Stephen F. Cohen, a veteran Russian scholar at New York University and Princeton, has lately gained some dubious notoriety as Vladimir Putinâs number one apologist in the ranks of American punditry. After a piece in The Nation slamming the American media for âtoxicâ anti-Putin reporting and a CNN appearance defending Putinâs incursion into Crimea as an attempt to protect âRussia's traditional zones of national security,â Cohen was excoriated not just by the conservative media but by The New Republic and New York magazine. More recently, a critical but respectful feature in Newsweek dubbed him âthe man who dared make Putinâs case.â
But what drives Cohenâs ongoing battle against âthe demonization of Putinâ? Some of his detractors sound baffled by the paradox of a longtime leftist defending an essentially right-wing authoritarian regime; New Yorkâs Jonathan Chait blames it on âthe mental habits of decades of anti-anti-communismâ transferred onto a no-longer-communist Kremlin. In The Daily Beast, James Kirchick treats Cohen as one of the ârealistsâ advocating a pragmatic rather than morality-based foreign policy. And Cohen himself, in the Newsweek interview, avers that he is the true American patriot seeking to keep the United States out of a reckless confrontation.
Yet none of these explanations quite captures the motives or the history behind Cohenâs passion, which is ultimately less about realism than frustrated idealism. Regrettably, this idealism has led Cohenâa man of unquestionable erudition, sometimes insightful analysis, and by all appearances genuine sympathy for Russiaâs tribulationsâinto some strange places at odds with both reality and morality.
As he writes in the foreword to his 2009 book, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, Cohenâs interest in Russia dates back to his days as a college student in the late 1950s, when he became keenly concerned with social justice after growing up in segregated small-town Kentucky. He developed a particular interest in Soviet alternatives to Stalinism and Nikolai Bukharin, the revolutionary and theorist killed in Stalinâs purges whom Cohen saw as the embodiment of such an alternativeâa champion of a mixed economy and more humane politics. (Other historians argue that Bukharin, earlier a full supporter of revolutionary mass terror and state-controlled production, saw liberalization in the 1920s as merely a strategic retreat to rebuild the Soviet economy and pacify the populace.) Cohenâs first book was an acclaimed 1975 biography of Bukharin, an expanded edition of which is to be published this year.
Cohen had a strong personal investment in his subject. In the mid-1970s, he began spending a lot of time in Moscow in academic exchange programs, an experience he describes in his 2010 book, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin; he grew close to Bukharinâs widow Anna Larina, herself a gulag survivor, and developed friendships with a few Soviet dissidents. He was a devout foe of Stalinismâat the time, he was already doing research on gulag survivorsâand no fan of the Brezhnev-era Soviet regime, which for unspecified reasons barred him from travel to the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1985. However, a running theme in Cohenâs writings was the possibility of âsocialism with a human face.â He argued that Communism was not monolithic; that Stalinism was not an organic continuation of Leninist Bolshevism (a ârichly diverse movement,â as Cohen, then a junior fellow at Columbia Universityâs Research Institute on Communist Affairs, wrote in a 1967 letter to the New York Review of Books) but a radical break from it; and that the Soviet system had real potential for peaceful reformism. It is telling that his closest dissident friend was Roy Medvedev, probably the only notable dissident in the 1970s who still considered himself a Marxist-Leninist.
In his 1985 book, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917, Cohen noted with regret that, as reformist hopes withered and died in the 1970s, most liberal dissidents âconcluded that the entire Soviet system was hopelessly ill-conceived and corruptâthat reform from within the Communist party-state was impossible,â and their protests âgrew increasingly anti-Soviet.â This, he argued, only led to more repression, drawing dissenters into a âpolitical cul-de-sacâ since change in the Soviet Union could only happen through âreform from above.â Around the same time, he claimed in The Nation that the Reagan administrationâs quest to pressure the Soviets into change would inevitably fail since it was âpredicated on wildly exaggerated conceptions of Soviet domestic problems. In reality, the Soviet Union is not in economic crisis; nor is it politically unstable.â
Not long after, Cohenâs cherished âreform from aboveâ suddenly became reality as the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, embarked on a course of liberalization and reform. Still more excitingly for Cohen, glasnost included a Bukharin revival, with major support from Gorbachev himself. Bukharin was formally exonerated in 1988 and became, as Cohen recounts in Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, âvirtually canonized as Leninâs rightful heir, anti-Stalinist prophet and hero, and forerunner of Gorbachevâs perestroika reformation.â
Cohen threw himself enthusiastically into this reformation. He traveled regularly to the Soviet Union with his wife Katrina Vanden Heuvel, an editor at The Nation and currently its editor-in-chief and they co-authored the 1989 book, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachevâs Reformers, a collection of interviews with fourteen officials, journalists, and intellectuals, all of them proponents of a kinder, gentler (and more efficient) Soviet socialism.
Then, in late 1991, the dreams of reformist socialism crashed with the end of the Soviet Union. The new Russian leadership was far more interested in embracing Western-style democratic capitalism than in reforming socialism. Lenin was tossed on the dustbin of historyâeven if his mummified body remained in the Mausoleum on Red Squareâand Bukharinâs ghost faded into irrelevance. As Cohen notes with tangible bitterness in Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, âOf what political use or historical interest was a founding father whose country no longer existed?â
For many observers, the Soviet Unionâs downfall leads to the logical conclusion that Soviet communism was not reformable after all: virtually the moment its coercive mechanisms weakened, the entire edifice began to crack and promptly collapsed. Not surprisingly, Cohen strongly disagrees. His view is most succinctly summed up in a 2011 talk at a conference sponsored by the Gorbachev Foundation: the Soviet Union, he believes, did not âcollapseâ but was dismantled by the power-hungry Boris Yeltsinâaided by âthe radical intelligentsiaâ which âhijacked Gorbachevâs gradualist reformationâ and helped bring Yeltsin to power, and by greedy bureaucratic elites eager to plunder the Soviet Unionâs wealth. To make this case, he drastically downplays both the economic crisis of 1990-1991 (when, as Russian satirist Viktor Shenderovich once quipped, âSoviet power still existed but the food had already run outâ) and the separatist tensions in the Soviet republics.
Meanwhile, Cohen blames Yeltsinâs reforms in the early 1990s for causing âthe worst economic and social catastrophe ever suffered by a major nation in peacetime.â Thatâs a rather startling assertion from someone familiar with Stalinâs brutal collectivization of agriculture and the ensuing âterror-famineâ of the early 1930s.
Of course, few would disagree that Russiaâs âWild West capitalismâ of the nineties was not a pretty picture, with the rise of oligarchs who gave robber barons a bad name and millions of people cast adrift and struggling. One can argue about the causes and the specifics of this crisisâfor instance, whether Yeltsin-era policies were really free market-oriented (the private sector remained crippled by byzantine taxes and regulations, official corruption, and lack of effective legal protection for property rights) and whether some of the decadeâs social ills were caused by the transition to the market or by the disastrous Soviet legacy. (Thus, the decline in Russiansâ life expectancy began in the Soviet era, with male life expectancy at birth dropping from 64 years in 1965 to 61.4 years in 1980.) Still, Cohen has an indisputable point when he says that the hardship and chaos of the 1990s explain widespread Russian support for Putinâs neo-authoritarian ruleâas well as the resurgence of Stalinist nostalgia, with both Putin and Stalin seen as symbols of the âstrong handâ bringing order and security.
This, however, should hardly preclude a critical view of Putin and Putinism: if anything, an authoritarian strongman is all the more dangerous when he rides a wave of legitimate popular discontent with economic and social chaos. The fact remains that after his rise to power, Putin systematically strangled Russiaâs free press (the remnants of which are now under attack in the warmongering over Ukraine), crushed political opposition, turned elections into a farce and the parliament into an obedient rubber stamp, and moved toward making anti-Western nationalism an official ideology. And these are facts that Cohen either glosses over or downplaysâfor instance, by asserting that âde-democratization began under Yeltsin, not Putinâ (which is true only in the sense that power was increasingly concentrated in the presidency rather than elected representatives).
All this autocratic thuggery seems a more than adequate explanation for why the Western media would take an uncharitable view of Putin, the ex-KGB officer who has always taken conspicuous pride in his Soviet-era career. Yet Cohen professes to be utterly baffled by why Putin is so âvillainized.â His explanation in The Nation article is that the U.S. press âadopted Washingtonâs narrativeâ of Yeltsin as the man steering Russia to democracy, still treating him as âan ideal Russian leader.â By contrast, in the 2000s, the mediaâagain taking their cue from Washingtonâbegan to treat the Kremlin as the enemy. (This account completely ignores, among other things, the complexities of U.S.-Russian relations in both the 1990s and the 2000s: the chill between Moscow and Washington at the end of the Yeltsin years, the initially cordial relationship between George W. Bush and Putinâthe War on Terror ally in whose eyes Bush famously got âa sense of his soulââand the âresetâ at the start of Obamaâs presidency.)
In essence, Cohen is arguing that the American media dislikes Putin because he is seen as the anti-Yeltsin. But this seems like classic projection: the far more likely explanation is that Cohen sympathizes with Putin because he sees Putin as the anti-Yeltsin, and Yeltsin as the anti-Gorbachev who destroyed the bright and shining hopes of Soviet reformism. The irony, of course, is that Putinâs rule hasnât seen a restoration of socialism, Soviet-style or otherwise (except for the fact that, while Yeltsin repudiated the Soviet period, Putin treats it as a source of real achievements and legitimate pride). Putinâs Russia is a country of corrupt crony capitalism, conspicuous consumption by the rich and the affluent, and a repressive state that increasingly leans on a subservient church as its source of moral authority. It stands, in short, for everything a leftist should detest.
Many of Cohenâs arguments about post-Communist Russia are legitimate subjects of debate, and his scholarship has been serious enough to draw praise from the likes of Robert Conquest, the British historian and author of The Great Terror. And yet his Putin cheerleading increasingly crosses the line into denial or outright recycling of Kremlin propaganda. Last October, at a New York University symposium, Cohen asserted with a straight face that the game of musical chairs between Putin and Dmitry Medvedev (who was handpicked to succeed Putin in 2007, then stepped aside for his mentor four years later) was not a carefully orchestrated ploy to circumvent the Russian constitutionâs ban on two consecutive presidential terms but a genuine, though unsuccessful, âtryoutâ for Medvedev. âI donât believe that Putinâs return was agreed upon in advance,â said Cohenâflatly contradicting Medvedevâs own statement to the media in 2011 that he and Putin had âlong agoâ agreed on the power arrangement.
In a 2012 Reuters column, Cohen complained that Putin is often blamed for the 2006 murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, even though âthe editors of Politkovskayaâs newspaper, the devoutly anti-Putin Novaya Gazeta, believe her killing was ordered by Chechen leaders, whose human-rights abuses were one of her special subjects.â He forgets to mention that the Chechen leader in question, Ramzan Kadyrov, is Putinâs best buddyâor that Novaya Gazeta has also asserted that the actual killers are connected to Russian special services and protected by the government.
But the disconnect from reality is most glaringly evident in Cohenâs Newsweek interview. Take this gem: âWe donât know that Putin went into Crimea. We literally donât know. Weâre talking about âfactsâ that are coming out of Kiev, which is a mass of disinformation.â Cohen must be the only person in the world who thinks thereâs any doubt that the armed men who are all over Crimea wearing Russian army uniforms without insignia and wielding Russian weaponryââlittle green men,â as irreverent Russians call themâare actually Russian soldiers.
And he hits an all-time low when asked about Pussy Riot, the activist punk rockers given a two-year prison sentence in 2012 for an anti-Putin protest performance in a Moscow cathedral. After noting that âin 82 countries they would have been executedâ (a statement later amended to say that the women âwould have faced criminal charges in many countries and the death penalty in several of themâ), Cohen tells the interviewer, âYou know what they were doing before they went to prison? They would go into supermarkets, strip, lay on their back, spread their legs apart and stuff frozen chickens in their vagina. There were people in there with their kids shopping and Russian authorities did nothing. They didnât arrest them.â
The very slight factual basis for this outlandish claim is that two members of Pussy Riot once belonged to an activist performance art group called Voina (War). In one of its âperformances,â a woman discreetly stuffed a supermarket chicken inside her panties and into her vagina (an act not witnessed by anyone except other group members who took photos), then left the store and âbirthedâ the chicken in an empty lot outside. However tacky, this was hardly the flagrant public obscenity Cohen alleges. Whatâs more, the chicken stunt did not actually involve any of the Pussy Riot defendantsâthough Russian television falsely implied that it did.
Itâs rather sad to see Cohen, who has written with sensitivity and compassion about gulag survivors, sink to the level of a pro-Kremlin Internet troll, perpetuating a crude slander against courageous young women who are currently braving harassment and physical assaults as they advocate for prisoner rights.
Cohen is doubtless sincere in his conviction that he stands against a propaganda war that incites dangerous hostility to Russia. Yet his sincerity leads him to channel Kremlin propaganda as effectively as any paid shill. A verse composed by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko for Cohenâs seventieth birthday in 2008 included the lines, âI love you, my unique friend, Steve / And envy you that you're naĂŻve.â Alas, this brings to mind an old Russian proverb: âThereâs a kind of simplicity thatâs worse than thievery."
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor & Fields, 1989). You can follow her on Twitter at @CathyYoung63