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Once Known As Preeminent Soviet Scholar, Stephen Cohen Now Seen As Putin Apologist

May 7, 2015

Once Known As Preeminent Soviet Scholar, Stephen Cohen Now Seen As Putin Apologist

On a recent Friday evening, the prominent Russia historian Stephen Cohen took the mic before an audience of 3,000 in Toronto to debate Western policy toward Russia in light of the Ukraine conflict.

Over the next 90 minutes, the man renowned for his pioneering scholarship on the Soviet Union accused the West of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin with NATO expansion, stoking potential war with Moscow, and failing to acknowledge its responsibility for what has happened in Ukraine in the last 15 months.

For those who have followed Cohen’s commentary, it was hardly surprising that many of his arguments dovetailed with a narrative pushed by the Kremlin, which portrays its seizure of Crimea as a response to Western meddling in Ukraine.

But toward the end of his debate with two strident Putin critics — former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and journalist Anne Applebaum — Cohen delivered a preemptive aside tailored for those who dismiss him as a dupe for the Russian leader.

“I am not pro-Putin,” Cohen, a professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University, told the crowd. “I have no sentimental attachment to Putin whatsoever. He’s a subject — as a historian, to me — of study.”

It was a caveat unlikely to convince critics of Cohen, 76, whose fierce condemnation of the West’s role in the Ukraine conflict and more forgiving assessment of the Kremlin’s have made him arguably the most divisive American public intellectual commenting on the crisis today.

Widely seen as one of the preeminent scholars in the generation of Sovietologists who rose to prominence in the 1970s, Cohen these days is routinely derided as Putin’s “toady” and “useful idiot.”

 

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