Failed Crusade

Failed Crusade is a deeply informed and passionate call for a fundamentally different American-Russian relationship in the post-Yeltsin era. Author Stephen Cohen shows that what US 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 after 1991, representing an even greater threat to our national security than during the Cold War, and an indictment of American journalists and policy makers who failed to see or report the truth about the complicity of U.S. policy in a great human tragedy.

"Cohen writes with bracing clarity on a subject obscured by euphemisms and double talk."

Stephen F. Cohen (1938—2020) was professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, the author of numerous books, including Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution and Sovieticus, as well as a regular commentator on network television.