BY HANK REICHMAN

Stephen F. Cohen, one of the world’s leading scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history and politics and emeritus professor at Princeton and New York Universities, died of lung cancer on Friday at the age of 81.  The author of ten books and numerous scholarly articles, Cohen was also a prominent public intellectual whose often controversial views on U.S-Russian relations, expressed in the pages of The Nation and elsewhere, were both polarizing and challenging.  A full obituary may be found in the New York Times.

Stephen F. Cohen

As a fellow historian of Russia and the Soviet Union I have long known and respected Cohen’s work, especially his pathbreaking 1973 biography of Nikolai Bukharin (fun fact: Kamala Harris’s father was also in the 1970s a Bukharin scholar) and I had over the years occasionally interacted with him.  But in 2015 a controversy with potentially profound implications for academic freedom brought us together in a common struggle.  The previous year Cohen and his wife, Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, had made an extraordinary six-figure donation to the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) to fund dissertation research in the region in the wake of the federal government’s withdrawal of support for such study.  The grants, like a previous prize grant the two had funded, would be named in honor of Cohen and his late mentor, Princeton political scientist and Stalin biographer Robert C. Tucker.  But some members of the ASEEES board objected to Cohen’s name on the awards owing to the controversies swirling around his recent political commentaries, viewed by some as overly “pro-Putin.”  As a supposed “compromise” they agreed to accept the donation, but only on the condition that it not carry the Cohen name.  Understandably, Cohen and vanden Heuvel refused and the donation was revoked.

I didn’t agree with some of Cohen’s views, but as an ASEEES member and as the chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure I was outraged and wrote a lengthy post on this site about what was happening.  The post quickly became one of the most-read in the then brief history of this blog, attracting over 9,000 views in a month.  (As of this morning, the post had been viewed more than 11,000 times.)   Here’s a little bit of what I wrote:

To be sure, a scholarly association, or for that matter a university, has every right to reject donations or to refuse to honor an individual’s request for naming rights. Certainly, had someone donated money to the study of, say, African-American slavery, but insisted only that it be named for a noted Ku Klux Klan leader, a decision to reject that donation would be understandable. But such is hardly the case here. Stephen Cohen has clearly earned the right to place his name on this generous donation. His views on Ukraine might be relevant were they hateful and bigoted, but they are scholarly and insightful, if controversial. Indeed, there is no greater evidence of this controversy than that others who have questioned, even mildly, the current neo-Cold War orthodoxy — including such luminaries as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, hardly Russophiles — have also been labeled appeasers and worse.

And here’s one irony: it would surely be possible for one of the Cohen-Tucker dissertation awards to go to a student whose research seeks to debunk Cohen’s own views. And were that the case, I’m certain Cohen would be the last to object. (Here I might note that my evidence for this contention is that back in 1981 Cohen was on the selection panel and interviewed me for a different fellowship supporting research in the then-Soviet Union. He probably won’t recall, but we argued at the time over my then-unorthodox views about Lenin. It even got a bit heated. But I got the fellowship and never feared that I would be judged by my personal opinions instead of by my scholarship.)

Steve quickly got in touch with me, thanked me for the support, and for the next several months we worked together with other like-minded members of ASEEES — some longtime friends of Steve, others who didn’t agree with or even much like him but thought the association’s move to be unethical and dangerous — to get the decision reversed.  My own role involved keeping up reports to this blog on the case’s development (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) and compiling for Steve’s use a “dossier” on the controversy.  Happily, ASEEES reversed its decision and the grants have been awarded annually ever since.  After the dust settled I organized a panel at the annual ASEEES convention on academic freedom in slavic studies in which both Steve and I participated.  It attracted quite a crowd.

Steve, as I suspected, did not recall our little 1981 debate over Lenin.  And I only recently learned of Steve’s small role in the 1968 Columbia University student rebellion, in which I participated as an undergraduate and about which I have written on this blog and elsewhere.  My fellow Russianist Lewis Siegelbaum, recently retired from Michigan State University, was a year behind me at Columbia and also involved in the uprising, which he recalls in his recent memoir.  Lewis was at the time enrolled in a class taught by Cohen, then a graduate student instructor.  And, of course, as Lewis reports, “Unlike many on the Columbia faculty, Cohen supported the student strike.  I may not have heard of the term ‘role model’ yet, but he served as one, partly, I suppose, because of his youthfulness but mainly because the way he practiced political history appealed to me.”

I last saw Steve Cohen at the 2018 ASEEES meeting in Boston where he gifted me a copy of what I think was his final book, War With Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate.  He graciously inscribed it, “with admiration and gratitude for the struggle.”  I found things to disagree with in the book’s pages, but far more important food for thought about the complexities of our present political crises.

For all the controversy that could surround him, Stephen F. Cohen was a giant in his field and an important voice in our public political discourse.  He will be sorely missed.