Success Quote by Stephen Cohen

Perestroika, in Stephen Cohen's framing, isn't a brand name for "reform" so much as a permission slip to stop pretending the old script still worked. The punch of his sentence lies in the phrase "creating and acting on alternatives": not merely debating new ideas, not merely loosening controls, but institutionalizing the right to choose differently. Cohen is an educator and historian of the Soviet project, and you can hear the classroom precision in how he resists romanticizing Gorbachev. Perestroika is presented as a method: diagnose failure, generate options, commit to them.

The subtext is sharper than the polite wording suggests. Calling prior policies "failed and dangerous" is an indictment of the late Soviet status quo: economic stagnation at home, militarized overreach abroad, and a political system trained to treat dissent as sabotage. Cohen implies that the real innovation wasn't a single policy tweak but the act of admitting contingency in a regime built on inevitability. Alternatives are politically explosive when your legitimacy depends on the claim that there are none.

Context matters: perestroika arrives after Afghanistan, Chernobyl, a draining arms race, and a bureaucracy skilled at self-preservation. Cohen's emphasis on "at home and abroad" underscores that Gorbachev's wager was holistic: you can't modernize the economy while maintaining an imperial posture, and you can't reduce external risk without changing internal incentives. The sentence also gestures at why perestroika destabilized the USSR: once the state authorizes alternatives, it can't fully control who gets to propose them, or where the logic of change leads.