Stephen f. cohen interview

These people were all talking like…. The question is why Clinton bought into this. That would then take you to Strobe Talbott. Strobe was a disciple of Isaiah Berlin, who taught that if you want to understand Russia, you have to understand the history, the culture and the civilization. And certainly if you took that view, you never would have done, as George Kennan said in or , you never would have expanded NATO.

I knew George during my 30 years at Princeton. Be patient, understand Russian history, the forces in Russia. Well, they say power corrupts, or at least changes people. I think Russia disappointed him. And when it disappoints you, you never forgive Russia. Check out Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post. Fred was writing from Moscow during the s that democracy was going to be great.

So did most the guys who are now were still in editorial positions. Russia let them down. Part of it also had to do with Yeltsin. He was so desperate, not only for American affirmation but for American affection. He was so insecure as his health declined, and he became more and more the captive of the oligarchs that he wanted to mean as much to Washington as Gorbachev had.

He was getting close to virtually giving Washington anything, saying anything, until the Serbian war. Then it dawned on him that Washington had a certain agenda, and the expansion of NATO [was part of it], but by then it was too late, he was a spent force. This is a separate university course, this is a book, this is for somebody with a much bigger brain that I have.

This really is for historians to judge. I wrote an article in, I think, called Stop The Pointless Demonization of Putin , arguing that there is very little basis for many of the allegations made against Putin, and that the net result was to make rational analysis in Washington on Russian affairs at home and abroad impossible, because it was all filtered through this demonization.

This has now happened fully. The history of how this came about [begins] when Putin came to power, promoted by Yeltsin and the people around Yeltsin, who were all connected in Washington. These people in Moscow included Anatoly Chubais, who had overseen the privatizations, had relations with the IMF and had fostered a lot of the corruption. When he came to power, both the Times and the Post wrote that Putin was a democrat and, better yet, he was sober, unlike Yeltsin.

Well, remember, Sarah Palin could see Russia from Alaska! But the demonization of Putin has become an institution in America. It is literally a political institution that prevents the kind of discussion that you and I are having. Kissinger had the same thought. I asked a question rhetorically several years ago of these regime changers: Have you thought about what would happen in Russia in the event of regime change?

If what you say is true, if Putin is the pivot of the whole system, you remove Putin the whole system collapses. Russia has every known weapon of mass destruction in vast quantities. So this Putin phenomenon has to be explained. How did he go from a democrat for sure, now to maybe the worst Russian leader since Ivan the Terrible. How do you explain it?

Does that tell us more about Putin or more about us? I think his sin is an unacceptable take on, broad-brush terms, Eastern ethos vs. Western ethos, and on narrower terms a rejection of a neoliberal economic regime in the Washington consensus style. What does he face domestically? Let me tell you just briefly. When I ask Russians, they think the answer is American presidential envy.

Clinton left basically in disgrace, Bush left not beloved for the war that he had got us into and lied about, Obama is before our eyes a shrinking, failing president. And by the way, until recently the preeminent European statesman of his time, no doubt of this. In the 21st century, only Merkel can stand anywhere near him as a European statesman, whether you like what a statesman does or not.

This, of course, changes everything. Not to take the famous cop-out, but let history judge. For my short-term take on Putin, he was put in power to save the Yeltsin family from corruption charges, and the first decree he signed upon becoming acting president was to exempt the Yeltsin family from future prosecution. He has honored that, by the way.

I kind of like it. I operate under the assumption that no matter how or why people come to power, when in power they begin to ponder what their mission is, what history asks of them. For Putin it was quite clear: The Russian state had collapsed twice in the 20th century. Stop and think what that means. It means misery; it means foreign invasion; it means civil war; it means that people fall into poverty.

This is the Russia that Putin inherited. The governors were corrupt, were not obeying the law, were not paying taxes, were running criminal fiefdoms in scores of regions. In Russian history, the worst thing that can happen to Russia is smuta , when the state collapses. Stop and think: Between and , it happened twice in the largest territorial country in the world.

Is there any precedent for that in history? How a leader could come to power and not see that…. If there is a lesson in Stephen F. The problem lies with the ideologues infesting the waters wherein Cohen swims. Terminally poisoned by Cold War consciousness, they cannot abide disinterested thought. Cohen has been mostly scholar, partly journalist, since the s.

The first half of our exchange last week on Salon began with events during the past year, and then advanced toward the post-Soviet origins of the current crisis. Most surprising to me was the real but foregone prospect of reforming the Soviet system such that the suffering that ensued since its demise could have been averted. Stephen F.

His first impulse was toward more free-market reforms, anti-progressive taxes. He offers [George W. And what does he do? I even have an army over there called the Northern Alliance. You want overflight? How many American lives did Putin save during our land war in Afghanistan? And do you know what a political price he paid in Russia for that?

Because his security people were completely against it. Oh, yeah. You think they minded seeing America being brought to its knees? He has a real strategic partnership with America. What does Bush give him in return? This was betrayal for Putin, and for the entire Russian political class, and Putin paid a price. Putin says just what I told you.

We believe in the common European home. But every time we turn to you or we negotiate with you or we think we have an agreement with you, you act like a hegemon and everybody has to do exactly what you say if they want to be on your side. Putin has come to tell them that America is risking a new Cold War with more than a decade of bad behavior towards post-Soviet Russia.

John McCain interprets this as the declaration of a new Cold War. But the demonization of Putin came earlier , before the Munich speech, when he began to drive a few favorite American oligarchs [oil companies] out of the country. But people who think for themselves. But this then brings us to another question that people in my generation will remember.

If you want to protest something that you think is really bad — in my case, it would have been the Vietnam War. During the protest against the war in Vietnam — though, I was in living in New York and come here from Kentucky and Indiana, was a student at Columbia — I recall vividly these discussions before these large protests; the organizers hoping to gather , people — maybe less — but in Central Park or various places.

And the question about, whether to do it with or without a permit? And so there was a negotiation with the city. And sometimes the city gave you a permit. Are we passive? Or do we provoke the police? Some of the organizers — I talk now about the opposition against the war in Vietnam — wanted arrest, because they wanted to be shown on television, thinking it would show a repressive state and win adherents.

Almost exactly the same conversation has gone on in Moscow, ever since protests began under Gorbachev. By the way, when we talk about protest in Moscow: I may have the year slightly off in the number. In , I believe it was, In , there was a protest march of , people in Moscow — , And what were they protesting? There was a clause in the then-Soviet constitution, that named the Communist Party as the only party permitted in the country.

They wanted that clause removed from the constitution. That was But imagine: , people. So if we look at the history of democratization of Russia, going back to the Gorbachev years, and we take the view that protests are part of democratization — as they were in England, as they were in the United States — then we see the history of Russia during the last 30 years.

But there were , people in It was sensation in to go into the streets and protest. I mean, some people go to the dacha. Do they come back in time for the protest? And this is a good thing, I think. From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate. Cohen, speaking to me in September His wisdom was always so important to me, and I know it was to many people who watch the Grayzone.

Grayzone UK See All. Skripal poisoning victim disputed UK narrative, official inquiry reveals. Stephen F. The Minsk-2 ceasefire accord, drafted by Germany and France and endorsed by Moscow and Kiev, would have moved Ukraine in this direction, but has been repeatedly thwarted, primarily by Kyiv. Whether or not full backing for Minsk by both Trump and Putin, particularly the provision giving rebel territories some degree of home rule, would end the Ukrainian civil war is far from certain, especially as it might result in the overthrow of the current Kiev government by well-armed ultra-nationalist forces, but for now there is no peaceful alternative.

Cohen concludes that even if Trump and Putin adopt a wise joint policy toward Ukraine, neither leader has much political capital to spare at home. Now into their fourth year of interviews, previous installments of interviews with Stephen Cohen by John Batchelor are here at The Nation. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions.

I can arrange this at my own university, the University of Birmingham. So I was in a sort of passive but adventurous stage of life. I was mainly interested in girls and basketball. I wanted to be a golf professional, but that was over. So I go off to the University of Birmingham. So I start taking these courses, though not intellectually hooked on Russia.

And about four months before I had decided to buy a car in England because I like British cars. So I went down to the working class district, industrial district of Birmingham. I talked myself into going, and I get on a Soviet ship in London. You go with this tour on to five Soviet cities. We went to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Rostov, and one other.

The only problem was it turned out to be a Fabian Society pensioners group where everybody was in their sixties [laughter]. I think I was just turning nineteen, maybe twenty. So I carried the bags. But the trip was astonishing. And I had always had an interest in history. And what I saw, because Russians would come up to you—somebody who spoke English would come up to you—and crowd of two or three hundred people would form, and this Russian would ask you questions.

Most of them never seen an American before. They were like do you have your own apartment, do you have a car, what does a refrigerator cost? This would go on two, three, four hours. Nobody wanted to leave. What I saw was a country awakening from twenty years of terror. Had nothing to do with communism or that. That was separate. When I returned to Bloomington, Indiana—I had not known this—the university had one of the best Russian studies programs in the country.

I had not known this. So I start taking courses. One being with the man who, I think, was the greatest Russianist of his generation, and possibility several generations, Robert C. He had his own history. Later he got the whole family out. Bob became an aide to Adlai [E. The mother-in-law lived here and died here. We all called her Mama. She was in Bloomington and in Princeton.

But that began my Russian studies. What should I study? What should be my dissertation? He was going to Princeton. I was going to leave for a different reason. But I needed to think, what do I do? So that makes me think that there was something in the history of Kentucky that involved alternative paths of development.

Stephen f. cohen interview

The great unexplored topic, very few of us work on it, alternatives in Soviet history. I write in the preface of that book—I tell the story about that with Tucker about alternatives. I mean this is making it too systematic and logical, but a series of accidents—again, Russians would say fate—took me first to Russia, then back to Indiana to Tucker, to the subject of alternatives which was my—masters topic, Bukharin at Indiana.

But it never occurred to me to come to New York. I probably would have stayed at Indiana or gone to another regional university. Several Big Ten universities had Russian studies. Or I might have gone further south. I was comfortable in the south. I lived in Florida for two years and I had no ties up here at all. Then fate intervened again. It was a very famous opera school.

Some say it was better than Juilliard. So they went auditioning and they went to Indiana and they hired my soon-to-be wife. Her professional name was Lynn Blair. So we were stuck on each other. My father and mother were not happy about this. So if you were going to stay together you really had to consider getting married. But that was not the choices we had, male or female, back then.

So I made application to Columbia [University] and secondary, as a backup, to Harvard [University] because it was the other Russia Studies major center close to New York. I was accepted at Columbia in what was then called the department of—still is, I guess—department of government. I was teaching a course called Radical Thought. They were Weathermen.

But Tucker was at Princeton and he needed a junior colleague, and though Princeton had a democratic system of hiring and the rest, thanks to Tucker I got the job at Princeton. I spent thirty years there as a professor. Cohen: And bear in mind though that had I been a better student—at that time I think there were forty-eight states in the union.

Kentucky and Mississippi were ranked in educational quality down near the bottom, and I was really a mediocre student. That changed when I went to private school for two years in Florida. A woman teacher took charge of me and got me going. But Indiana University was really important in my life and not just for these accidental reasons. These state universitites were really micro or macrocosms of democratic life and class in America.

The people who went to public universities really were a cross section of America, with all the pluses and minuses of that, as opposed to those schools where I later taught, the Ivies, and where my kids went to school. I was full of disapproval of this whole system up here, private schools. Fortunately she has a soul and spends her summers down south trying to get black people off of death row.

But I really am glad that I was a product of the American public school system, elementary and college, as it then existed. Indiana University was really good. When it later gave me a—what did they give me? Something called distinguished alum award? Q: So tell me about the Russian Institute when you arrived. Who was there, both professors and students, and what was it like?

Cohen: I stumbled, like an old Kentucky drunk after losing another football game, to every lucky place I ended up. I came here because of my wife primarily. We got married, in fact, the year I came here. I mean I was really nervous. Being a graduate student at Columbia, for me, was more like going to work. I lived at 96th Street, twenty blocks from Columbia.

It was like a job. But still the university was a whole new world for me. We heard this before. But Columbia was a place with an extraordinary number of scholars who had extraordinarily diverse biographies, autobiographies, of their own. He said social development occurs within the limitations and conditions set down by the mode of production—there was plenty of choice in Marx, but leave that aside.

For me, though I went into the government department, history was everything. You study history. Tucker took it a bit too far perhaps because he saw history recapitulating itself in Russia under Stalin. And of course most Americans in the business did get Russia wrong. That was Phil [Philip E. John was interesting. He was a folksy guy. He called me Stevie.

A lot of people were programmed when they got there. He had been the manager of sending a lot of the American equipment to the Soviet war effort, Studebakers, Jeeps, stuff like that, Spam, the food. To the extent that weapons were compatible, ammunition, small arms. John was in charge of that and McCarthy called him a Soviet agent, giving all this stuff to the Russians.

I will sign them because one day there may be trouble. It was one war effort then. I think there have been biographies of him. But John never signed anything. He did it, but when the order came to ship, Groves signed it. You had to write either a weekly or a monthly letter diary back to the Quakers. Or were they the Mormons? They were the Quakers.

Part of the history of the Russian Institute, somebody should read those letters—you know about them? Cohen: Oh, you know about them. So John actually studied with people who got shot. I mean John was living history. I mean it all was testing for him, I mean it was close. So there was that element at the Russian Institute, but there were also people like Alexander Erlich, the economist.

I tapped into everybody for my Bukharin dissertation because biography goes to psychology, it goes to politics, goes to history, goes to economics, it goes to sex. So I turned to everybody. John was my advisor, but I went to Erlich. I mean think who Erlich was. His father had been shot by Stalin as a Bundist leader. I mean these were people—I think of Alex [Alexander] Dallin.

Wonderful man. His father David had been a Menshevik. There were other kinds of people there—[Zbigniew K. Zbig later said I was his worst mistake because he helped me and Tom [Thomas P. Bernstein]— the China guy. He retired recently, the sinologist. Anyway Zbig picked me and Tom to be junior fellows of this university seminar on communism he created, so he gave me some money and status.

And with what I was getting to be a TA or teaching assistant made it possible for me to earn a salary. Half kidding, I think. But there was Brzezinski who represented something completely different. There was a guy named Henry [L. I mean he was open to every point of view. There was Michael [T. So the place was full of this diverse group of senior scholars who agreed among themselves about almost nothing.

Therefore if you were an attentive young aspiring scholar, you understood it was okay to be an outstanding scholar and not agree, that there may be a public consensus out there—Russia was evil and it all was because of communism, or because Russia was a shit culture—but when you were at Columbia in those days they were having these arguments.

He was an honorary Menshevik himself. In the environment of Columbia there lived, blocks away, Boris [I. I met him. I went to his townhouse. His great archive is now at Stanford. But he had three archives and he sold his shit archive to Indiana. I mean the bloody Russian revolution and all its friends and foes genetically were living on the upper west side of Manhattan, and many of them gravitating toward Columbia, if not as members of the faculty, to the seminars, the public events, to the library.

You could see them working. When I worked on my biography of Bukharin—Columbia had a very good collection, but I had to use the public library. I hated it. The Mensheviks, [Raphael R. They flocked to Haimson. I mean this kid from Kentucky stumbles into this. You know, not a dumb kid but who knew more about horses and basketball than he did about Russia.

I had no real—somehow I missed the Cold War down in Kentucky [laughter]. We were not doing Cold War nuch down there. We were too busy victimizing blacks to worry about communists. But other than that, Cold War shmold-war. So Columbia was wonderful. But it was what Russian studies should be. The loathing for [Donald J. And I know people who are going to roll over, but this is my last stand.

I am not rolling over for these people no matter what they call me. I had no idea. It was like going to Russia. Columbia was perfect for me. Perfect for a kid. I mean I was twenty-two maybe. Still a kid, not quite a kid. But for somebody who just really had a lot of questions, and no answers, to come to a place where there was no one answer. Do you understand?

And these were not people who had casual, undocumentable, unverifiable, uneducated opinion, but major scholars—among the major scholars in America. So it legitimized—though there was a risk of career and I saw it and witnessed it. Those were the two ingredients and it was perfect. I kept a tie to what became Harriman. I freelanced when I was at Princeton.

I taught this basic seminar colloquium at the graduate level. You have to stop. I stayed tied to the Russian Institute—now the Harriman Institute—through my teaching. I knew a lot of students. I knew Marshall quite well. I mean people who had gone to New York schools or Harvard and came to Columbia, for them it was perfectly normal. And John Hazard was an absolutely wonderful man, a nurturing man.

By the way, that was a big subject at the Russian Institute. They taught it in law school there. John and somebody else taught courses in Soviet law, administrative law. And then of course there were the events. Brzezinski and others, and the Russians too, were bringing in for seminars and as visiting short-term scholars, authors of the books I was reading.

One of them became one of my greatest friends of all—people thought we were the odd couple—[George] Robert [Acworth] Conquest. Bob and I met at Columbia, and Bob was one of the great womanizers of all time and had five wives. But he was a great British poet, novelist, and Sovietologist. He wrote novels and poetry. When he died, I read the obituaries, and he was noted as one of the major British poets of the twentieth century.

This is interesting. Bob took us out, and we bonded. I wonder if they were able to go home. When I went to live in Russia for several months a year in the late s—I found myself living among survivors, because of Mrs. Bukharin—I was the hero in her circles. I had written a biography of Bukharin. It was published here in Russian by Ardis out in Michigan.

Three thousand copies circulating in Russia by All the survivors wanted to talk to Steve, wanted to tell me their story. It was only about, I think—what? But it all began, I guess, with that conversation with Bob Conquest in a park in London, late at night, as we were walking his bloody basset hound [laughter], who was the slowest walker. You know, bassets are lumbering dogs.

The dog seemed to have to pee every—so we were out there a long time. But that too was a road followed from the Russian Institute at Columbia. I was still fairly young. Some were people who had careers and families, and came to Columbia from other careers in the Army or business. And of course I had my own views. I was educated at Indiana and Columbia.

But generally speaking that was the meaning of a real education, what was going on at the Russian Institute. Rarified because we were now an elite. How many people were getting paid to do a PhD in Russian studies at a moment when everybody wanted your opinion, right? Some went into politics or other things. But boy, I really was lucky.

Cohen: And by the way, they were all very political. The Times no longer seeks conflicting views. In fact—this is not well known but you might want to note it. Is this a trick by Gorbachev or should we seize this as an opportunity to end the Cold War? I had talked to Bush privately, with others—Bill Hyland and somebody else took me along— about this.

But Bush decided on a Camp David debate—because his administration was really split on this. Was Gorbachev an opportunity or a dangerous hoax? So I went to Camp David. They obviously invited us because of this idea that there was the Princeton school and the Harvard school. He was really connected to the conservative movement in America. I, I guess, had the reputation of being sort of the left liberal position.

And can we get some evidence before we go crazy? But this event at Camp David was fascinating. Pipes and I each were given fifteen minutes, then we were interrogated by all these guys. I felt like Zelig. I had a discussion with [James Danforth] Quayle about golf and putting because he had the yips. It was an astonishing day,. That was the potential at that time of institutionalized Russian studies.

Tucker and I had created an alternative center of Russian studies to the other northeastern ones, which were Harvard and Columbia. But we were a mini-center. We did a little operation, but we believed it was of the highest quality, higher than other, but it was pretty good. Cohen: But that was different. Because a lot of people—not a lot.

Joseph [R. Nothing at all. Who were these students? They were excellent young scholars, who could have gotten PhDs, but wanted either not to do that or wanted to do government service. I was happy to send excellent students there to do scholarship in the agency, so that the fools in the agency were not alone, uncontested. Now, of course their intel probably never got up past the national estimate.

There was a scandal about this under Reagan when they learned that [William J. So this was not a bad thing. So good for them. Good for the agency being smart enough to come to Princeton and ask me. But there were also bad elements of that. It was one thing when they came and asked me for a security check on one of my students. The typical thing would go like this.