Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917

by Stephen F. Cohen

In this wide-ranging and provocative book, Stephen F. Cohen cuts through Cold War stereotypes of the Soviet Union to arrive at fresh interpretations of that country's traumatic history and its present-day political realities.
Cohen's lucidly written, revisionist analysis reopens an array of major historical questions. As he probes Soviet history, society, and politics, Cohen demonstrates how this country has remained stable during its long journey from revolution to conservatism. It the process, he suggests more enlightened approaches to American/Soviet relations. Based on the author's many years of study and research, including numerous visits to the USSR, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the state of world affairs today.

Genres: History, Russia, Soviet Union, Nonfiction, Politics

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 17, 1985

About the author

Stephen F. Cohen was Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University, where for many years he served as director of the Russian Studies Program, and Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and History at New York University. He grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky, received his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Indiana University, and his Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Cohen’s other books include Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography; Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917; Sovieticus: American Perceptions and Soviet Realities; (with Katrina vanden Heuvel) Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev’s Reformers; Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia; Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War; and The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin.

For his scholarly work, Cohen received several honors, including two Guggenheim fellowships and a National Book Award nomination.

Over the years, he was also a frequent contributor to newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. His “Sovieticus” column for The Nation won a 1985 Newspaper Guild Page One Award and for another Nation article a 1989 Olive Branch Award. For many years, Cohen was a consultant and on-air commentator on Russian affairs for CBS News. With the producer Rosemary Reed, he was also project adviser and correspondent for three PBS documentary films about Russia: Conversations With Gorbachev; Russia Betrayed?; and Widow of the Revolution.

Cohen visited and lived in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia regularly for more than forty years.

(source: Amazon)

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing in 1985, Cohen envisions a future wherein the Soviet state system persists. Without the foreknowledge of its imminent demise, he asks what form it will take in the future. Its development will be shaped by the interplay of two broad tendencies, he claims: conservatism and reformism, coloured by Russian and Soviet specificities. Cohen’s use of a framework more associated with Western political history is intentionally opposed to the orthodox ‘totalitarian’ interpretation of the Soviet Union. He highlights that the Soviet state need not be viewed as something entirely alien to the West, but rather as a political system which can be legitimately compared to others with regard to the way in which its citizens and elites respond to problems of governance and the relationship of the state to its history. In contrast, a totalitarian reading refuses to admit the possibility of interactions between different parts of Soviet society. If forced to moderate their stance, its denizens nonetheless reject outright any acknowledgement of the complexity of such interactions or degrees of reciprocity between them. Yet the historiography of this interplay – between state and citizen, party and bureaucracy – is key to any adequate understanding of the contours of Soviet history which resulted in the nature of the state in the mid-1980s, and how the competing interests of different blocs gave rise to a variety of possibilities for the future.

A mode of analysis such as this, which understands society as a competition of interests, may have skirted perilously close to theories of class conflict, particularly unpalatable to many during the Cold War. Nonetheless, Cohen does not only blame the sorry state of Soviet studies on short-lived political calculation, but its combination with bad history more generally. His point of reference is Herbert Butterfield’s attack on British historiographical orthodoxy, The Whig Interpretation of History (1973), which Cohen extends to Sovietologists in the post-war era. While Butterfield had attacked the tendency of Whig historians to craft a historical narrative so as to lead inexorably to the ‘progressive’ world within which they found themselves, Soviet studies constituted a negative reflection of this, reading into the revolutionary past an inner logic which could not but result in the ‘totalitarianism’ that later came to pass. This totalitarian seed at the heart of the Soviet state at its inception finally bore fruit, leading to the stark possibilities open to the country in the aftermath of Stalin’s death: a continuation of totalitarianism, collapse, or revolution.

Yet these experts could not account for what in fact happened: a movement by fits and starts from an exceptionally despotic system to a lesser form of authoritarianism, without the expected state collapse. In fact, in the aftermath of Stalin’s rule his successors were left in a contradictory situation, grappling with an imbalance that persisted for the remainder of Soviet history. The ascendant bureaucracy were some of the greatest victims of Stalinism, yet also its greatest beneficiaries. De-stalinization necessarily involved submitting their own positions to scrutiny and raised uncomfortable questions about the culpability not only of elites, but also of large swathes of the population. As a result, the assertion of historical inevitability beloved of Western Sovietologists was equally important to the official ideology of the Soviet state, resulting in half-measures when it came to undoing the Stalinist distortion of history; Stalinism, they argued, had been a painful process of modernization, riddled with ‘excesses’, but nonetheless historically necessary. The waste and dysfunction of Stalinism were hushed up, mistakes attributed to the foibles of individuals and not the system Stalin created. Khrushchev managed to implement large-scale reforms in the security services and the prison system, yet caught between competing interests which grew increasingly acute, a true reckoning with the past lay out of reach since this would have involved a challenge to the ideological underpinnings of the state, on which even the most reform-minded elites depended.

History marched onward, but Soviet studies provided no corrective to its earlier stance, becoming more and more disconnected from what was actually happening. Faced with this state of affairs, a new generation of revisionist specialists came to the fore, charged with understanding actually existing Soviet reality. The revisionist challenge first embarked on a wide-ranging critique of ‘totalitarianism’ as an overly simplistic category of analysis. To reject the totalitarian lens was to necessarily reject the prevailing tendency to ‘Stalinize everything of significance in early Soviet history and politics’ (51), and hence read the future as its inevitable continuation. It became increasingly necessary to posit a more nuanced historical and political perspective. One particularly rich source of inspiration was the New Economic Policy and the wide-ranging economic debates of the 1920s. The orthodox interpretation in both Russia and the West presented the NEP as a tactical retreat during which the Bolsheviks consolidated power, before their true goal of imposed collectivization. As such, Stalin’s alliance with Bukharin against Trotsky and the Left Opposition was seen as a cynical ploy to facilitate the ousting of his great rival, before his own shift to the left, culminating in Bukharin’s execution and the implementation of many of the measures previously espoused by Trotsky and his followers. Cohen disputes this; developments under Stalin, he writes, had no precedent in Bolshevik thought. Even the left-wing of the party had ‘generally thought in terms of peasant farming for the foreseeable future’ (61) and none had proposed the war on the peasantry later instigated by Stalin. Furthermore, to say that the events under Stalin occurred according to a pre-determined plan does far too much credit to Stalin himself and the sycophants that surrounded him. Moshe Lewin interprets the events of period as ‘less a product of Bolshevik programs or planning than of desperate attempts to cope with the social pandemonium and crises created by the Stalinist leadership itself in 1929-33’ (64). The crudity of the policies instigated against these self-imposed crises were arguably the result of the creeping disempowerment of the Party under Stalin. The dynamism of the 1920s debates stand in stark contrast to this, illustrating a variety of paths to the future, whose proponents were all liquidated during Stalin’s consolidation of power.

Bukharin serves as Cohen’s archetype of a lost alternative, ‘the martyred symbol of a lost but still possible programmatic alternative to Stalinism in the Communist world’ (89-90), whose evolutionary stance and tolerance towards market relations seem diametrically opposed to the revolution from above imposed under Stalin. Of course, circumstances in the Soviet Union of the 1980s were vastly different to those of the 1920s. Nonetheless, the idea that for a time Bukharin’s stances could be contained under a broader conception of Marxist orthodoxy is remarkable and has provided inspiration to various attempts at reform, from Hungary to China. Bukharin demonstrates that there were those amongst the Bolsheviks willing to adhere to the Marxist injunction to pay attention to material circumstances. It is ironic that Lenin’s testament criticised Bukharin for his lack of dialectical understanding, when it is this very understanding that was lacking in the way the Stalinist system dealt with the challenges it faced. The ultimate petrification of this system into a rigid model of conservatism was a happy historical accident insofar as the will no longer existed to continue the atrocities committed in its name, and a more dynamic set of reformers could act quickly and push through limited structural change which, for its many inadequacies, nonetheless succeeded in turning full-blown Stalinism into a future impossibility.

What possible relevance can this have for the present day? The conflict between tendencies that Cohen describes would outlive the Soviet Union, yet now continues on a different ideological plane, no longer Marxism-Leninism but amongst paeons to market forces and a disdain for the backwardness of the Soviet past. In the West, the persistence of the totalitarian lens amongst Russian ‘experts’ leads to similarly fanciful analyses of the contemporary Russian Federation, so divorced from reality as to be utterly useless. The paths Russia takes in the future will continue to balance the forces of conservatism and reformism. One difference the Soviet Union had was that its revolutionary pedigree meant that the onus was placed on conservatives to find justifications for their world view within an insurrectionary ideology ‘based upon the very idea, desirability, and inexorability of change’ (153). At the current time, the scales have tipped. Stability provides the ideological justification for the current regime, and reform must come up against this, as well as appeal to a society that remains ‘one of the most conservative countries in the world’ (146). Like before, the current status quo depends to a large extent on misrepresenting the past and the endless deferral of any kind of historical reckoning. Just as the choice was never truly between Stalinism and capitalist revanchism, nor is the choice for Russians today necessarily one between late Putinism, the bandit capitalism of the 1990s, and Soviet shortages. It is only by being clear-sighted in our view of history and its persistence in the present that such stark possibilities can be transcended.

[Sherv · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really tried to give this book a chance (which I couldn't finish because its history was so bad) because I had previously heard good things about Cohen as an expert on Russia who sought to bring a more balanced understanding of America's strongest Cold War adversary. I also understand that this was written in 1985 before Gorbachav, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the access that many scholars had to soviet archives post-collapse. I also understand that he still had to write a history that was digestible for the audience of his time as he discussed the difficulties of writing about the Soviet Union in an era of heightened tensions, McCarthyism, etc. which he discusses in a lot of detail in the first chapter. Moreover, this book is not really about soviet history as it is about how soviet history is written, so I didn't really learn much. But it still sucks, lol.

His premise at the beginning of the book was one that resonated with me: Western Sovietology is a collection of multi-disciplinary scholars whose works have largely influenced American policy but at the detriment of creating a history of the Soviet Union that is not always true. These political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, and historians, among others, were writing of the Soviet Union as a stagnant totalitarian entity devoid of any fluidity or change. Cohen expertly categorized these assumptions as lacking by borrowing and expanding upon Herbert Butterfield's concept of the Whig Interpretation of History. This is to say, that for Western Sovietologists the past was not studied for the sake of the past, it was always in relation to the present.

But I don't believe that he really did a good enough job of making himself any different than those he criticized. He does not give much-needed attention to the origins Russian Revolution, the Czardom, or Lenin. But he gives significant, and in my opinion, too much attention, to Stalin, and other figures like Trotsky, Bukharin, and Kruschev are only discussed in their relationship to Stalin. Trotsky was simply a political adversary whom Stalin outmaneuvered to gain power and was deemed a traitor to the revolution. Bukharin, Lenin's "favorite bolshevik" was a communist that Westerners could love because he stood up to Stalin and endeavored to implement market reforms like the NEP that would revitalize the Soviet Union. But poor Stalin did him dirty by having him shot, DAMN THAT MAN! Khrushchev's legacy was no better as his whole political strategy for running the country was to destalinize the Soviet Union as Stalin's reign was seen as such a detriment to progress with gulags and purges and shootings.

Cohen wants us to believe that the soviet union was not a rigid totalitarian dictatorship but rather a complex state with many institutions, factions, and interests that governed it - which he discusses early on in the book. But he does himself no credit by focusing on Stalin and writing a history of how collectivization and industrialization can be contributed to a "Stalinist System". This one man had the final say in everything happening in the Soviet Union, which is also what Western Sovietoloigists all agree on, so what are you saying that's different? Also, just the way that he writes makes his biases clear to the reader that he really doesn't care about writing a balanced soviet history by using phrases like "cult of Stalin", "draconian industrialization", "rural holocaust" and the all-around nonsense of not providing a due explanation for the industrialization and collectivization other than it was necessary to get this backward country to become competitive on the world stage. However, the cost was "too high" but what were other countries doing to be competitive? Moreover, Stalin recognized that there would be war soon with the fascists in Germany and Italy, so he needed to raise a modern army, which required industry and resources from collectivization.

I could say more but essentially this book does not achieve its goals well. It offers no alternative to the Western canon of Sovietology and isn't as bold as it seems. In my opinion, a better account of how the USSR fell is Socialism Betrayed which is much more balanced and discusses fair criticisms.

TLDR: not worth it

[Susan Webb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was written in the early 1980s just before Gorbachev, but it is still timely in many ways. Cohen debunks some Sovietologist myths, and some myths of the communist movement as well. He suggests, in this pre-Gorbachev book, that the Soviet Union and CPSU could overcome the disastrous legacy of Stalin through fundamental reforms, but in many ways he foretells the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is nearly an article of fact in the Western countries that Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin was a monster. His policies led to the transformation of Soviet society from essentially an agrarian one into an industrial power. That transformation took place in only a few years. In the early 1920’s, the Soviet Union was an incredibly weak country, struggling to stay together after having several countries spin off at the end of the First World War. The Russian Civil War did not end until 1922-23.
Yet, less than 20 years later, the Soviet Red Army was engaged in a battle to the death with the forces of Germany. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that it was the Soviet Union that defeated Germany and the collection of Axis powers. When you compare the casualty levels of all the Allied nations, the number in the Soviet Union dwarfs all other belligerents in the European theater.
While there were many allies of Stalin, there is no question that he was the driving force of the transformation of the Soviet Union into a superpower. It is realistic to say that the postwar Soviet Union was the last true empire on Earth. Through its’ ideology exported on the backs of the Red Army, it retook control of the Baltic States and Ukraine as well as the countries of Eastern Europe, including approximately half of Germany.
Therefore, in the Soviet Union, he is widely thought of as a person that saved the country from ruin, despite having made some major mistakes, rather than as a murderous monster. Those two competing threads of thought are the main topics of this book and it was refreshing to read of the position inside the Soviet Union that Stalin was a success in the Machiavellian sense.
It was also informative to read that the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev was a reaction to his pace of reformation and criticism of Stalin. There was a strong conservative backlash to this, the consequence was the elevation of Leonid Brezhnev to power. Something similar happened again after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there was a strong movement of glasnost or openness. One major theme of this was to open archives and air out what happened during the years when Stalin had absolute power. Once again, there was a conservative backlash, leading to the rise of Vladimir Putin, who is now the de facto President for Life.
One cannot understand history in general and that of Russia in particular, without looking at leaders in their totality. If Western leaders do not accept that the Russian people do that, then it will be difficult for the United States to make inroads in their dealings with the current Tsar-equivalent now occupying the Kremlin. This book is a good place to begin that process.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illuminating, impartial, and fascinating book written by a Princeton Sovietologist in the early/mid-1980s. The text draws from the American intellectual tradition of Sovietology, both detracting from the field's narrowness while also serving to add depth to its study. The book is subdivided into five parts, each adding different themes to the general, overarching focus on an analysis of the Soviet Union.

The book provides a lurid look into Soviet political intricacies, with an emphasis on the pronounced influence of the Stalin years, particularly following Stalin's policy of agricultural collectivization in 1929 to his death in 1953.

Cohen deviates from the traditional American Sovietological perspectives that draw a clear structural route from Lenin's policies to those of Stalin, instead placing unique precedence on how aberrant Stalin's evils and excesses truly were. Cohen also draws a significant conclusion that highlights the axiom underpinning Soviet political and civil life post-Stalin: the true heft of Stalin's legacy within the USSR.

Cohen states that, after Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev's process of de-Stalinization and liberal-minded reforms ultimately doomed him, in large part because of how conservative the party bureaucracy and apparatus truly were.

The breadth and scope of Stalin's excesses, from forced deportations to show trials to labor camps, effectively necessitated, in the view of the conservative, pro-Stalin bureaucracy, a damper on wide-ranging reforms as a means of both entrenching their status and preventing societal upheaval. The logic of these Soviet conservatives led to Khrushchev's removal and replacement with the more conservative Brezhnev, ruling from 1964 to his death in 1982.

Cohen remarks that Brezhnev's conservative bent prevented reforms while also entrenching a deeply aged, gerontocratic party bureaucracy. Read now through a 2024 lens and having read part of Vladislav Zubok's recent work on the USSR's collapse, historical threads that precipitated such a collapse are becoming clearer.

The work implicitly makes apparent how devastating Stalin's legacy was for the USSR with regard to the prevention of needed liberal reforms. Were it not for, essentially, what amounted to collective fear and trauma, both from the victims and victimizers, of the Stalinist excesses and evils, a different Soviet Union may have emerged.

An awesome, deeply-researched work.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book on the Soviet Union from 1985. In the first chapter Cohen does a good job at looking at and critiquing the historiography and scholarship of Western Soviet Scholarship while also documenting the changes and perspectives on Western Soviet Scholarship over the previous years. The following chapter Cohen goes into theories on Western Scholarship's thoughts on "Bolshevism and Stalinism" largely analyzing theories on whether Stalinism was a "continuation" or a "break" from Bolshevism. The third chapter Cohen talks about the largely unknown alternative to "Stalinism" with focusing on Bukharin and his ideas, and how they impacted other parties and countries since his death. The fourth chapter Cohen documents the historical struggles between Anti-Stalinism and Stalinism under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and the fifth chapter talks about the reformist and conservative camps within the Soviet Union. Good and interesting insight from someone who is not a Trotskyist or a Stalinist, but rather one sympathetic to a Bukharinist alternative.

[Twilight O. ☭ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not convinced by Cohen’s consistently implied, but never explained (at least not in adequate, Marxian terms), argument that the NEP had the real potential to “build socialism” in the USSR had it not been ended in 1928 by Stalin’s ruthless drive to primitive accumulation, but he makes a good case that it represented an authentic “alternative” path the Soviet Union could have taken in history. He certainly argues well against the notion that Stalin was in any sense the inevitable product of the Russian Revolution, that Stalin’s economic program was “stolen” from Trotsky and the left opposition and therefore, had they managed to wrest power from him, they would have subjected Ukraine to the same horrors. I'm now very interested in reading Cohen's biography of Bukharin, where I suspect he will lay out his position on the NEP in more detail! Highly recommended book, I'm incorporating much of it into a script I'm writing so it has obviously proven its value in my eyes.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"... They do not understand that there is a broad spectrum of nondemocratic, authoritarian political systems, from the murderous to the avuncular. Changes along that spectrum... may not be toward democracy, but they are fateful for citizens of those systems. NOT TO APPRECIATE SUCH CHANGES IS A FAILURE BOTH OF ANALYSIS AND COMPASSION." (Caps mine.)

[Jim Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

In real life I found that I totally enjoyed and respected the Russian people. I've been trying to fill in the gaps in my education regarding Russia. This was a very informative book. I learned lots but Russia is still a mystery. How politicians and "the people" could be so different is beyond me. Yet I too believe that Russia has the potential to be one of our most valued alies. "Our people" and "their people" need to get it together. I've seen first hand that "we the people" can get along just fine.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only read a few selected chapters (for class) but this wasn't a horrible book. Cohen keeps things from getting too dull.