Humanities and Social Studies Center A3226
1226 Park Street
Grinnell, IA 50112
United States
Ed Cohn
Edward Cohn is a scholar of Soviet and Eastern European history, with a specialty in the history of policing, surveillance, and the often-blurry line between public and private life in the Communist world. A 1999 graduate of Swarthmore College, he worked for a year as a political journalist and came to Grinnell in 2007 after finishing a PhD in Russian history at the University of Chicago.
At Grinnell, Professor Cohn teaches a survey of Soviet history, a class on the global history of surveillance, and a course on World War II on the Eastern Front, as well as a seminar on Stalinism, a section of the department’s intro class, and interdisciplinary first-year tutorials on topics like “The Life and Times of Nikita Khrushchev,” “The History of Reading,” and “The Liberal Arts as a Force for Evil.” He also helped design the department’s advanced tutorial on the modern classics of historical writing—an experimental class whose students meet with the professor in small groups for intensive discussions of major historical works. A former chair of the Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies concentration, he is always happy to mentor independent research projects on the region.
Professor Cohn’s research on the political and social history of the postwar USSR has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, and the National Council of Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. His first book, The High Title of a Communist, analyzes the Soviet Communist Party’s system of internal discipline in the twenty years after World War II, focusing on investigations of corruption, war-time collaboration with the Nazis, drunkenness, and sexual misconduct among party members.
He is now completing a monograph entitled The Admonitory State: KGB Surveillance, Prophylactic Policing, and Political Control in the Late Soviet Union that builds on his recent articles in The Russian Review and Kritika. This book, based on extensive archival research in the Baltic republics and Moldova, discusses the KGB’s efforts to fight dissent using a tactic known as “prophylaxis,” in which low-level offenders were not arrested or prosecuted, but “invited” to the offices of the secret police for supposedly informal “conversations” about their alleged misdeeds. The Admonitory State argues that prophylaxis was not a simple form of coercion and intimidation (or a straightforward loosening of Stalinist repression), but a more systematic and theoretically sophisticated effort to manage anti-Soviet activity that anticipated later policing methods around the world.
Education and Degrees
Ph.D. in Russian history at the University of Chicago