Here is a picture of Gorbachev with Steve. Here is another picture of Gorbachev with Steve, this one with some Russian dissidents. And look, there is one of Gorbachev and Katrina, Steve's wife, holding their infant daughter. There is even a Gorbachev magnet on the refrigerator.
Walking around this book-lined apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side on an August evening, it is almost as though the man with the world's most famous birthmark is the third partner in the marriage of Stephen F. Cohen and
The Nation editor-publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel.
For more than four decades, Cohen has been a leading voice on Russian affairs, pinballing between the academy, where he is now emeritus at Princeton University and NYU, and the media, influencing world events along the way. Few scholarly works can be said to have equaled the direct political impact of Cohen's 1973 biography of the Soviet founding father Nikolai Bukharin.
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (Alfred A. Knopf) didn't just suggest a new understanding of the Russian Revolution when it was released in the middle of the Cold War - it profoundly affected the course of that war. Mikhail Gorbachev's chief foreign-policy adviser, Anatoly Chernyaev wrote, "Some of us had already read the book, and we encouraged Gorbachev to do so. He took the book on vacation with him. He read it closely and kept quoting it to me. ...
The re-evaluation of Bukharin's role and personality opened the sluice gates to reconsidering our whole ideology."
Comment: A well put together analysis which pretty much agrees with our own. The US empire won't go down without a fight, and that fight is likely to include attempts to 'flip the chessboard' and ruin the game for everyone else, most especially their own citizens.