Initially submerged, those agendas resurfaced and became dominant under Gorbachev, staying important under El´tsin - and even Putin, as Cohen argues, contrary to an established view. Numerous returnees and the victims’ family members also became part of the Soviet political establishment, bringing their memories and experiences with them. A living embodiment of the Stalin Terror, these people, many of whom took an active civic stance, made the issue of the Terror’s legacy enter the long-term text and subtext of Russian culture. Cohen argues persuasively that the social, intellectual, legal SEER, 90, 2, APRIL 2012 374 and thus ultimately political impact of the returnees was enormous. Gulag returnees were another major under-appreciated political force in Soviet history. Putin’s reassertion of state control over key sectors of the economy, Cohen suggests, bore some resemblance to the NEP concept of ‘commanding heights’. After the end of the Soviet Union, a number of disenchanted Russian intellectuals and politicians rediscovered Bukharin’s vision as a potential relief from the country’s ‘shock therapy’ introduction to capitalism. Bukharin’s theories, moreover, may have offered an alternative not only to Stalinism but also to the brutal capitalism of early post-Soviet Russia. ![]() In the present book he traces Bukharin’s tragic end in the 1930s, personal rehabilitation in the late 1980s, and the resurgence of his ideas in the NEP-inspired economic projects of Gorbachev’s perestroika. As specialists know, Cohen has argued that Bukharin’s ideas presented one such alternative path. Ultimately, all these projects revert to the issue of whether the Soviet system could have taken other political, economic and cultural forms than those established under Stalin. Shortly after the publication of the volume under review, his book on the returnees came out. This work grew out of Cohen’s earlier research - his widely-known expertise onBukharinandhisbookprojectontheGulagreturnees,forwhichhegathered interview material for several decades. With one chapter devoted to Bukharin and one to Khrushchev (more precisely, the Gulag returnees and their role in Soviet political life since the 1950s), the remaining five chapters examine the Gorbachev years and their post-Soviet aftermath. ![]() Cohen associates these alternatives with three political leaders: Nikolai Bukharin in the 1920s, Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s and 1960s and, lastly but principally, Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Stephen Cohen’s perceptive and intensely polemical book focuses on the issue of alternatives which, he argues, presented themselves at several moments in Soviet history but were lost, or perhaps deferred. ![]() Columbia University Press, New York, 2009. Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. School of History, Classics and Archaeology Iain Lauchlan University of Edinburgh Cohen, Stephen F. REVIEWS 373 two Ezhovs before and during the Terror casts doubt on the central conceit of the book: is banality really the key to the mystery? It is difficult to believe that the bisexual son of a brothel-keeper in an age of prudery and homophobia - an alcoholic insomniac and sadistic midget who allegedly took pleasure in torture and executions - committed these dreadful crimes simply because he had spent too much time shuffling paper. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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