Stephen Cohen

Stephen Frand Cohen (November 25, 1938September 18, 2020) was an American scholar of Russian studies.

His academic work concentrated on modern Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's relationship with the United States.

Cohen was a contributing editor to The Nation magazine, published and partially owned by his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel.

He attended Indiana University Bloomington, where he earned a B.S. in economics and public policy in 1960 and an M.A. in government and Russian studies in 1962.

While on an undergraduate study abroad program in England, he took a four-week trip to the Soviet Union, where he became interested in its history and politics.

After completing his Ph.D. in government and Russian studies at Columbia University in 1968, he became a professor of politics at Princeton University later that year and remained on its faculty until 1998, when he became Professor of Politics, Emeritus.

According to Eugene Huskey, William R. Kenan chair at Stetson University, in the 1970s Cohen viewed the Soviet Union as "simply inefficient and corrupt" rather than a totalitarian state.

Richard Lowenthal in a 1985 review of Cohen's Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 said that many scholars of history consider "such an iffy assumption as illegitimate".

Cohen gave his support to perestroika, the reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev and, with his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, co-authored Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev’s Reformers (1989).

Cohen was a friend of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who invited him to attend the 1989 May Day parade in Red Square, and advised former U.S. President George H. W. Bush in the late 1980s.

Cohen helped Nikolai Bukharin's widow, Anna Larina, to rehabilitate her name during the Soviet era.

In a March 1991 op-ed for The New York Times, he wrote that Gorbachev's government "has undertaken the most ambitious changes in modern history. Their goal is to 'dismantle' the state controls Stalin imposed and to achieve an 'emancipation of society' through privatization, democratization, and federalization of the 15 republics."

He said that perestroika was then in crisis, and stated: "Russia has come closer to democracy than ever before. Though democratization remains exceedingly fragile, how can this be dismissed as a failure?"

Cohen wrote that the US continued the Cold War after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

He said that President Bill Clinton backtracked on the promise of his predecessor not to extend NATO eastward and the flawed interpretation of an "American victory" and a "Russian defeat", which he believed in 2006 led US leaders to believe that Russia would submit completely to US foreign policy.

He then taught at New York University until his retirement in 2011, when he became Professor Emeritus of Russian and Slavic Studies.

In his first book, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, a biography of Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik official and editor of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Cohen argued that Communism in the Soviet Union could have easily taken a different direction, not leading to Joseph Stalin's dictatorship and purges.

Cohen wrote that it was completely possible for Bukharin to have succeeded Lenin and that the Soviet Union under Bukharin would have had greater openness, economic flexibility, and democracy.

The book was widely praised, with economic historian Alec Nove describing it as "the best book on the USSR to be published for many years".

In an article for The Nation, published in the March 3, 2014 issue, Cohen wrote that "media malpractice" had resulted in the "relentless demonization of Putin" who was not an "autocrat".

He wrote that the American media's coverage of Russia was "less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological" than it had been during the Cold War.

In a follow-up interview with Newsweek magazine, Cohen said Putin was the "best potential partner we had anywhere in the world to pursue our national security".

In a CNN interview around March 2014, he said Putin was not "anti-American".

In a May 2014 Nation column coauthored with his wife, Cohen wrote that President Barack Obama had unilaterally declared a new Cold War against Russia and that those inside the Beltway were complicit in it by their silence.

Julia Ioffe in The New Republic saw this as Cohen disagreeing with a consensus that did not exist.

Cohen's views on US-Russian relations were criticized by Ioffe and others as being pro-Putin.

Writing in The American Conservative, James W. Carden, a former advisor to the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission and soon-to-be executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accord, described Ioffe's article as a "scurrilous — and frankly hysterical — ad hominem attack on his work and character".

Carden agreed with Cohen's view that the US had failed to conduct a public debate prior to making a major shift in policy toward Russia to try to "isolate" and make it a "pariah state".

Cohen was a founding director of the 2015 reestablished American Committee for East–West Accord.

Cohen was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and later grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of Ruth (Frand) and Marvin Cohen, who owned a jewelry store and a golf course in Hollywood, Florida.

His grandfather emigrated to the United States from Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire).

Cohen graduated from the Pine Crest School in Florida.

Cohen participated in a Munk Debate in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in April 2015, on the proposal "Be it resolved the West should engage not isolate Russia."

With Vladimir Posner, he argued in favor of engagement, while Anne Applebaum and Garry Kasparov argued against.

Cohen's side lost the debate, with 52% of the audience voting against the motion.

In a July 2015 interview, Cohen said:"Even Henry Kissinger—I think it was in March 2014 in The Washington Post—wrote this line: 'The demonization of Putin is not a policy. It's an alibi for not having a policy.' And then I wrote in reply to that: That's right, but it’s much worse than that, because it's also that the demonization of Putin is an obstacle to thinking rationally, having a rational discourse or debate about American national security. And it’s not just this catastrophe in Ukraine and the new Cold War; it's from there to Syria to Afghanistan, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to fighting global terrorism. The demonization of Putin excludes a partner in the Kremlin that the U.S. needs, no matter who sits there."

In an interview with Tucker Carlson on May 17, 2017, Cohen said: "You and I have to ask a subversive question: are there really three branches of government, or is there a fourth branch of government — these intel services?"

He stated that a military alliance that President Obama had tried to establish with Putin against terrorism was "sabotaged by the Department of Defense and its allies in the intelligence services".

Each of Trump's efforts to "cooperate with Russia" was "thwarted [by] a new leak of a story".

In his book War with Russia? (2019), Cohen wrote that at "least one U.S.–Soviet summit seems to have been sabotaged. The third Eisenhower–Khrushchev meeting, scheduled for Paris in 1960, was aborted when the Soviets shot down a US U-2 spy plane sent by what he refers to as the US deep state. During the Cold War, Cohen was critical of both Western hawks and also the Soviet government, which banned him from visiting the country from 1982 to 1985. Cohen said in early 1985 that the reasons had not been revealed to him.