Stephen f cohen stalin biography

Stephen Cohen, historian of the Russian Revolution and commentator on Russian-American relations, passed away earlier this year.

His most important and enduring contribution was a groundbreaking 1973 biography of Nikolai Bukharin. Cohen was born in 1938, the same year Bukharin was executed by Stalin, and his work encouraged socialists and historians to engage with both the neglected legacy of one of the true geniuses of the Russian Revolution and larger interpretive questions about the rise of Stalinism.

Taking issue with the anti-Communist narrative of the Russian Revolution leading inexorably to Stalinism, Cohen argued that Bolshevism “was a diverse movement” with “endless disputes over fundamental issues.” The 1920s was a “golden era” of Marxist thought, with “contrary theories and rival schools.” Bukharin, “rightly considered the favorite of the whole party,” according to Lenin, was at the center of many of these controversies. More than a political biography, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 offered “a way of reexamining the Bolshevik revolution” and the formative years of Soviet history.

At age seventeen, Bukharin joined the Bolsheviks during the 1905 Revolution and helped rally Moscow youth groups into a citywide organization. Along with fellow students Valerian Osinsky and Vladimir Smirnov, he spearheaded “theoretical raids” at Moscow University seminars, putting forward Marxist critiques against liberal professors. He was also involved in the workers’ movement and by age twenty was elected to the Bolshevik Moscow Committee.

Bukharin made his mark, however, as an economist and theoretician. The free enterprise system analyzed in Capital had undergone profound changes that he examined in Imperialism and World Economy. Influenced by Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital, Bukharin described how free competition of early capitali

Cohen’s landmark book Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (Vintage Books, 1973) became central to debates about the New Economic Policy (NEP) and Stalin eras that were long the center of gravity in the field. Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1985) broadened the leitmotif of his work—Bolshevik alternatives to Stalinism—and cemented his own distinct position within what became known as revisionism.

Cohen was a charismatic teacher, a longtime proponent of détente and relentless critic of US foreign policy, and a rare academic philanthropist in Slavic studies. He forged a close bond with Bukharin’s widow, Anna Larina, giving her an archival copy of the last letter the Bolshevik theoretician wrote to her. A self-styled provocateur in debates at home, Cohen became the confidante of a wide array of gulag survivors, dissidents, intellectuals, scholars, and reformers in the USSR and Russia.

In the 1980s, Cohen became something of a historical figure in his own right as his Bukharin, translated abroad, influenced key Soviet architects of reform. In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev—later a personal friend of Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Cohen’s second wife and publisher of The Nation—invited them to the Lenin Mausoleum to review the May Day parade on Red Square. In that symbolic moment, the scholar occupied the space traditionally studied by Kremlinologists.

Cohen first visited the USSR in 1959 at the age of 19. Raised in Kentucky, versed more i

American scholar of Russian studies (1938–2020)

For other persons with a similar name, see Stephen Cohen.

Stephen Frand Cohen (November 25, 1938 – September 18, 2020) was an American scholar of Russian studies. His academic work concentrated on modern Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's relationship with the United States.

Cohen was a contributing editor to The Nation magazine, published and partially owned by his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel. Cohen was a founding director of the 2015 reestablished American Committee for East–West Accord.

Early life and academic career

Cohen was born to a Jewish family in Indianapolis, Indiana, and later grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of Ruth (Frand) and Marvin Cohen, who owned a jewelry store and a golf course in Hollywood, Florida. His grandfather emigrated to the United States from Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire). Cohen graduated from the Pine Crest School in Florida. He attended Indiana University Bloomington, where he earned a B.S. in economics and public policy in 1960 and an M.A. in government and Russian studies in 1962.

While on an undergraduate study abroad program in England, he took a four-week trip to the Soviet Union, where he became interested in its history and politics.

After completing his Ph.D. in government and Russian studies at Columbia University in

To the Editors:

In his “Happy Birthday” reflections on the Bolshevik revolution (NYR, Nov. 9, 1967), Mr. George Lichtheim records a provocative opinion and then rushes on to other things. It should not go unchallenged because it involves a question central to any serious evaluation of the revolution’s outcome. His point is that Stalin was the real Leninist—the “real Bolshevik”—because he “was prepared to let millions die of starvation, and ship other millions off to labor camps, if Plan fulfillment demanded it.” His underlying argument is that Stalin’s industrialization and collectivization policies of 1929-1933 were truly in the Leninist tradition, and that old Bolshevism (Leninist Bolshevism) and Stalinism were fully compatible.

The evidence suggests otherwise. Little if anything in pre-1929 Bolshevik history or thought foreshadowed the policies of the first Five Year Plan. The great party debates of the Twenties demonstrate this clearly. For six years, the party’s Left, Right, and Center discussed to distraction every conceivable policy issue related to the fate of Bolshevism in Russia. During those years, when every shade of economic and political opinion was heard, no one advanced a program remotely similar to that subsequently adopted by Stalin. The moderate Bukharinist group had of course something very different in mind. But even Preobrazhensky, who in economic matters occupied the far Left, and whose talk of industrializing Russia by “systematically exploiting” the peasant sector later gained him an unjustified reputation as a precursor of Stalinism, made no place in his program for a forcible or imminent collectivization. Instead, he explicitly rejected force as an acceptable method of industrialization. Those few Bolsheviks who occasionally dreamt aloud of a “second revolution” in the countryside were generally regarded by the major protagonists as