Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War

by Stephen F. Cohen

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Politics, Russian History, Soviet Union, 21st Century

308 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2009

About the author

Stephen F. Cohen was Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University, where for many years he served as director of the Russian Studies Program, and Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and History at New York University. He grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky, received his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Indiana University, and his Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Cohen’s other books include Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography; Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917; Sovieticus: American Perceptions and Soviet Realities; (with Katrina vanden Heuvel) Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev’s Reformers; Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia; Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War; and The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin.

For his scholarly work, Cohen received several honors, including two Guggenheim fellowships and a National Book Award nomination.

Over the years, he was also a frequent contributor to newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. His “Sovieticus” column for The Nation won a 1985 Newspaper Guild Page One Award and for another Nation article a 1989 Olive Branch Award. For many years, Cohen was a consultant and on-air commentator on Russian affairs for CBS News. With the producer Rosemary Reed, he was also project adviser and correspondent for three PBS documentary films about Russia: Conversations With Gorbachev; Russia Betrayed?; and Widow of the Revolution.

Cohen visited and lived in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia regularly for more than forty years.

(source: Amazon)

Reviews

[Natylie Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In Washington DC, one feels the rarefied air of a Himalayan peak. Seen from the grandiose palaces of the administration, where the fate of the world is decided, foreign people look small, primitive and largely irrelevant. Here and there some real experts are tucked away, but nobody really consults them.”
-Uri Avnery

Avnery’s observation about American foreign policy and the attitudes behind it was made in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is an apt description of American leaders’ foreign policy in general, and pretty much regardless of which party is in charge at any given time. Cohen’s book about the history of the Soviet Union (and later the Russian Federation) and the inevitable exploration of America’s attitude toward and relationship with the Russians seems to reinforce Avnery’s insight, particularly after the end of the Cold War.

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives covers roughly the time between Lenin’s death, which fueled a brutal rivalry for who would become his successor, and the present day. It focuses on the concept of exploring possible alternatives that were potentially available in the Soviet Union/Russia at various points throughout that historical timeline.

Cohen is a recognized scholarly expert on the Stalin era and the attendant terror that gripped the Soviet Union during his 20 plus-year reign. A whole chapter is devoted to this and the political and psychological ramifications of it are explored throughout the rest of the book as well. Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev, who admitted that he had plenty of blood on his hands from Stalin’s era, comes across as a deeply courageous and tragic figure who in the course of a few years freed all of Stalin’s prisoners, made some attempt to reintegrate them into society and publicly repudiated many of Stalin’s excesses. He also attempted to reform the system with some limited success and many failures amid a conflicted Communist Party leadership. He was eventually removed from power in 1964.

There is much else that is interesting and insightful offered in the coverage of the mid-1960’s to the mid-1980’s, including an examination of whether the Soviet Union could have been reformed, but in light of current events, the rest of this review will focus on Russia after the end of the Cold War as it is the most instructive for understanding the present foreign policy mess surrounding Russia and the West.

Vladimir Putin is a flawed leader, but one who is, upon closer and more thoughtful examination, not the imperialistic, anti-Western, anti-democratic cartoon character that many of our leaders and members of the mainstream media make him out to be, with that portrayal, of course, being ratcheted up recently. Instead, what emerges is a more nuanced picture of a somewhat conflicted leader who, according to Cohen, has supported democratic policies at times and opposed them at times. Despite claims by pundits that he single-handedly controls every aspect of Russian society, Putin must lead amidst conflicting attitudes in the Kremlin toward the West and the policies associated with the West.

To understand where that ambiguity, and sometimes outright hostility, comes from, one must understand the actual historical experience of the Russian people in relation to Western policy.

A quote from Putin that is trotted out by many commentators in an attempt to demonstrate an irrational nostalgic yearning for the Soviet Union and his grand ambitions to revive it is a comment he made during a domestic speech in 2005 wherein he stated that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. (1)

It should be noted that, according to Cohen, a majority of Russians also regret the end of the Soviet Union.

To understand what Putin might have actually meant by that statement, why it reflects the view of most Russians and to understand the conflicted attitudes of the Kremlin toward the West, it is imperative to take a look at how the relationship between Russia and the West, primarily the United States, evolved after the negotiated dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

As documented by other historians as well as Cohen, during that negotiated dissolution in which the Warsaw Pact military alliance was rendered defunct, a gentleman’s agreement was entered into by the Bush I administration, specifically through Secretary of State James Baker, that in return for allowing the reunification of Germany and its admission as a NATO member, NATO would not be extended further east. This promise was broken first by the Clinton administration and then by Bush 2 who spearheaded the admission of seven more Eastern European nations into NATO including three former Soviet republics, reinforcing Russia's perception of being militarily encircled. The obvious question to ask is why we needed to keep NATO if the reason for its existence had disappeared? Bush 2's Senior Director for Russia on the National Security Council admitted that an alternative that was not pursued by the U.S. was to dissolve NATO and create a new pact that reflected new global realities and eventually included Russia – a lost opportunity that would have fateful consequences. (2)

This refusal in Washington to give up the Cold War mentality was foreshadowed as early as 1989 when Cohen relates a debate he was invited to participate in with a Cold-War professor before the Bush I administration over the possibility of a U.S.-Soviet strategic partnership: “Declarations alone could not terminate decades of warfare mentality….Many of the top level officials present clearly shared my opponent’s views, though the President did not.” (p. 171)

Then, there is the shock therapy that Russia allowed Western elites to administer to its citizens during the 1990’s under the guise of modernizing and marketizing its economy. It's a crucial enough point to justify quoting Cohen at length:

“[Boris Yeltsin under the advisement of American elites] adopted a “shock therapy” program that immediately ended Soviet-era price controls and other consumer subsidies and privatized the state’s most valuable assets, from natural resources, large industries, and banks to rail transport.

The result was the worst economic and social catastrophe ever suffered by a major nation in peacetime. Russia sank into a corrosive economic depression greater than that of the American 1930s. Investment plunged by 80 percent, GDP by almost 50 percent; some two-thirds of Russians were impoverished; the life expectancy of men fell below 59 years; and the population began to decline annually by almost a million people. In 1998, with nothing left to sustain it, despite several large Western loans, the Russian financial system collapsed. State and private banks defaulted on their domestic and foreign obligations, causing still more poverty and widespread misery. (p. 26).

These events put Putin’s words into a more sober and perfectly rational context – what he probably meant was that after the Soviet Union's exit from the world stage, Russia had been too trusting of the West's motives and made too many concessions that had come back to bite it in the ass, leaving a lot of destabilization in its wake. Not to mention, it left the world with a lone empire that acts drunk on triumphalism.

Putin's attitude toward the U.S. has been fairly consistent in his speeches and interviews during his tenure as President and Prime Minister of the Russian Federation: calling out the U.S.'s most reckless policies, hubris and double-standards while leaving the door ajar for cooperation.

That opening for cooperation seemed to be paying off during the brief period in 2013 when Putin and Obama had established enough of a rapport to actually start working together to address serious geopolitical issues, like avoiding a U.S. military invasion of Syria based on what turned out to be unreliable evidence of the Syrian government's responsibility for a chemical weapons attack (3) and negotiating a solution to the Iran nuclear problem. As investigative journalist Robert Parry reports, Putin pissed off the neoconservatives by thwarting their plans for more regime change in the Middle East. (4)

In light of this post-Cold War history, we have the Ukraine crisis that developed as the co-opting of grievances by citizens of Ukraine, particularly the western part of the country which leans more toward Europe, by American agents to foment a coup as admitted by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland in cahoots with American ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. (5) It should be noted that Nuland is married to influential neoconservative Robert Kagan and shares the neocon world view of regime change at America's whim. Though Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's administration was corrupt, he was democratically elected. Of course, this is not the first time American officials have been involved in overthrowing democratically elected leaders it feels don't serve its interests, regardless of the interests of the people actually living there and platitudes about democracy.

As Cohen has commented in interviews about the Ukraine crisis, preventing a country literally on its doorstep from joining NATO is now an existential issue from the perspective of Russian security in a post-Soviet world order that has been less than hospitable. Anyone who had any real knowledge or understanding of Russia's interests and the history of the last 23 years could have predicted this whole fiasco. Cohen's basic analysis is echoed by other experts on Russia such as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and ex-diplomat John Matlock. (6) (7)

If we really want a more democratic and open society in Russia and elsewhere, we would be better advised to not encourage government leaders' more autocratic tendencies by backing them into corners where they must worry about their sovereignty and independence rather than allowing them the space to develop their own society in their own time, consistent with their own history and culture.

One of the most insightful observations in the book comes from Cohen's analysis of comments made by Yegor Ligachev, a moderate-conservative Communist Party reformer who had a complicated alliance with Gorbachev during the glasnost/perestroika era: “Ligachev has been proved right about one essential issue: Russia can borrow from the West but it cannot transplant an American or other Western style system into its native soil, as was attempted so disastrously in the post-Soviet 1990s.” (p. 83).

It is a lesson for American leaders who insist on imposing their agenda on the rest of the world with often disastrous and tragic consequences for everyone involved, then acting shocked when the rest of the world resents and even resists it.

*Published today: “Needed: Obama-Putin Summit on Ukraine” Memorandum to President Obama signed by numerous veteran intelligence professionals, dated 5/4/2014. Link below.

Additional Sources:
1. http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/...
2. “Special Report: How the U.S. Made its Putin Problem Worse” by David Rohde and Arshad Mohammed, Reuters. 4/19/2014. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/0...
3. “The Red Line and the Rat Line” by Seymour Hersh, London Review of Books. 4/17/2014. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-...
4. “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis” by Robert Parry, Consortium News. 3/2/2014. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/02/...
5. Leaked Phone Conversation Between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt Discussing Ukraine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL7cg...
6. “Trying Not to Give Peace a Chance” by Ray McGovern, Consortium News. 4/20/2014. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/20/...
7. “Former U.S. Ambassador: Behind Crimea Crisis, Russia Responding to Years of Hostile U.S. Policy” – interview of John Matlock by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now. 3/20/2014. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/20...
*Bonus: “Needed: Obama-Putin Summit on Ukraine” Memorandum to President Obama signed by numerous veteran intelligence professionals, dated 5/4/2014. Consortium News. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/04/...

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important part of understanding and enjoying history is not only learning what did happen, but also what alternatives could have happened but didn’t. Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives explores how things could have turned out differently in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia from the rise of Stalin through 2011.

With the end of major fighting in the Russian Civil War in 1921 and after learning from the disaster of the Russian famine and angry uprisings, Lenin adopted the New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed for some private enterprise as well as markets in agriculture, small manufacturing and retail trade. Despite maintaining a political monopoly, Lenin also allowed for diversity in social, intellectual and cultural areas. The NEP generated the fastest economic recovery from World War I (and Russia’s civil war) of any European nation and was seen as an incredible success.

When Lenin died in 1924, however, a political struggle ensued and Nikolai Bukharin was the head of the pro-NEP faction together with Stalin. But Stalin, having become the Soviet leader, eventually turned against Bukharin and the NEP and abolished the economic program in 1929 in favor of a brutal and rapid industrialization and collectivization program, which Bukharin bitterly condemned. Bukharin also strongly opposed fascism and was opposed to Stalin’s peace treaty with Hitler. Stalin didn’t tolerate such opposition and had Bukharin arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938 as part of the Great Terror. Imagine, however, if Bukharin had come to power instead of Stalin, implementing a more mixed economic system and confronting Hitler from the start.

Bukharin became a popular inspirational figure among Communist reformers, influencing both Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in China and the Prague Spring. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, another of Bukharin admirers came to power in the Soviet Union – Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev released millions of Stalin’s political prisoners who were still alive, allowed the publishing of accounts of Gulag horrors, and condemned Stalin in speeches in 1956 and 1961, among other anti-Stalin reforms. But Communist party leaders complicit in Stalin’s crimes began to fear a Nuremberg style trial for complicit party officials, so they overthrew Khrushchev in 1964 and the conservatives came to power with Leonid Brezhnev as their leader, who put the brakes on reforms. Imagine again if Khrushchev had remained in power and continued with his reforms.

In 1985, a Bukharin and Khrushchev admirer and one of the 20th century’s most consequential leaders came to power – Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev came to power with the intent of ending the Cold War and transforming the Soviet Union into a democratic federation of states with a market based economy modeled on Western European welfare states.

Cohen, the author, proceeds to detail the political maneuvering that led to the Soviet Union collapse and focuses on Yegor Ligachev’s belief that Gorbachev should have embarked on reforms oriented toward China’s market economy with authoritarian politics, rather than moving quickly to democratize the Soviet Union. The political reforms provided room for Yeltsin’s power play, who was willing to destroy the Soviet Union (via the coup of the Belovezh Agreement) to advance his own political power. Soviet leaders in the Republics in turn backed Yeltsin because they knew Yeltsin, rather than Gorbachev, would allow their greedy privatization of state assets to enrich themselves.

But Cohen emphasizes that the Soviet Union collapsed specifically because of how Gorbachev went about implementing reforms and strenuously rejects the idea that the Soviet Union was by nature unreformable (and calls the idea that Reagan’s defense spending had anything to do with the collapse as totally baseless and absurd).

Gorbachev had implemented a free press, free elections, an independent legislature and the empowerment of civil society. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin and later Putin reversed all of these reforms because their corrupt mass privatization to oligarchs was deeply unpopular, so they had to roll back Gorbachev’s democratic reforms to avoid accountability to the people.

Yeltsin’s shock therapy of corrupt mass privatization of state assets, as guided by U.S. advisors, sent Russia into an economic depression far worse than that in the U.S. in the 1930s. GDP fell by half and 75% of Russians were plunged into poverty.

Gorbachev ended the Cold War, with cooperation from Reagan and Bush I, before the collapse of the Soviet Union through nuclear reduction agreements, the decision not to use force to stop the fall of the Berlin wall, allowing the independence of Eastern Europe, supporting the reunification of Germany and supporting the first Iraq war. But it has been the actions of the U.S. since the collapse of the Soviet Union that has helped to drive the two countries toward a new Cold War.

Following the Soviet collapse, the U.S. has acted as if it “won” the Cold War by “defeating” the Soviet Union. President Clinton broke Bush I’s promise not to expand NATO east in exchange for Gorbachev’s support of incorporating unified Germany into NATO. Every U.S. President since has worked to expand NATO and establish U.S. military weapons and bases on Russia’s border, thus nearly encircling the nation. Russia views these moves as extremely threatening. The U.S. has also denied that Russia has any legitimate security interests beyond its borders, condemned Russia for foreign policy actions the U.S. routinely engages in, funded anti-Kremlin groups in Russia and former Soviet states, backed the “color” revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, which Russia considered to be opposing its interests, and fought a proxy war with Russia in Georgia in 2008. These measures, together with pushing Yeltsin’s shock therapy of corrupt mass privatization, produced a resentful backlash in Russia and conservative hawks pushed Putin to steer a more independent and oppositional path for Russia, increasingly since 2004. In particular, Russia views Ukraine as the cradle of origin of the Russian state and will go to any length to prevent Ukraine from becoming part of NATO, which is why it invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 following the U.S. backed toppling of the Yanukovych government.

Imagine, finally, what it might be like had Gorbachev been successful in reforming and democratizing the Soviet Union and it had not collapsed and been plunged into an economic depression and the U.S. had not embarked on its confrontational “we won the Cold War” policies toward Russia.

I picked up this book because I was very impressed with author Stephen F. Cohen’s articles on the Ukrainian crisis in 2014. This book does have its flaws. It is repetitive at times and the author sometimes writes as though he is engaged in an argument with other Russian scholars, rather than educating a general reader. That said, I believe it is perhaps the most important book to read for understanding Russia and U.S./Russian relations today.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The go-to book for Soviet and post-Soviet history. Cuts through the hyperbole and tired, ideology-driven assumptions like a sharpened sickle. If you only read the newspaper or mainstream historians, everything you think about the Soviet Union and the Russia of today may be wrong...

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

sort of strange. he's a liberal democrat but doesn't make that obvious, and he treats what was for me the most interesting alternative, the deepening of soviet socialism and soviet democracy at the same time, as basically not an option. so the story of the alternatives mainly involve how one elite group or another tried to turn the soviet union into a liberal democracy slightly nicer than the united states and failed. he is much better on the breakup period and the duplicity of us and other nato during the 90s continuing up to the obama presidency. and he basically predicts the crisis in ukraine and provides clarifying reasons for it, which is a nice bonus. very fair for a us academic, although as he notes, people like him have absolutely no leverage in washington anymore. its funny how the us seemed to respect and interfere less with russia when it was a belligerent superpower... its almost like they have no loyalties, only interests...

[Tessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

deze auteur komt over alsof hij zou flippen als je zegt dat je het met hem oneens bent

[Mallory · Rating 5 out of 5]

A call to arms about the modern relationship between the U.S. and Russia, though not a literal call of arms. Cohen lays out several ways in which the Soviet Union could have proceeded differently, showing that the U.S.S.R.'s collapse was neither inevitable, nor brought about by American power. Yeltsin was never very democratic, Putin may be less antagonistic than we think, and if we keep mucking around in Russia's backyard, we may have some serious problems. While I'm not entirely sure I trust everything he says, it's important to challenge the conventional wisdom, and Cohen does it with a plethora of facts and policy suggestions.

[Victor Rabinovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the the best books on the subject.

[Noah Stacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the Russophile, a worthwhile survey of some of the lost chances and paths not taken that characterize Soviet and post-Soviet history, from the Bukharin alternative to the contemporary Russo-American relationship. Fascinating and recommended.

[Mikeba · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tragic account of opportunities squandered, both in Russia and between Russia and the US.

[Kenneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting book. I'm glad I came across the author on TV.