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Saturday, April 18th, 2015

The New York Times “basically rewrites whatever the Kiev authorities say”: Stephen F. Cohen on the U.S./Russia/Ukraine history the media won’t tell you

Author:     Patrick L. Smith
Source:    
Publication Date:     Thursday, Apr 16, 2015 04:00 PM PDT
 Link: The New York Times “basically rewrites whatever the Kiev authorities say”: Stephen F. Cohen on the U.S./Russia/Ukraine history the media won’t tell you
Stephan:   I spent 20 years of my life deeply immersed in the Soviet and, then Russian, American relationship. In doing that I came to respect only a few people who wrote about it. Most of the journalism and punditry was garbage. But there were exceptions and one scholar stood out, Stephen Cohen. Here is an example of what I mean; This article is the best assessment I have read of where things stand today. We are making a hash of it of course. The Neocon imperialists who have shaped American policy for years,, the Cheneys, the Rumsfield, Abrams, Wolfowitzs  begin from wrong premises, and arrive at wrong conclusions. Look at the hash they have made of things. And for most of the Congress it's all political posturing, "talking to the base" with no conception of the implications. But Cohen is the real deal, and he should be listened to.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin Credit: AP/Boris Yurchenko/Alexander Zemlianichenko

Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin
Credit: AP/Boris Yurchenko/Alexander Zemlianichenko

It is one thing to comment in a column as the Ukrainian crisis grinds on and Washington—senselessly, with no idea of what will come next—destroys relations with Moscow. It is quite another, as a long exchange with Stephen F. Cohen makes clear, to watch as an honorable career’s worth of scholarly truths are set aside in favor of unlawful subterfuge, a war fever not much short of Hearst’s and what Cohen ranks among the most extravagant expansion of a sphere of influence—NATO’s—in history.

Cohen is a distinguished Russianist by any measure. While professing at Princeton and New York University, he has written of the revolutionary years (“Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution,” 1973), the Soviet era (“Rethinking the Soviet Experience,” 1985) and, contentiously but movingly and always with a steady eye, the post-Soviet decades (“Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, 2000; “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives,” 2009). “The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After […]

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