Slate | Stephen F. Cohen has long been one of
the leading scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union. He wrote a
biography of the Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin and is a
contributing editor at the Nation, which his wife, Katrina
vanden Heuvel, edits and publishes. In recent years, Cohen has emerged
as a more ideologically dexterous figure, ripping those he thinks are
pursuing a “new Cold War” with Russia and calling for President Donald
Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to form “an alliance against
international terrorism.” Cohen has gone so far as to describe the
investigations into the Trump campaign and Russia “the No. 1 threat to
the United States today.”
Cohen has been criticized by many people, myself included,
for his defenses of Putin. (He once said the Ukraine crisis had been
“imposed on [Putin] and he had no choice but to react.”) He scolded
President Barack Obama for sending retired gay athletes to Sochi and
recently went on Fox News to speak up for Trump’s war against leakers.
I spoke by phone with Cohen, who is also a professor emeritus of Russian
studies and politics at NYU and Princeton and the author of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.
During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and
condensed for clarity, we discussed why Cohen won’t concede that the
Democratic National Committee was hacked, whether it’s fair to call
Putin a murderer, and why we may be entering an era much more dangerous
than the Cold War.
