Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia - Softcover

Cohen Ph.D., Stephen F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393322262 ISBN 13: 9780393322262

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

What really happened in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union, and how badly experts and the media misjudged it.

Failed Crusade is a deeply informed and passionate call for a fundamentally different American-Russian relationship in the post-Yeltsin era. Author Stephen Cohen shows that what US officials and other experts call "reform" has for most Russians been a catastrophic development―namely the unprecedented demodernization of a twentieth-century country―and for the United States the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. What emerges is an alarming analysis of nuclear-laden Russia after 1991, representing an even greater threat to our national security than during the Cold War, and an indictment of American journalists and policy makers who failed to see or report the truth about the complicity of U.S. policy in a great human tragedy. This paperback edition has been updated to reflect the events of the last year. "Cohen writes with bracing clarity on a subject obscured by euphemisms and double talk."―Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen F. Cohen is director of Russian studies at Princeton University and a regular commentator on network television.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An incisive and occasionally caustic critique of American attitudes toward post-Soviet Russia.Russian expert Cohen (Voices of Glasnost, not reviewed) takes the reader through a decade of American policymaking that he views as nothing less than an unmitigated disaster. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, he argues, the Clinton administration, along with the majority of American scholars and journalists, has embarked on an ideological crusade, preaching the necessity of monetarist, free-market reforms and unflinchingly supporting the Yeltsin administration despite incontrovertible evidence that the reforms and the reformer have driven Russia back into the 19th century. Cohen is especially compelling in demonstrating the parallel between contemporary American "transitionologists" (those who believe Russia is in a period of "transition" to American-style free market democracy) and the Communists themselves-both have proved willing to overlook the poverty, chaos, and misery created by "shock therapy" reforms in the name of a purportedly golden future. While Cohen's argument is effectively laid out, however, it bogs down in the book's middle section, where he reprints a series of articles written since 1992. Cohen's prescience and deep understanding of Russian society are easy to glean from these pieces, but their repetitiveness soon takes on a smirking quality. The final third of the study, in which Cohen outlines a new Russia policy based on respect for Russian realities and the dangers posed by the country's nuclear arsenal, is marred by a different kind of self-importance: perhaps because he studies Russia for a living, Cohen gives it a centrality in his analysis of American policymaking that at times verges on the unbelievable. These are minor flaws, however, in an otherwise thoroughly convincing work.Unafraid to be contentious or to stand accused of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, Cohen offers a blistering, brilliant, and deeply felt critique of America's decade-long daydream of a Russia in transition. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393322262
• ISBN 13: 9780393322262
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 366