Stephen F. Cohen

Failed Crusade

Failed Crusade reveals what really happened in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union, and the complicity of U.S. policy in a great human tragedy.
Drawing on his many years of studying and living in Russia, Stephen Cohen shows that what U.S. officials and other experts call "reform" has for most Russians been a catastrophic development—namely the unprecedented demodernization of a twentieth-century country—and for the United States the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. What emerges is an alarming analysis of nuclear-laden Russia during the corrupted Yeltsin era, as well as an indictment of American policy-makers who failed to see or report the truth about Russian developments in the 1990s. Failed Crusade is also a deeply informed and passionate call for a new policy toward Russia in the next millennium. Arguing that the U.S. crusade of the early 1990s to transform post-Communist Russia into a replica of America was ill-conceived and bound to be counterproductive, and that developments in Russia today represent a greater threat to our national security than existed even during the Cold War, Cohen sets forth a bold plan for a fundamentally different American-Russian relationship in the post-Yeltsin era. Even readers who disagree with this important book cannot afford to ignore it.