Self publishing book CONFESSION OF FOREIGN AGENT

I was born in what is now Ukraine in 1940, and emigrated to the US in 2008, where I was awarded a special green card set aside for those with “outstanding merit.” I became a US citizen soon after and have lived in California ever since. My ex-wife, current wife and two children also live here. I have not returned to Russia since. This is my fourth book, the first in English.

Before the fall of the USSR on Christmas Eve 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power promising  perestroika (restructuring of the Soviet economic and political system) and glasnost (transparency). I believed in what he was doing and won the two grants from the USAID, a grant from the Ford Foundation, and a grant from the Mott Foundation – all to teach democratic principles and train grass roots community organizers in Moscow and other cities in the former USSR and post-Soviet Russia. We were very successful until the direction of the Russian government changed and Vladimir Putin became president. As he moved away from the concept of democracy and freedom, he determined that anyone such as me who got grants from abroad was a “Foreign Agent.” By the way, I am in very good company. The best and the brightest have mostly left the country because of Vladimir Putin’s decision to take Russia back to a Soviet style dictatorship.

I wrote a book about my efforts to teach democracy in post-Soviet Russia. The first edition, in Russian, was published in 2005. I presented a copy to US Ambassador Alexander Vershbow. Several years later, I moved permanently to the US, taught “Soviet Civilization: From Lenin to Putin” at Chapman University and began work on this book, which is aimed at helping Americans understand life in the USSR and the transition to post-Soviet Russia. “Confession of a ‘Foreign Agent” is the first of my books written in English.

I am proud to say that in October 2016 Harvard University Professor Richard Pipes, who specialized in Russian and Soviet History, wrote: ”It is very difficult for a person brought up in the Western world to understand what life was like in the Soviet Union during the Communist regime and immediately after its collapse. Professor Kokarev’s book explains and illustrates this life based on his own experience. This is of great value especially now that Communist rule begins to fade from memory.”