Professor Cohen's latest pro-Putin project

Putin's New American Fan Club

“The more organizations there are having country-to-country conversations, exchanges and partnerships, the better, [especially in] an increasing atmosphere of anti-Americanism there and anti-Russianism here,” New School international studies professor and writer Nina Khrushcheva, a granddaughter of the late Soviet leader, told The Daily Beast in an email. Like several other analysts, however, Khrushcheva voiced concern that the group’s potential positive role was compromised by some of its members’ knee-jerk tendency to blame all tensions on the West while excusing the Kremlin’s and Vladimir Putin’s actions. 

The committee’s seven-person board of directors includes former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock, and former Procter & Gamble CEO John Pepper. But its co-founders are two men who were part of the group’s forerunner, the American Committee on East-West Accord, a pro-d�tente organization that existed from 1974 to 1992. Stephen F. Cohen, the Russian history scholar, earned a certain notoriety last year with his dogged defense of Putin at the height of the Russia-Ukraine conflict; Gilbert Doctorow, a like-minded Brussels-based U.S. expatriate and self-styled “professional Russia-watcher,” has had a long career in multinational business as well as scholarship and punditry. 

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Cohen credited both himself and Doctorow with the idea of an advocacy group to counteract the new Cold War. “The model I had in mind was the American Committee, and it began to fester in my mind to re-create the equivalent,” says Cohen; the change from “on” to “for,” he says, was intended to make it “more proactive.” Both men began to publicly promote the initiative in early 2014. Doctorow, as ACEWA’s European coordinator, organized its first events in Brussels, including a panel last March that featured Cohen as well as Nation editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuvel, Cohen’s wife and frequent co-author on Russia-related issues.

Actively promoted in The Nation, ACEWA is clearly something of a Cohen-vanden Heuvel project. While vanden Heuvel is not a board member, Cohen told The Daily Beast that she “does help,” sometimes by mentioning the group’s activities to her contacts in Congress. Her father, William J. vanden Heuvel, a retired career diplomat and former United Nations ambassador, serves on the committee’s board and was even listed as its president in its incorporating papers. ACEWA also appears to have close ties to his philanthropy, the Melinda and William J. vanden Heuvel Foundation: The address listed on the committee’s tax filing last March is the foundation’s Manhattan address (and that of the investment firm Allen & Co., in which he is a senior adviser). None of the ACEWA representatives contacted by The Daily Beast would comment directly on whether the organization -- whose U.S. budget is listed at $30,000 for this year -- is financed by the vanden Heuvel Foundation; but both Cohen and Doctorow confirm that for now, its funding comes from board members.

Cohen’s views have been widely described as pro-Putin and “Moscow-friendly,” labels he has hotly disputed. Similar charges have been leveled at other people and organizations linked to ACEWA; the March 2015 World Russia Forum in Washington, D.C., where Doctorow made a pitch for the Committee, was skewered by The Daily Beast’s Jamie Kirchick as “a gathering of Kremlin apologists, conspiracy theorists, and other assorted nut jobs.” 

To ACEWA’s founders, such language validates the need for the committee, showing that dissent from a bellicose, Russia-bashing party line is marginalized in American discourse. “McCarthyite” attacks on Russia-policy dissenters have been decried by Cohen, Doctorow (who hailed Cohen as the “Great American Dissident”)  and James Carden, the former National Interest columnist who is now editor of ACEWA’s website. 

Yet the drubbing Cohen has received was due largely to his propensity for crossing the line into Kremlinesque spin. During the Crimea grab, he asserted that “we don’t know that Putin went into Crimea”; later, he insisted that the Russia-backed insurgents of Donetsk and Luhansk were “resisters” with a valid claim to self-defense since those regions had “voted overwhelmingly for autonomy” (never mind that the separatist-controlled vote was a blatant farce and polls showed most locals opposing secession). 

Whatever one makes of this argument (which doesn’t account, among other things, for Cohen’s similarly skewed Nation articles), Cohen is also emphatic that he should not be the “personification” of the committee. “If you look at the seven members of the board, there are serious disagreements among us on various issues,” he says. “In fact, you could probably have a terrific debate just by putting the seven of us on the stage.”

Fair enough. Yet, disturbingly, at least one board member disagrees with Cohen from a more pro-Kremlin point of view -- and that person is Doctorow, the committee’s co-founder. 

Doctorow’s peculiar outlook can be gleaned from his 2014 Nation article on U.S. and Russian media coverage of the Ukraine crisis. In it, he chides far-left academic Noam Chomsky for being slow to condemn “American bullying of Russia” because of “distaste for what he construed as Mr. Putin’s authoritarian regime” and praises Russian journalism for “emerging from pro-Western wishful thinking.”

In articles on his own blog and on Russia Insider, an American expatriate website with clear Putinist sympathies, Doctorow serves up a steady diet of frank Kremlin apologism and vitriolic attacks on Putin foes. A 2013 column waves aside Moscow’s ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans, many of them with disabilities, as no big deal since “the handicapped constituted no more than 10% of … international adoptions” and “the global numbers of such adoptions had been falling” even before the ban. Doctorow’s  commentary on the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov last February 2015 not only played up the theory of an anti-Putin provocation -- either by Ukraine or by fellow oppositionists -- but slammed the murdered man for “actively courting the enemy in what may easily be described before the dock as treason.”

Opposition treachery is a Doctorow leitmotif. An August column is subtitled, “Russian ‘liberals’ are hailed as heroes in the West. In Russia, they’re widely viewed as traitors”; the text leaves little doubt that Doctorow shares this view. The massive protests against election-rigging in late 2011 and the spring of 2012 are portrayed as a “seditious movement” financed with “U.S. dollars.” Yeltsin-era Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, the main target of the piece, is accused of “courting sedition” with a New York Times op-ed calling for regime change in Russia -- and of being a de facto U.S. agent with “American handlers” during his tenure as minister. (Doctorow also calls Kozyrev “delusional” and makes unsubstantiated references to his past “mental breakdown.”) A 2013 blogpost brands the Carnegie Center Moscow think tank as “a nest of sedition,” singling out foreign policy analyst and then-Carnegie associate Lilia Shevtsova as the culprit. 

What does Cohen, who has often stressed his sympathy for Russia’s liberal dissenters, think of his partner’s crude dissident-bashing? “Gil has very strong feelings because he’s got this trilateral life,” Cohen told The Daily Beast, referring to Doctorow’s status as a U.S. citizen who divides his time between Belgium and Russia and has a Russian wife. He also stressed, once again, that “the seven [board members] probably disagree as much as we agree about specific issues.”