Time & Perspective Quote by Stephen Cohen

Cohen’s line is built like a quiet rebuke dressed up as optimism. He’s not simply offering hope; he’s insisting that history contains forks in the road, and that forgetting those forks is a political act. The key phrase, “memory of lost alternatives,” treats the past not as nostalgia but as evidence: proof that what exists now was never inevitable. That’s a pointed intervention in the most common propaganda of entrenched systems, which is to naturalize the present as the only possible outcome.

The “however” matters, too. It signals he’s writing against a backdrop of disappointment - reforms that stalled, openings that closed, Western-Russian relations that hardened into a story of mutual betrayal. Cohen, long associated with arguing that post-Soviet Russia had more potential paths than the standard triumphalist narrative allowed, is smuggling in a counter-history: there were moments when Russia could have been less authoritarian, less isolated, less locked into zero-sum geopolitics. Something was chosen instead, by leaders and institutions, at home and abroad.

Subtextually, the quote is also a warning to outsiders. If Russians (or any society) can remember “lost alternatives,” then the moral ledger doesn’t just tally internal failures; it also counts external pressures that narrowed the menu of choices. The sentence keeps its claim modest (“at least in Russia,” “as sometimes happens”), which is part of its persuasive strategy. He’s not predicting a comeback; he’s defending the legitimacy of imagining one - and suggesting that imagination, once anchored in real historical possibilities, can become a form of political fuel.