NY Times, Sept.
18, 2020, 7:29 p.m. ET
Stephen F. Cohen, Influential Historian of Russia, Dies at 81
By Robert D. McFadden
Stephen F. Cohen, an eminent historian whose books and
commentaries on Russia examined the rise and fall of Communism,
Kremlin dictatorships and the emergence of a post-Soviet nation
still struggling for identity in the 21st century, died on
Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.
His wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and part owner of
The Nation, said the cause was lung cancer.
From the sprawling conflicts of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution
and the tyrannies of Stalin to the collapse of the Soviet Union
and Vladimir V. Putin’s intrigues to retain power, Professor
Cohen chronicled a Russia of sweeping social upheavals and the
passions and poetry of peoples that endured a century of wars,
political repression and economic hardships.
A professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University
and New York University, he was fluent in Russian, visited
Russia frequently and developed contacts among intellectual
dissidents and government and Communist Party officials. He
wrote or edited 10 books and many articles for The Nation, The
New York Times and other publications, was a CBS-TV commentator
and counted President George Bush and many American and Soviet
officials among his sources.
In Moscow he was befriended by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail
S. Gorbachev, who invited him to the May Day celebration at Red
Square in 1989. There, at the Lenin Mausoleum, Professor Cohen
stood with his wife and son one tier below Mr. Gorbachev and the
Soviet leadership to view a three-hour military parade. He later
spoke briefly on Russian television to a vast audience about
alternative paths that Russian history could have taken.
Loosely identified with a revisionist historical view of the
Soviet Union, Professor Cohen held views that made him a
controversial public intellectual. He believed that early
Bolshevism had held great promise, that it had been democratic
and genuinely socialist, and that it had been corrupted only
later by civil war, foreign hostility, Stalin’s malignancy and a
fatalism in Russian history.
A traditionalist school of thought, by contrast, held that the
Soviet experiment had been flawed from the outset, that Lenin’s
political vision was totalitarian, and that any attempt to
create a society based on his coercive utopianism had always
been likely to lead, logically, to Stalin’s state terrorism and
to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse.
Professor Cohen was an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Gorbachev,
who after coming to power in 1985 undertook ambitious changes to
liberate the nation’s 15 republics from state controls that had
originally been imposed by Stalin. Mr. Gorbachev gave up power
as the Soviet state imploded at the end of 1991 and moved toward
beliefs in democracy and a market economy.
Mr. Cohen first came to international attention in 1973 with his
biography of Lenin’s protégé Nikolai Bukharin.
A prolific writer who mined Soviet archives, Professor Cohen
first came to international attention in 1973 with “Bukharin and
the Bolshevik Revolution,” a biography of Lenin’s protégé
Nikolai Bukharin, who envisioned Communism as a blend of
state-run industries and free-market agriculture. Critics
generally applauded the work, which was a finalist for a
National Book Award.
“Stephen Cohen’s full-scale study of Bukharin is the first major
study of this remarkable associate of Lenin,” Harrison
Salisbury’s wrote in a review in The Times. “As such it
constitutes a milestone in Soviet studies, the byproduct both of
increased academic sophistication in the use of Soviet materials
and also of the very substantial increase in basic information
which has become available in the 20 years since Stalin’s
death.”
After Lenin’s death, Mr. Bukharin became a victim of Stalin’s
Moscow show trials in 1938; he was accused of plotting against
Stalin and executed. His widow, Anna Mikhailovna Larina, spent
20 years in exile and in prison camps and campaigned for Mr.
Bukharin’s rehabilitation, which was endorsed by Mr. Gorbachev
in 1988.
Ms. Larina and Professor Cohen became friends. Given access to
Bukharin archives, he found and returned to her the last love
letter that Mr. Bukharin wrote her from prison.
In “Rethinking the Soviet Experience” (1985), Professor Cohen
offered a new interpretation of the nation’s traumatic history
and modern political realities. In his view, Stalin’s despotism
and Mr. Bukharin’s fate were not necessarily inevitable
outgrowths of the party dictatorship founded by Lenin.
Richard Lowenthal, in a review for The Times, called Professor
Cohen’s interpretation implausible. “While I do not believe that
all the horrors of Stalinism were ‘logically inevitable’
consequences of the seizure of power by Lenin and his Bolshevik
Party,” Mr. Lowenthal wrote, “I do believe that Stalin’s victory
over Bukharin was inherent in the structure of the party’s
system.”
As Professor Cohen and other scholars pondered Russia’s past,
Mr. Gorbachev’s rise to power and his efforts toward glasnost
(openness) and perestroika (restructuring) cast the future of
the Soviet Union in a new light, potentially reversing 70 years
of Cold War dogma.
As Mr. Gorbachev arrived in Washington for his 1987 summit with
President Ronald Reagan, The Times wrote, “With an irreverence
for precedent and an agility uncommon in Soviet leaders, he has
disrupted old assumptions about Soviet impulses, forced
reappraisals of Soviet purposes and rendered less predictable
the course of East-West competition.”
To widen the focus, Professor Cohen and Ms. vanden Heuvel
published “Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev’s
Reformers” (1989).
Professor Cohen affirmed his support for Mr. Gorbachev in a
March 1991 Op-Ed article in The Times. “He has undertaken the
most ambitious changes in modern history,” he wrote. “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.”
As 1991 ended, the Soviet Union was dissolved and Mr. Gorbachev
resigned, giving way to Boris N. Yeltsin’s tumultuous elected
presidency. Mr. Yeltsin tried to transform the state economy
into a capitalist market by imposing a “shock therapy” of
nationwide privatization without price controls. Inflation and
economic calamity ensued.
By 1997, as Professor Cohen saw it, the Russian economy had
become “an endless collapse of everything essential for a decent
existence.” He became a persistent critic of Mr. Yeltsin, who
survived an attempted coup and tried to promote democracy but
resigned in 1999 amid growing internal pressures. He was
succeeded by his deputy, Mr. Putin.
In his book, “Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of
Post-Communist Russia” (2000), Professor Cohen laid the blame
for Russia’s post-Communist economic and social collapse on the
United States, for providing bad advice; on academic experts,
for what he called “malpractice throughout the 1990s”; on
Western journalists; and on Mr. Yeltsin, for a range of sins:
abolishing the Soviet Union, creating a bureaucratic vacuum and
generating hyperinflation with his economic shock therapy.
“Cohen’s thesis is that Yeltsin, rather than Russia’s first
democratic leader, was a neo-czarist bumbler who destroyed a
democratization process that, in fact, should be credited to
Mikhail Gorbachev,” Robert D. Kaplan wrote in a Times review.
“Cohen is particularly scathing toward American journalists,
whom he depicts as overly influenced by the prosperity of a
small, rapacious upper class in the major Russian cities, and
who seldom ventured out into the countryside to see the terrible
price of the reformers’ handiwork.”
Stephen Frand Cohen was born in Indianapolis on Nov. 25, 1938,
the older of two children of Marvin and Ruth (Frand) Cohen. His
father owned a jewelry store and a golf course in Hollywood,
Fla. Stephen and his sister, Judith, attended schools in
Owensboro, Ky., but Stephen graduated in 1956 from the Pine
Crest School, a private school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
He loved the novels of Hemingway. As an undergraduate at Indiana
University, he went to England on a study-abroad program. He had
saved $300 for a side trip to Pamplona to run with the bulls.
But an advertisement he saw for a 30-day, $300 trip to the
U.S.S.R. changed his life.
Back at Indiana University, he gave up plans to be a golf pro
and took up Russian studies. He earned a bachelor’s degree in
economics and public policy in 1960 and a master’s in Russian
studies in 1962. In 1969, he received a doctorate in that
subject from Columbia University.
Professor Cohen’s marriage in 1962 to the opera singer Lynn
Blair ended in divorce. He married Ms. vanden Heuvel in 1988. In
addition to her, he is survived by a son, Andrew, and a
daughter, Alexandra Cohen, from his first marriage; another
daughter, Nicola Cohen, from his second marriage; a sister,
Judith Lefkowitz; and four grandchildren.
His Columbia dissertation on Mr. Bukharin’s economic ideas grew
into his first book, copies of which reached Soviet dissidents,
the K.G.B. in Moscow, and eventually Mr. Gorbachev, who put
Professor Cohen on his guest list for the 1987 Gorbachev-Reagan
summit in Washington.
Professor Cohen taught at Princeton from 1968 to 1998, rising to
full professor of politics and Russian studies, and at New York
University thereafter until his retirement in 2011. His last
book, published in 2019, was “War With Russia? From Putin &
Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.”
Many journalistic colleagues accused Professor Cohen of
defending Mr. Putin, who curtailed democratic freedoms but
boosted the economy, which grew for eight straight years. Wages
for ordinary Russians tripled, poverty was reduced, and national
growth jumped fivefold as rising prices of Russia’s plentiful
oil and gas overcame a depression.
In a recent interview for this obituary, Professor Cohen denied
that he had “defended” Mr. Putin.
“He holds views that I also hold,” Professor Cohen said. “It’s
the views that I defend, not Putin.
“From the moment Yeltsin came on,” he continued, “Americans
thought the Cold War was over. There was disappointment with
Putin as a more rational leader. I see him in the Russian
tradition of leadership, getting Russia back on its feet. He
frightens some of our observers, but I didn’t see it that way.”
