Stephen Frand Cohen (born 1938) is an American scholar of Russian studies. His academic work concentrates on developments in Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the country's relationship with the United States.

Education and career [edit]

Stephen F. Cohen's grandfather, while speaking only Lithuanian, Russian and Yiddish, emigrated from Lithuania (then part of Tsarist Russia) to the United States.^[1] Stephen Cohen was born in 1938 in Owensboro, Kentucky where his father owned a golf course.,^[2] and attended Indiana University, where he earned a B.S. degree and an M.A. degree in Russian Studies. While studying in England, he went on a four-week trip to the Soviet Union, where he became interested in its history and politics. Cohen, who received his Ph.D. in government and Russian studies at Columbia University, became a professor of politics and Russian studies at Princeton University in 1968, where he taught until 1998, and has been teaching at New York University since.

Cohen is well known in both Russian and American circles. He is a close personal friend of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, advised former President George H.W. Bush in the late 1980s, helped Nikolai Bukharin's widow, Anna Larina, rehabilitate her name during the Soviet era, and met Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana.^{[citation needed]}

Since 1998, Cohen has been professor of Russian Studies and History at New York University, where he teaches a course titled Russia Since 1917. He previously taught at Princeton University. He has written several books including those listed below. He is also a CBS News consultant as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Cohen has a son and a daughter from his first marriage to opera singer Lynne Blair, from whom he is divorced. Cohen is now married to Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the progressive magazine The Nation, where he is also a contributing editor. They have one daughter.

He has been strongly critical of historian Orlando Figes, whom he attacked in his wife's magazine The Nation.^[3]

Publications [edit]

Books [edit]

• The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin ISBN 978-1-933002-40-8 Pub. 2010 by PublishingWorks
• Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War ISBN 978-0-231-14896-2 Published 2009 by Columbia University Press
• Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia ISBN 978-1-933002-40-8 Updated edition Pub. 2000 by W. W. Norton & Company
• Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev's Reformers ISBN 978-0-393-02625-2 Pub. 1989 by W W Norton & Co Inc
• Sovieticus: American Perceptions and Soviet Realities ISBN 978-0-393-30338-4 Pub. 1986 by W W Norton & Co.
• Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 ISBN 978-0-19-504016-6 Pub.1985 by Oxford University Press
• An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union, from Roy Medvedev's Underground Magazine "Political Diary" ISBN 978-0-393-30127-4 Pub.1982 Norton
• Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 ISBN 978-0-19-502697-9 Pub.1980 by Oxford University Press

Essays - Articles [edit]

• The Friends and Foes of Change. Reformism and Conservatism in the Soviet Union in: Alexander Dallin/Gail W. Lapidus (eds.): The Soviet System. From Crisis to Collapse, Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford 2005 ISBN 0-8133-1876-9

References [edit]

• Stephen Cohen's lectures, Russia Since 1917. Spring Semester, 2008. NYU.

External links [edit]

• Stephen F. Cohen at the Internet Movie Database
• Articles by Stephen F. Cohen available online at The Nation