lost alternatives
잃어버린 대안
A framework of Soviet historical interpretation systematised by Stephen F. Cohen, countering the conventional wisdom that Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution and that the Soviet system was fundamentally unreformable. Cohen links Bukharin's NEP, Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation, and Gorbachev's perestroika into a single 'viable anti-Stalinist tradition' and argues the system's collapse was not structural destiny but a contingent political failure. The concept has served as the most sustained counter-argument to the unreformability thesis that dominated mainstream Western Sovietology after 1991.
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Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) biographical context and bibliography showing Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives (2009) and the 'Was the Soviet System Reformable?' debate as Cohen's central contributions.
- Wikipedia (EN) discusses the Bukharinist alternative to Stalinism and Cohen's role in framing it as a 'lost and incalculably preferable alternative to Stalinism.'
- cup.columbia.edu Columbia University Press description: 'Cohen shows that their defeated policies were viable alternatives… Stalinism was not the predetermined outcome… the Soviet Union was reformable and its breakup avoidable.'
- themontrealreview.com Lars T. Lih review detailing Cohen's argument against the unreformability assumption: 'the Soviet Union showed a vast potential for reform based on aspects of its own tradition.'
- fpif.org Foreign Policy In Focus review confirming 'a viable anti-Stalinist tradition… linked Bukharin's progressive socialism of the 1920s and Khrushchev's political revivalism of the 1960s.'
- gorby.ru Russian translation of Cohen's 'Was the Soviet System Reformable?' (Gorbachev Foundation), using the phrase 'утраченные альтернативы' and arguing the Soviet system was 'замечательно реформируемой' (remarkably reformable).