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Oxford University Press, 1985
Inadequate historical analysis, wrote Cohen in the early 1980s -- when the Soviet Union still existed -- leads to inadequate political analysis. In his 1980s book, Cohen complains that the Cold War intruded into academic Sovietology politically and intellectually. Many, he wrote, entered Soviet studies primarily interested in 'national security problems' rather than an intellectual passion for Russian-Soviet civilization. There was nothing wrong, he opines, with being concerned about challenges that the Soviet Union presented the United States, and there was "no case for moral objection" with the passion of some former Communists and refugees from Communism. Cohen expressed concern with quality historical analysis and appears to have been offended by the " political zeal that often exceeded self-proclaimed expertise." Academic life has room for various kinds of scholars an scholarship, he wrote, "But," he added, "the politicization of an academic field does have serious intellectual consequences." In expressing this discomfort, Cohen mentioned Hannah Arendt, who labeled some work in history as "more on the order of 'axiomatic value-judgment,' than authentic historical analysis.
Cohen complained that "...the majority of sovietologists , including the new generation, believing, in the words of Adam Ulam in his book Stalin, that 'Stalin epitomized the Communist mind.' that his acts were 'pure, unadulterated Leninism." And Cohen mentions the claim that 'Lenin was the mentor and Stalin the pupil who carries his master's legacy to its logical conclusion.'
Cohen questioned the historical analysis that described Stalin's collectivization campaign of 1929-33 as an inevitable consequence of the triumph of the Bolsheviks acquiring power on November 7, 1917. Cohen described it as "rigid determinism." He wrote that the nature of Bolshevik ideology was "less cohesive and fixed" than the standard Cold War interpretation allowed. He writes that Bolshevik ideology influenced events in Russia, but that the Bolshevik outlook was shaped also to some degree by events after the Bolsheviks took power in November 7, 1917. As "an early instance" of this, the Russian civil war (1918-23), wrote Cohen, "had a major impact on Bolshevik outlook, reviving the self-conscious theory of an embattled vanguard developed by Lenin in 1902, which had been inactive or inconsequential for at least a decade."
Cohen:
It is important, first of all, to shed the ahistorical habit of thinking of the Stalinist system as an unchanging phenomenon. The historical development of Stalinism must be traced and analyzed through several stages, from the truly revolutionary events of the early 1930s to the rigidly conservative sociopolitical order of 1946-53.
Lenin became disabled in 1922 and died in 1924. Cohen wrote that there was no Stalinism before 1925, that before 1925 Stalin was following the positions of others. Cohen wrote that "...above all, official ideology changed radically under Stalin." This includes "the revival of nationalism, statism, anti-Semitism, and conservative or reactionary , cultural and behavioral norms..."
Cohen writes of the dissident Russian historian Roy Medvedev in his book Let History Judge (page 359) having pointed out that if Stalinism was predetermined by Bolshevism, if there were no alternatives after 1917, then 1917 and Bolshevism must have been predetermined by previous Russian history, which could take Stalinism back to the time of rule by the Tatars, which would be 'justification of Stalinism, not a condemnation.'
Cohen suggests that a more realistic appraisal of developments in the Soviet Union, as opposed to one that emphasized pre-determined developments, would have created a less rigid approach in dealing with the Soviet Union among Cold Warrior scholar-analysts. He wrote of their insistence that Detent having to wait for reform of the Soviet system. "That ill-conceived policy," wrote Cohen, "serves only to undermine the reformist cause in the Soviet Union.
Then came Gorbachev, in 1985 -- the same year Cohen's book was published. Was Gorbachev's doings predetermined by Lenin and Stalin? President Reagan and Michael Gorbachev met in 1986., and Reagan worked outside the thinking of his State Department Cold War theorists. None of them, including Gorbachev or Reagan, foreseeing the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
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