"In this wide-ranging and acclaimed book, Stephen F. Cohen challenges conventional wisdom about the course of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Reexamining leaders from Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin's preeminent opponent, and Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev and his rival Yegor Ligachev, Cohen shows that their defeated policies were viable alternatives and that their tragic personal fates shaped the Soviet Union and Russia today. Cohen's ramifying arguments include that Stalinism was not the predetermined outcome of the Communist Revolution; that the Soviet Union was reformable and its breakup avoidable; and that the opportunity for a real post-Cold War relationship with Russia was squandered in Washington, not in Moscow. This is revisionist history at its best, compelling readers to rethink fateful events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the possibilities ahead."--Publisher description

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 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 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 US 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.