Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 20, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a panel discussion featuring Nadezhda Azhgikhina (Journalist and widow of Yuri Shchekochikhin), John Kohan (Time Magazine’s Moscow Bureau Chief, 1988-1996), Carol Ueland (Professor of Russian Emerita at Drew University), and Katrina vanden Heuvel (Publisher, The Nation). Moderated by Ann Cooper (Columbia University).
This roundtable discussion is focused on an important aspect of Gorbachev’s perestroika: the role of journalists and scholars in overcoming both the images and realities of the Cold War during this period of U.S.-Russian relations.
In 1988 the new bureau chief of Time Magazine’s Russian office, John Kohan, a graduate of Columbia’s Slavic Department, interviewed Yuri Shchekochikhin, an investigative journalist from the liberal weekly newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta. Shchekochikhin had just published a groundbreaking article—the first in an official press publication in the USSR—about the existence of organized crime in the country. The meeting between Kohan and Shchekochikhin was the start of a long-term friendship and a project which resulted in a trip to the Tambov region in the Russian provinces and the subsequent publication of a joint text in Time and Literaturnaya Gazeta.
This example of professional and personal dialogue and cooperation was one illustration of Gorbachev’s stated intention to develop “a new perception” of views of one another, with the hope of finding commonalities based on the deep desire to build a joint future without hostility or stereotypes about the other. Diplomacy played an important role in this process. Many professionals, scholars and ordinary people in the USA and USSR shared this goal of knowing one another better and working together.
Speakers will share their memories of Gorbachev’s time and their assessment of the results of long-term Russian-American dialogues. Katrina vanden Heuvel and Nadezhda Azhgikhina will also discuss their new dialogue project, “Hope Springs Eternal.”