Stephen F. Cohen

Cohen, Stephen - Headshot (02.27.13)Stephen F. Cohen is a Professor of Russian Studies and History Emeritus at NYU, and Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University. He is among the most distinguished scholars of Russian history in the United States, and is internationally recognized for his academic works on Russian and Soviet political history since 1917. Cohen is also an expert on Russian-American relations, and has for decades contributed both domestically and abroad in shedding light on the two countries’ political and historical relationship. Cohen’s books have been translated into several languages, and his work Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution still stands as the number one political biography on Bukharin. More recent publications include the books Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin, and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.

Cohen is contributing editor of The Nation and part of the editorial council of the Moscow based Svobodnaia Mysl’. He is currently working on a full biography about Nikolai Bukharin, to be released in 2014.

sfc1@nyu.edu
Articles by Stephen F. Cohen

Rethinking Putin: A Talk by Professor Stephen Cohen

In this brief talk, originally delivered on 2 December 2017 aboard “The Nation”‘s annual cruise, Professor Cohen tries to revise popular perceptions of Vladimir Putin as a leader by putting him in historical and contemporary context. 

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Why We Must Return to the US-Russian Parity Principle

We are in a new Cold War with Russia today, and specifically over the Ukrainian confrontation, largely because Washington nullified the parity principle. Indeed, we know when, why, and how this happened.

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The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities

Among the crucial questions rarely discussed in the US political-media establishment: What is the role of the “neo-fascist” factor in Kiev’s “anti-terrorist” ideology and military operations?

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Cold War Again: Who’s Responsible?

The East-West confrontation over Ukraine, which led to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea but long predated it, is potentially the worst international crisis in more than fifty years—and the most fateful. A negotiated resolution is possible, but time may be running out.

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Distorting Russia: How the US Media Misrepresent Sochi, Putin, and Ukraine

American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

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Twenty-Seven Questions for Stephen F. Cohen from Russia’s Leading Opposition Newspaper

People who know me personally or my writings know that I never judge or lecture Russia, but these three inter-related features are objective, not my subjective opinion: the excessive concentration of wealth in too few hands; the political-economic system, including widespread corruption, which that feature created; and, as a result, the unwillingness of the financial élite and its many official retainers to permit truly free elections. (All this began, of course, in the Yeltsin 1990s, not under Putin.)

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Syria: The Alternative to War

By claiming for weeks that “doing nothing” is the only alternative to a “limited” military response to the Assad regime’s reported use of chemical weapons in Syria—plainly stated, an illegal American war against a nation that has not threatened the United States—the Obama administration has continued Washington’s post–Cold War disdain for diplomatic solutions to international crises.

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How Obama can avert another Cold War

Why is another Cold War possible two decades after the Soviet Union ended?

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America’s New Cold War With Russia

With the full support of a feckless policy elite and an uncritical media establishment, Washington is slipping, if not plunging, into a new cold war with Moscow.

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