Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate. Today we are airing something special. It's an unpublished

interview that I did with Stephen F. Cohen, the late Stephen F. Cohen in September 2019.

Just a year before his death, Stephen passed away in September of this year at the age of 81

and as anyone who watches the gray zone knows Steve was a legend he shaped the field of Russian studies. He wrote a number of really important

books about Russian and Soviet history. And in the last few years, as this new Cold War emerged, and anti-Russia chauvinism and militarism became just predominant

across both political parties starting especially with the Medan coup in Ukraine in 2014 and

that coinciding with the U.S. and Russia being on opposite sides of the Syrian

proxy war. And then, of course, in 2016, when Russiagate began, during all this time,

Stephen F. Cohen was almost a lonely figure inside the academy from his esteemed perch.

He was a professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton and NYU,

world-renowned, appeared often on CNN and other major outlets.

And he was virtually alone in pushing back on all this and calling out the hypocrisy

and calling out the fallacies

of the narratives that were used to justify what he called a new cold war on Russia.

And he was infallible.

He faced a whole bunch of smear campaigns and childish attacks, but it didn't face him.

He handled everything with so much grace and courage and a mastery of the facts. And that's why we all loved him and looked up to him.

And that's why his loss has just been so incalculable because there's no one like him.

And that's why now, with a story like

Alexina Valny's poisoning in the news, you know, the first person I want to hear from on this

is Stephen Cohen and he's not here anymore. But what we can do today, though, is play

this interview that I did with him a year ago that we have never released before.

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