socialism", as a viable alternative to Stalin's forced collectivisation and crash industrialisation. Cohen argued that Bukharin could have succeeded Lenin, and that the Soviet Union under him would have had greater openness, economic flexibility, and democracy.

Cohen extends this line into a "viable anti-Stalinist tradition" running through Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation to Gorbachev's perestroika. As Columbia University Press summarises his argument, Stalinism was not the predetermined outcome of the Communist Revolution; the Soviet Union was reformable and its breakup avoidable; and the opportunity for a real post-Cold War relationship with Russia was squandered in Washington, not in Moscow. For him, Bukharin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Gorbachev's rival Ligachev are each owners of defeated policies whose tragic personal fates shaped the Soviet Union and Russia today.

The reformability debate

The framework stands directly against the thesis of the Soviet system's unreformability. In "Was the Soviet System Reformable?" (Slavic Review, 2004), Cohen took on the prevailing view that Gorbachev's six years proved the system unreformable, reexamining the ideological, conceptual and historical assumptions of the nonreformability thesis and finding them wanting. Against those who held that Gorbachev "failed to reform the unreformable", he argued the evidence of 1985 to 1990 shows the system was, in his phrase, "remarkably reformable" (замечательно реформируемой). He adds that reform need not mean democratisation or marketisation, citing the NEP and the Khrushchev-era changes as cases in point. Cohen's concluding claim is that the breakup was avoidable, dependent on the unpredictable actions of particular leaders rather than structural destiny.

Lars T. Lih framed the book as an attack on the entrenched cultural narrative that the Soviet Union "died because it deserved to die, because it was 'unreformable'", noting that Cohen explains the collapse through the unpredictable actions of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Lih also observed that Cohen knew his outlook represented a minority opinion, which pushed him to consider the plausible objections. Cohen's arguments were not a broadly accepted consensus, and his political positions on the USSR and Russia were themselves contested in academic and journalistic debate.