Stephen F. Cohen

Stephen F. Cohen is professor of Russian studies and history at New York University and professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University. He is a contributing editor to The Nation and a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose Show and other broadcast media. In our conversation leading to this book interview for Rorotoko, he described Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives as reflecting “almost my entire intellectual career.” EP

The Victims Return - In a nutshell

The story of survivors of the Jewish Holocaust is widely known. The story of surviving victims of Stalin’s 25-year terror is virtually unknown in the West—and even in Russia itself. The Victims Return tells that story. I focus on a wide array of survivors—including many I knew personally in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s.

Editor: Erind Pajo
February 14, 2011

Stephen F. Cohen The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin Publishing Works224 pages, 5½ x 8½ inches ISBN 978 1933002408

Photograph of an NKVD execution squad in 1936. (From<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1903427150?ie=UTF8&tag=r0a98-20" target="_blank" id="">David King’s Ordinary Citizens</a>, reproduced in the book on page 45.)

Anna Larina (the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, who was executed in 1938), with their son Yuri, whom she had not seen in nineteen years, and her two younger children, Nadya and Misha, by her second husband, at her place of Siberian exile, 1956. The photographs reproduced on page 50 show Anna Larina’s aging during her years in the Gulag, and Yuri’s in the orphanage.

Left, Olga Shatunovskaya before her arrest, in 1936; right, in a Magadan camp, 1945. After her release in the early 1950s, Shatunovskaya became a member of Khrushchev’s inner political circle and, in that capability, helped to free millions of other victims from labor camps and exile.

A 1980 photo of the author with Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko.

Stephen F. Cohen

The Victims Return - A close-up
February 14, 2011

I hope that your “browsing reader” glances at the Prologue, the pages one through six. One informed reader said this must be the best short overview of Stalin’s terror ever...

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives - A close-up
July 10, 2009

On page 116 I pose the question: How is the historic end of the Soviet Union to be explained? This is a question discussed in most American high schools and...

The Victims Return - The wide angle
February 14, 2011

While I focus on individuals, The Victims Return has a wide angle or broad context.The book begins with a short overview of Stalin’s mass terror, from 1929 to 1953, and...

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives - The wide angle
July 10, 2009

Most historians and journalists in the United States say that what happened in the Soviet Union was a straight line of inevitable development, from the moment the Communists took power...

The Victims Return - In a nutshell
February 14, 2011

The story of survivors of the Jewish Holocaust is widely known. The story of surviving victims of Stalin’s 25-year terror is virtually unknown in the West—and even in Russia itself....

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives - In a nutshell
July 10, 2009

I begin with the fact that, along with the United States, no country was more important in the twentieth century than was the Soviet Union. And it may also be...

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