Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (review)

Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia. New York: Norton, 2000. 320 pp. $14.95.

Asking "what if?" is one of those endless games of history. I grew up listening to passionate debates among old Mensheviks, monarchists, Kadets, and Russian émigrés of all hues on what might have happened if only someone had not died, or had done something, or had made a different decision. What if Russia had not become embroiled in World War I? What if Josif Stalin had not come to power? For veterans of old political wars, it is the reckoning of a spent life. For most of the rest of us it is a largely futile exercise with limited value in shedding light on why things happened as they did. In the end we will simply never know whether Russia, for example, could have developed differently.

Stephen F. Cohen, a professor at New York University who has written and commented extensively on Soviet and Russian affairs, has asked some big "what ifs." He made his name as a historian in the 1970s with a biography of Nikolai Bukharin, claiming that Russia might have taken a fundamentally different direction if Bukharin, a leader of the Russian Revolution who supported the market-based New Economic Policy, had come to power instead of Stalin. After the collapse of Communist rule Cohen argued that things could have gone differently—better—if Mikhail Gorbachev had not been stymied in his efforts to reform the Soviet state.

Exploring where the Soviet Union might have gone under Gorbachev is something that most of us who were based in Moscow in the 1980s and 1990s as journalists, diplomats, or scholars have spent a lot of time considering, especially when we look at the mess Russia is in today, after nearly a decade of Boris Yeltsin and his revolving-door reformers and premiers, the last of whom, Vladimir Putin, now rules Russia. Cohen certainly has the credentials to explore how Russia got where it is and to ask whether it had to be so. But the problem with Failed Crusade is that instead of an evenhanded examination, it embarks on a crusade—a tirade, much of the time—against all those who did not see things as clearly as he maintains he did: the Clinton administration, the press, and his fellow academics. Cohen blames them for denying Russia the shining opportunity that, in his view, a Gorbachevian brand of Communism would have offered. Reprinting numerous columns and op-ed pieces he wrote in the 1990s, Cohen transforms a potential "what if" into a resounding "I told you so."

His indictment is sweeping and bitter:

The indictment will charge that the U.S. government, enthusiastically supported by many American journalists and scholars, actively encouraged a Yeltsin regime that enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable twentieth-century assets, a process that continued [End Page ]153 during the early months of Putin's rule, while most of its people were being impoverished and millions of them dying prematurely for lack of elementary resources (p. 193).

It is a fate, Cohen declares, that could have been averted, if only he had been listened to: "To the extent that I have succeeded and my warnings been confirmed by events, I wish I had been wrong" (p. 69).

Whew! Let me step back and say that although I was one of the reporters who covered the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Yeltsin and shared many of the sentiments that Cohen rails against, I can honestly say I have no interest in defending the press—or scholars, or Bill Clinton, or Yeltsin. In fact, I fully agree with Cohen that much of what was written, said, and done in the United States in the years after Gorbachev came to power and after he fell was badly informed...