Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780231148962)

In this wide-ranging and acclaimed book, Stephen F. Cohen challenges conventional wisdom about the course of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Reexamining leaders from Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin's preeminent opponent, and Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev and his rival Yegor Ligachev, Cohen shows that their defeated policies were viable alternatives and that their tragic personal fates shaped the Soviet Union and Russia today. Cohen's ramifying arguments include that Stalinism was not the predetermined outcome of the Communist Revolution; that the Soviet Union was reformable and its breakup avoidable; and that the opportunity for a real post-Cold War relationship with Russia was squandered in Washington, not in Moscow. This is revisionist history at its best, compelling readers to rethink fateful events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the possibilities ahead.

In his new epilogue, Cohen expands his analysis of U.S. policy toward post-Soviet Russia, tracing its development in the Clinton and Obama administrations and pointing to its initiation of a "new Cold War" that, he implies, has led to a fateful confrontation over Ukraine.

Author: Stephen Cohen
ISBN-10: 0231148968
ISBN-13: 9780231148962
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/23/2009
Pages: 328
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.31lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.30w x 1.04d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 07/24/2009 pg. 17
Chronicle of Higher Education 09/25/2009 pg. 17
New York Review of Books 02/11/2010 pg. 25