I seem to have missed a memo somewhere. My understanding of a "McCarthyist" charge is that it connotes an accusation of communist--even Stalinist--anti-American, treasonous sympathies. Now, it seems, it is a term that is supposed to mean little more than "a word to be used when a person's views on the former Soviet Union are interpreted in a way that he or she does not prefer."

I would think that the scholar who coined the term "sovietism"--an expression I have used in my own work with credit given to Cohen for it--would understand the difference between a charge that someone is a committed communist (which I did not even remotely imply about Cohen) and the belief that someone regrets the passing of the USSR as a state system. I would also note--again--that I was not questioning Cohen's qualities as a human being, although he felt free to question mine and particularly my "decency" as a person. (Apparently the dark history of ad hominem attacks that Cohen deplores is not as far in the past as either of us might wish.)

In any case, Cohen has since claimed it is a slur to interpret his views as expressing regret for the fall of the Soviet Union, and so I have since apologized, as he has made it (I think) clear that he holds no such regret. I'm glad we were able to clear that up.

On one important point, however, I remain, at best, puzzled, because of something Cohen said in his own response in JRL #66.

One of the triggers for Cohen's initial ire at my letter in Commentary is that I used the term "conspiracy theory" to describe the views of Cohen and (as he notes) others who profess a particular interpretation of how the USSR fell.

And yet, in his response, Cohen describes the end of the Soviet Union as something "done surreptitiously in a dark forest without any democratic procedure."

Cohen then proceeds to present a list of things he believes I don't understand about Russia or the Soviet Union--itself another overbearing and worn tactic in these kinds of debates, where disagreement is recast as ignorance. But one thing I think I do understand is the meaning of "conspiratorial," and if something "done surreptitiously in a dark forest without any democratic procedure" does not fit the connotation of "conspiratorial," then either Cohen is correct that I don't know how to "read any sources," or he and I use completely different dictionaries.

This kind of view is exactly why I mentioned Cohen in Commentary in the first place, as a synecdoche for a particular view that stands in opposition to another view that the Soviet Union fell for larger reasons of popular discontent. Cohen sees the end of the Soviet Union as brought about, apparently, by a group of men acting "surreptitiously" in a "dark forest", while others of us recall popular demonstrations, street violence, the defection of Eastern Europe and the Baltics, and declarations of autonomy and independence popping up like mushrooms. (Cohen, I note, objects to the term "tyranny"as a "feel-good" and "politically correct" condemnation, which again raises the question of what he thought the Soviet Union really was, and whether he thinks it should have survived. But since he has now clarified that issue and emphasized that any interpretation of his views as regretting the passing of the USSR is, in his eyes, a "slur," I will take him at his word.)

In any case, I am glad to reiterate that my comments reflected what I took to be Cohen's views, rather than his qualities as a person, and am equally happy to repeat that I apologize for any misunderstanding of Cohen's work as showing any regret at the fall of the Soviet Union. I am pleased that Cohen has, as well, decided to accept that apology.