Stephen F. Cohen

Prescient and even more relevant than when originally released in 2019, this Memorial Edition of War With Russia ? provides keen perspective to help readers understand the current Ukraine crisis. Are we in a new Cold War with Russia? Does Vladimir Putin really want to destabilize the West? War With Russia? answers these questions and more. America is in a new Cold War with Russia even more dangerous than the one the world barely survived in the twentieth century. The Soviet Union is gone, but the two nuclear superpowers are again locked in political and military confrontations, now from Ukraine to Syria. All of this is exacerbated by Washington’s warlike demonizing of the Kremlin leadership and by Russiagate’s unprecedented allegations. US mainstream media accounts are highly selective and seriously misleading. American “disinformation,” not only Russian, is a growing peril. In War With Russia?, Stephen F. Cohen—the widely acclaimed historian of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia—gives readers a very different, dissenting narrative of this more dangerous new Cold War from its origins in the 1990s, the actual role of Vladimir Putin, and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis to Donald Trump’s election and today’s unprecedented Russiagate allegations. Cohen’s views have made him, it is said, “America’s most controversial Russia expert.” Some say this to denounce him, others to laud him as a bold, highly informed critic of US policies and the dangers they have helped to create. War With Russia? gives readers a chance to decide for themselves who is right: are we living, as Cohen argues, in a time of unprecedented perils at home and abroad?

How should the West deal with Putin’s Russia? For the U. S. and some European powers the answer is obvious: isolate Russia with punishing economic sanctions, remove it from global institutions such as the G8, and arm the nations directly threatened by Putin. In short, return to the Cold War doctrine that froze Soviet aggression in Europe and helped bring about the collapse of communist Russia. Others argue that such a policy is a dead end. Putin’s Russia has legitimate grievances against Western and NATO powers meddling in its sphere of influence. Instead of further antagonizing Putin and risking a dangerous escalation of the current conflict, the U. S. and Europe should seek common cause with Russia to address shared threats, from the Middle East to Asia to combatting terrorism. In the fifteenth semi-annual Munk Debate, acclaimed academic Stephen F. Cohen and veteran journalist and bestselling author Vladimir Poznar square off against internationally renowned expert on Russian history Anne Applebaum and Russian-born political dissident Garry Kasparov to debate the future of the West’s relationship with Russia.

Stalinin hirmuhallintoa on kutsuttu joskus toiseksi holokaustiksi, ja sen vankileirien saaristoon hukkui jopa miljoonia ihmisiä. Aleksander Solzenitsynin, Eugenia Ginzburgin ja muiden kirjailijoiden leirikuvausten ansiosta vanki- ja työleirien kauheudet ovat tulleet tutuiksi koko maailmalle. Stephen F. Cohenin Gulagista selvinneet ei kuitenkaan ole Gulagin historia vaan sieltä hengissä selvinneiden historia. Stalin kuoli 5.3.1953, minkä jälkeen suurin osa leireistä purettiin ja vangit alkoivat vähitellen palata neuvostoyhteiskuntaan. Heidän maineensa palautuminen oli kuitenkin kiinni kulloisenkin hallinnon harjoittamasta sisäpolitiikasta ja oikuista. Stalinia seuranneen Nikita Hrustsovin aikana uhrit tai heidän lapsensa hyväksyttiin, mutta Stalinia ihailleen Breznevin aikana heitä alettiin taas lakaista maton alle ja jopa vainota. Monille ainoaksi vaihtoehdoksi normaalielämään tulikin paradoksaalisesti liittyä kommunistipuolueeseen. Sama meno on jatkunut Venäjälläkin, missä etenkin Putinin suhtautuminen maan leirimenneisyyteen ja siitä muistuttaviin ihmisiin on ollut vähättelevä. Kirjan kirjoittaja on käynyt Neuvostoliitossa ja Venäjällä jo 60-luvulta alkaen ja tuntee useita "zekejä" eli leirivankeja ja heidän jälkeläisiään. Henkilökohtainen ote ja kirjan runsas kuvitus tuovat tämän salatun tragedian todella lähelle lukijaa.

Failed Crusade is a deeply informed and passionate call for a fundamentally different American-Russian relationship in the post-Yeltsin era. Author Stephen Cohen shows that what US officials and other experts call "reform" has for most Russians been a catastrophic development—namely the unprecedented demodernization of a twentieth-century country—and for the United States the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. What emerges is an alarming analysis of nuclear-laden Russia after 1991, representing an even greater threat to our national security than during the Cold War, and an indictment of American journalists and policy makers who failed to see or report the truth about the complicity of U. S. policy in a great human tragedy.

This classic biography carefully traces Bukharin's rise to and fall from power, focusing particularly on the development of his theories and programmatic ideas during the critical period between Lenin's death in 1924 and the ascendancy of Stalin in 1929.

An inside account of the events unfolding in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. In a series of interviews, 14 leaders of Gorbachev's reforms talk about their personal and political struggles to change the Soviet Union. They include the Politburo member often called Gorbachev's right-hand man; three other members of the powerful Central Committee; leaders of the revolt against the old cultural bureaucracy, including Russia's most outspoken actor, poet and film-maker; and equally prominent reformers in economics, science, journalism and foreign policy. Other works by Stephen F. Cohen include "Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution", "An End to Silence" and "Sovieticus".

An examination fo Soviet Politics and History since 1917. 'This penetrating probe into the Soviet past offers the most illuminating analysis I know of choices and possibilities in the Soviet future.' Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Underlying current controversies about environmental regulation are shared concerns, divided interests and different ways of thinking about the earth and our proper relationship to it. This book brings together writings on nature and environment that illuminate thought and action in this realm.