>London Review of Books - April 19, 2001
>
>Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist
>Russia (New York: Norton, 2000)
>
>reviewed by Stephen Holmes (sholmes at ceip.org)
>Stephen Holmes is a professor at NYU School of Law and is currently a
>visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in
>Washington, DC.
>
[...]
>During the 1990s, Cohen explains, Russian civilization itself came close to
>melting down. In some ways, the country -- outside its Potemkin capital --
>no longer belongs to the modern world. To conceive the decade as a second
>Great Depression is to understate the extent of the calamity. Cohen favors
>more arresting comparisons such as the holocaust, World War 2 and
>thermonuclear devastation, almost implying that Yeltsin inflicted deeper
>wounds on Russia than did Stalin.
[...]