Apr 6, 2015

VIDEO: “The Ukrainian Crisis: A New Cold War?” — by Prof. Stephen Cohen

Over the next several days, we’ll be publishing the full transcript of Prof. Stephen Cohen’s February 5 speech on the major international crisis today, i.e. the events in Ukraine and the new Cold War with Russia, given at the Fairfield University to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies Program.

Transcript: part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5

We wish to thank Prof. Stephen Cohen himself, as well as Prof. David McFadden, the Program director and organizer of the February 5 event, for helping us with this project. Many thanks, also, to Alexa Mullady, the REECAS program assistant, for preparing the first transcript.

For those not familiar with his work: Stephen Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at NYU and professor-emeritus of Politics and Russian Studies as Princeton. Widely recognized as the pre-eminent scholar of Russian Studies in the United States today, Stephen Cohen is the author of Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917, as well as the classic work on Nikolai Bukharin, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888-1938. With his wife, Katrina vandel Heuvel, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Nation, he is also the author of Voices of Glasnost, a collection of interviews with the Gorbachev-era reformers, and The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin. Stephen Cohen is a regular contributor to The Nation and often appears on Democracy Now! as well as on CNN and other major networks.

We are presenting our edited transcript of Prof. Cohen’s speech in five separate sections. Today’s section, the first part of his speech, omitting the introductory remarks, under the heading Stephen Cohen deconstructs “the historical fallacies and political myths” behind the current crisis.