by REHANNA JONES-BOUTALEB
Why did the Soviet Union come to an end? Was the Soviet system reformable? Were there historical alternatives to Stalinism? These are the questions that Stephen F. Cohen raises in Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. In a series of seven essays, Cohen challenges conventional assumptions on the course of Soviet and post-Soviet history, examining the fates and lost opportunities of Stalin’s preeminent opponents.
For Cohen, captivated by the theme of political alternatives in history, Stalinism was never the predetermined outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Tracing the policies and aspirations of Nikolai Bukharin, Nikita Khrushchev, Yegor Ligachev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, he argues that there were both viable alternatives to Stalin’s Terror, and the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union. In other words, the Soviet system was reformable. Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist reforms, for instance, represented a real alternative for the Soviet future of the 1960s. A “viable anti-Stalinist tradition,” Cohen argues, linked Bukharin’s progressive socialism of the 1920s and Khrushchev’s political revivalism of the 1960s.
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