Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War
Stephen F. Cohen
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0231148976
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this wide-ranging and acclaimed book, Stephen F. Cohen challenges conventional wisdom about the course of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Reexamining leaders from Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin's preeminent opponent, and Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev and his rival Yegor Ligachev, Cohen shows that their defeated policies were viable alternatives and that their tragic personal fates shaped the Soviet Union and Russia today. Cohen's ramifying arguments include that Stalinism was not the predetermined outcome of the Communist Revolution; that the Soviet Union was reformable and its breakup avoidable; and that the opportunity for a real post-Cold War relationship with Russia was squandered in Washington, not in Moscow. This is revisionist history at its best, compelling readers to rethink fateful events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the possibilities ahead.
In his new epilogue, Cohen expands his analysis of U.S. policy toward post-Soviet Russia, tracing its development in the Clinton and Obama administrations and pointing to its initiation of a "new Cold War" that, he implies, has led to a fateful confrontation over Ukraine.
Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars
I Was a Potato Oligarch: Travels and Travails in the New Russia
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?
Say It Right in Russian: The Fastest Way to Correct Pronunciation Russian
later made this point. See, e.g., Alla Iaroshinskaia and Boris Vishnevskii in Novaia, March 25–28, 2004, and March 21–23, 2005. 20. See Valerii Vyzhutovich in Izvestiia, May 4, 1994; Konrad Liubarskii and Aleksandr Sobianin in NV, no. 15 (1995): 6 –12; and Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 96 –97. 21. M. Steven Fish in Demokratizatsiya (Spring 2005): 248; and Aleksandr Kolesnichenko in NI, Nov. 13, 2006. Similarly, see Boris Kagarlitsky, Square Wheels (New York, 1994), 5, 16; Grigorii Iavlinskii in
F. KGB, See also FSB Kheiman, Semyon Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Khrushchev, Nikita; anti-Stalin speech; Gulag survivors and; Ligachev and; meetings in honor of; 1961 monument proposal; overthrown by Central Committee; personal risk taken by; role in Stalinist terror; Thaw; Twenty-second Party Congress Kim, Yuli Kirkpatrick, Jeanne J. Kirov, Sergei Kissinger, Henry Koestler, Arthur Kogan, Lazar Kokh, Alfred Kopelev, Lev Korolev, Sergei Kosovo Kosygin, Aleksei Kovalev, Sergei Kravchuk,
predecessor in reform, legal justice was also an essential component of Gorbachev’s policies. Between 1987 and 1990, a million more individuals were officially rehabilitated, and then, by Gorbachev’s decree, all of Stalin’s remaining victims.136 Reacting to those and related actions, Gorbachev’s enemies occasionally charged that an “ideology of former zeks” underlay his anti-Stalinism. It may have been partially true: several members of his inner leadership were relatives of Stalin’s victims,
stereotypical version of his role—and that of other Soviet “conservatives”—in historic events. Without the full backing of Ligachev and the scores of regional Party bosses he represented, to take a ramifying example, Gorbachev probably could not have come to power in March 1985 against the clear wishes of an aged but entrenched Moscow Party-state oligarchy. Even more crucially, without a coalition for change in which Ligachev played a leading role—about which, more below—Gorbachev would not have
been the extremist wing of the Russian intelligentsia—educated, oppositionist, often guilt-ridden people of some privilege who emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Usually described as politically immoderate, impatient, and nihilistic, the radical intelligentsia repeatedly sought to destroy Russia’s existing order for the sake of a new one inspired by Western ideas, most fatefully Marxist socialism.63 This nihilistic tradition, according to the explanation, reasserted itself