|
Feature: March 20, 1996
Hands-on Scholar
Stephen Cohen Believes It May Have Been His Destiny to Study Russia By Tom Krattenmaker In the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was the biggest story going, Stephen F. Cohen was hot. The Russia scholar from Princeton was appearing on CBS News regularly (and exclusively) as an expert analyst. He was writing a syndicated monthly column. His 1973 biography of Nikolai Bukharin, the coleader of the 1917 revolution, whom Stalin later executed, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the Soviet Union after authorities allowed its publication. He knew Mikhail Gorbachev personally, and he was an intimate of the surviving family of the now-admired Bukharin and his widow, Anna Larina. Close to 400 students a semester were registering for his course on Soviet politics, one of the most popular on campus. The spotlight isn't so bright now. Cohen, a professor of politics and, until recently, the director of the Russian Studies Program, still has the CBS contract and continues to be quoted frequently in the press. But media interest in the former Soviet Union has eased, as it has in Cohen and other Russia experts. Enrollment in his course, accordingly, has declined to about 145 per semester, less than half its peak. The fact that fewer students are taking his course-renamed Soviet and Russian Politics after the Soviet Union's demise-doesn't bother him at all. "It all seems natural to me," says Cohen, who in 1998 will reach his 30th year at Princeton. "People now are coming to study Russia because they're interested in it-not because they're afraid of something. Back when the enrollment in the course was so large, we used to have the lectures in McCosh 10, which is very big. There were so many precepts we were all getting dizzy. We could hardly staff the course. Now I'm in McCosh 46. It's more comfortable. I can see everybody, even with my bad eyes. So I'm not stressed by the way things have changed. I feel I've probably got a more engaged, committed group of students out there than I might have had a few years ago, when they were attracted by the titillating nature of the Cold War or whatever it was that brought them." The students have settled into their seats at McCosh 46. Standing in boots and black jeans, his tie loosened and his jacket over a chair, Cohen launches into his lecture on the Gorbachev phenomenon and the ingredients that helped create a radical reformer in a country long believed incapable of reform. Gesturing and pacing, he explains how each leader since Stalin and his era of straitjacket control brought about incremental change, subtly paving the way for Gorbachev's attempt at a fundamental transformation of the system and society. But what also had changed since Stalin's day was the distribution of power in the Soviet system, Cohen points out. By the time Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, many of the prerogatives once bestowed upon the party leader were spread throughout the bureaucracy. Thus, while these changes made it possible for Gorbachev to push for greater reform, they hamstrung his ability to see his program through, says Cohen. "Most people who have written about Gorbachev's program underestimate just how radical his intentions were, and overestimate his power to carry them out." Cohen still seems stirred by the concept of a Russian leader proposing democratic reforms. "For the first time in history," he tells the students, "a leader in the Kremlin said, 'Follow me across the Rubicon into democracy.' There was conflicting evidence as to how many of them wanted to go, but they went-for a while. Whether they'll stay there is something we'll discuss later." Back in his office after the lecture, Cohen is remembering the exhilaration he experienced during the Gorbachev years. First, there was the satisfaction of seeing his unpopular hypothesis come true: Cohen had been in the minority of Soviet analysts who believed that if change ever did come to the supposedly unreformable system, it would be from within. But more important than the vindication was the access that came with Gorbachev's glasnost, or openness. In 1985 he returned to the Soviet Union after it again granted him a visa (he'd been denied one for three years, he assumes because of his association with dissidents, although the authorities never said why). His Bukharin biography was published in the Soviet Union and sold 250,000 copies. "So I had five minutes of knowing what it was like to have a best-seller," he says. Gorbachev was one of the many Soviets who read and admired the book-so much so that he insisted that Cohen be on the guest list when he hosted a reception for American political and cultural notables at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. So, too, was the Gorbachev era a boon to scholars. Archives were opened for the first time, giving scholars like Cohen their first glimpse into some previously unknown chapters of the Soviet saga. "On the other hand, for all the positive things that have happened in Russia, there's a great sadness when I see how hard things have been for my friends there," Cohen says. "These are mostly middle-class people who have lost a lot. In addition to their life savings and standard of living, they've lost their hopes. They've taken the burden of Yeltsin's so-called reforms. And it's very sad." That he would have an emotional, personal response to developments in Russia reveals much about the style of Cohen's research. Some Russian and Soviet scholars pursue their work entirely through written records, churning out books and articles without ever touching foot on the soil of the subject country. Not Cohen, who is anything but detached. Since the 1970s (with the exception of the period when his visa was denied) he has visited Moscow several times a year, and he has come to know and love it like a second home. His personal ties are especially close with Bukharin's widow and her extended family, in whose homes he and his family are frequent guests. The regular visits, he says, are essential to his type of scholarship, which examines current politics as well as history. "A sizable number of my colleagues are saying they don't want to go anymore, that they're afraid because of all the ugliness," says Cohen. "I can understand that. I suppose that apart from being in the archives you wouldn't have to go. Libraries here have about all the other material you need. But if you're going to do current politics, I think you do need to get there. Over the years I've built up a network of acquaintances in political life in Russia, and it's important for me to talk to them. You can get a lot of misperceptions from being so far away." When Cohen travels to Russia he does so with his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel '81, and their daughter, Nicola, born in 1991. (Vanden Heuvel edits The Nation, to which Cohen occasionally contributes. An article about her appears on page 49.) "So it's now going on 20 years that being in Russia has been a very central part of my life," he adds. "With my own parents dead for some time now, people there have become kind of a second family. I go to see friends and be with people who are like family, and at the same time I work like crazy." Cohen was studying economics and pub-lic policy at Indiana University when he made his first trip to the Soviet Union, in 1959. He was in England on a study-abroad program, thinking about a summer side trip to Spain to see the bulls run, when he came across a notice advertising travel to the Soviet Union. What first captured his imagination was the fare. For the same $300, he could spend either 30 days in the Soviet Union or five in Spain. "I thought, 'Now there's a thing for a kid from Kentucky to do. I'm going to the Soviet Union,' " Cohen recalls. "So I signed up. It turned out that it was a tour for pensioners. Everybody else in the group of about 30 was at least 65. So you can imagine who ended up carrying all the bags, right? But it was fantastic. We went by ship to Leningrad and visited five Soviet cities. The thing that struck me-though not in a sophisticated way, because I had no sophistication or knowledge and didn't know the language-was here was a society waking up from a frightfully long experience, which I later learned was Stalin's terror. Here was a society closed to the West, a fascinating society in many ways like ours, but so interestingly different that it completely engaged me." Hooked, Cohen returned to Indiana, and after completing his undergraduate degree in 1960, he pursued a master's in Russian-language studies. As luck would have it, Indiana had a long-standing and distinguished Russian studies program. One of the faculty members was Robert C. Tucker, a prominent Sovietologist who soon left for Princeton, where he launched the Russian Studies Program that Cohen would later head. Cohen moved on to Columbia for graduate school. After completing his doctorate in 1968, he was hired by Princeton, and within a few years was teaching the Russian politics course bequeathed him by Tucker. Cohen has been a tenured professor since 1973. Cohen cites Tucker as a significant influence on his own academic approach to Russia. Now an emeritus professor, Tucker had served in the American embassy in Moscow during World War II and the early years of the Cold War, and he had wound up marrying a Russian woman. Eugenia Tucker eventually emigrated with him and taught Russian for many years at Princeton. "So he had a special relationship with Russia and still does," says Cohen. "That, to me, seemed to be the model. In each generation of American Russianists, a handful for some reason develop a relationship with the country that is scholarly, or diplomatic, or professional in some other way, but that becomes something more as well. I don't know why it is. It's not political. It's not as if you become 'pro' or 'anti,' though during the Cold War that's the way people would define you. They'd say, 'Oh, he spends so much time there he must be pro-Soviet.' And then, when I couldn't get a visa for three years, the hard-liners in the States would clap me on the back and say 'Thatta boy.' It's just something that becomes an important part of your life and scholarship." Another distinctive aspect of Cohen the scholar is his willingness to engage in work not typically viewed as scholarship. His interest in "scholarly journalism," as he calls it, has taken a new turn in recent years with several documentary film projects. One is the 90-minute Conversations with Gorbachev, in which Cohen sat with the former Soviet president for an in-depth interview on his years in power and subsequent ouster. The program was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and premiered on PBS affiliates in December 1994. A second project, focusing on the opposition to current Russian President Boris Yeltsin, aired on WNET-TV in New York. His third documentary, filmed but not yet produced or fully funded (he is still seeking money), is about Bukharin's widow, Anna Larina, whose life opens a window to some of the most salient developments in Soviet and Russian history during this century. On all three documentaries, Cohen has teamed with New York filmmaker Rosemarie Reed. Cohen says the television work has been motivated in part by the reduced level of the U.S. media's coverage of Russia-which he believes deserves as much attention now as ever-and by what he sees as an ideological bent to what coverage does exist. Cohen says he wanted the documentaries to offer "a sustained treatment of things that were not being treated. Of course, it's difficult, because you need so much money. We work on a shoestring, but even a shoestring is a lot of money in television." As his professional and personal interests in Russia have become intertwined, so too have his scholarly and journalistic enterprises. Each grows out of the other, says Cohen. He finds that some material he gathers in his scholarly pursuits lends itself to a more "out-reaching" presentation, and that his journalistic pursuits inevitably yield materials useful to his scholarship. "This idea that scholarship is just for scholars doesn't seem right to me," he says. "Most of our students will not be scholars. They'll be citizens. I believe that scholarship is for public dissemination and public consumption, and that Americans should be enlightened about what directly concerns them. Those of us who are privileged enough to do scholarship have an obligation to shed some light. You have to find a way to talk to people, which is very hard work. It's a lot easier to write in jargon than it is in clean prose. So I looked at the newspaper column as a challenge. And with television, you reach even more people. My column reached a few million people, tops, but with television you can put another zero on that." The next project veers back in the scholarly direction. Cohen plans a book about Gorbachev-a "detective story," he calls it-that will give his and other observers' views on what Gorbachev accomplished and represented, on what went right and wrong. He is also considering a new edition of the Bukharin biography that would take advantage of newly available archival materials. (For more on Bukharin and Cohen's role in bringing his prison writings to light, see pages 20-23) That Cohen will undertake these and future projects as a member of Princeton's faculty is not entirely assured. He expresses a deep regard for the university, yet he has frustrations with his department, and other schools have tried to lure him away. In 1990, he acknowledged he was seriously considering a lucrative offer from New York University. He eventually turned it down, but used the opportunity to make a new arrangement with Princeton that allows him to teach half-time. A situation that frustrated him then continues to trouble him today: In recent years, he says, the politics department has admitted no graduate students specializing in Russia, even though, according to Cohen, there have been worthy applicants. "Even though I've been primarily an undergraduate teacher all these years," he says, "do I at my age [he is 57] want to stop training graduate students? I could say, 'Fine, let somebody else do it.' Or I could say, 'No, I've spent all these years in this field, and I think I've got something more to contribute to the next generation of scholars.' If that's how I answer, then I have to go someplace else." Geography is another consideration for Cohen, who lives in Manhattan while keeping an apartment in Princeton. "I have to think about my daughter, who will soon be reaching the age where she'll be in school and won't be mobile. So I have to decide whether I want to spend three or four days a week away from her, even just one semester a year. So it's not impossible that I would go, but I don't have a plan to go, and it would be very hard to leave Princeton, where I've spent my career." To wrestle with questions of fate is a very Russian trait, according to Cohen. While skeptical of the notion of destiny, he is certain that he was meant to study Russia as his life's work. "I was born the year Bukharin was shot-1938," he says. "I'm a child of Munich and Stalin's terror. It's a very interesting coincidence. I was born in the year they shot the guy about whom I would eventually write a biography. And it's interesting that it's exactly 50 years later that he is rehabilitated in Russia and that my book about him is published in Russia. There are certain symmetries, aren't there?" Russia, he adds, "has been my life for 30 years now, so it's not something you just stop doing. The second thing that continues to hold me is the saga of Russia today-for anybody interested in politics it's the greatest, most complicated, most fascinating political story on earth. And it is also the most fateful. What happens in Russia is going to affect the rest of the world more profoundly, for better or worse, than the development of any other country. Period. You may be wound tight about Syria or Bosnia or Haiti, but in the long run it's Russia. Because of its size, because of where it sits geographically, because of the nuclear weapons, and because of the long, strange relationship between Russia and the United States and Russia and Europe. So it's an enthralling, gripping story, and since I've done it all my life, I'm not going to let it go." Tom Krattenmaker, a frequent contributor to PAW, directs the news office at Swarthmore College.
|