Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia

What really happened in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union, and how badly experts and the media misjudged it.

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. This paperback edition has been updated to reflect the events of the last year. "Cohen writes with bracing clarity on a subject obscured by euphemisms and double talk."―Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times Book Review