Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007
From: Tom Nichols nicholst@cox.net
Subject: Regarding Stephen Cohen's complaint in JRL #43:
Can there ever be a disagreement about Russia where someone doesn't engage in the tiresome practice of throwing around the name of Joe McCarthy like some sort of magical incantation? One would think from Stephen Cohen's rather shrill letter that I have charged him with being a Stalinist or worse. I did not. More important, I did not question Cohen's "elementary decency" as a human being as he questioned mine, which strikes me as an unusually personal charge for someone to make after claiming to have been "defamed" by "slurs."
Cohen, it seems to me, protests too much. First, Cohen and I are not "intellectual opponents:" we have never met, to my knowledge, nor have we ever engaged each other's work in public. (Cohen might even be surprised at the degree to which we agree about American policy toward Russia, but that is a discussion for another day.) Rather, I can only judge his views by what he writes. Like any reader, I am entitled to my interpretation of what others offer on public pages, and my brief reference to his work and what I interpret to be his views in my letter about Leon Aron's article reflected my impression of Cohen's copious writings on Soviet and Russian affairs.
Simply put, my understanding of Cohen's writings on the subject of the Soviet collapse, including some of his most recent, is that he sees the fall of the USSR as largely the product of the internal machinations of various elites (which, as an explanation that privileges the secret actions of the few over the popular opposition of the many, seems to me conspiratorial), and that he regrets the passing of the USSR, seeing the Soviet Union as superior to what followed it (which to me, anyway, would qualify as nostalgia).
I would think that Cohen would consider such a reading of his work uncontroversial. He has written, as recently as last December, that it would be "hard to imagine a political act more extreme" than breaking up the USSR. This "extreme" act tore apart a state, Cohen writes, that "was still, for all its crises and defections, a nuclear superpower state of 286 million citizens," as though the Soviet Union--a state initially founded on the idea of violent revolution aimed at overturning the liberal international order--remaining a vast nuclear superpower was in itself somehow a good thing.
He has also chided "American specialists" for not considering more seriously whether "a reforming Soviet Union might have been the best hope for the post-Communist future of Russia or any of the other former republics," an option which I can only assume, given his frustration at those who dismissed it, Cohen wishes had been tried. Even his own letter to JRL denying any nostalgia for the USSR takes pains to remind us how many Russians do, in fact, feel exactly such nostalgia for the Soviet Union, an odd digression in a letter ostensibly devoted to his indignation at any suggestion that he might share those views with so many of those Russians.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I think a reasonable person, given this and others of Cohen's writings, would conclude that he wishes the Soviet Union had not fallen. If I have somehow misinterpreted him, and it is actually the case that he, like so many of us, was relieved to see the end of a dangerous and tyrannical experiment in Eurasia, then I gladly apologize. Indeed, if Cohen believes that it is a "slur" to interpret his work as showing any regret at the collapse of the Soviet Union, then I will even apologize twice over.
On one point Cohen is completely correct. He was not referenced in the original article by Leon Aron. But he is a well-known public intellectual who has published his views widely, with--one assumes--the wish that they are noticed. In this case, however, Cohen seems to be complaining that he was dragged into this particular discussion, to which I can only respond that it is a testimony to his prominence that I would have mentioned him at all. But if Cohen would rather his views be ignored, at least by me, then I suppose "elementary decency" demands that I honor his wishes.