HIST 337C Russia Since 1900
This class will explore the history of the Soviet Union; it is intended for those who have never before studied Russian history. It has three parts: the creation of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union after Stalin and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Its first part begins with the situation of the Russian empire at the time of the First World War. It proceeds to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian civil war, focusing on the figure of Vladimir Lenin and his vision of Soviet communism in the 1920s. It will proceed to the era of Joseph Stalin, which began approximately in 1928 and ended with Stalin's death in 1953: Stalin's consolidation of power, his use of the five-year-plans, his prosecution of the "great terror" in the late 1930s, his leadership during the Second World War and his postwar political and foreign-policy aspirations. This course's second part traces the Soviet system administered by Khurshchev and Brezhnev, emphasizing not just politics and not just the Cold War but cultural and everyday life within the postwar Soviet Union. The third part will review the major explanations of the Soviet Union's collapse, from dissident movements to technological backwardness, and it will devote considerable attention to the consequences of this collapse, to the redrawing of the geopolitical map in 1989 and 1991 and to the legacy Soviet history has left in Russia, Ukraine and the countries of Eastern Europe. This course will attempt to characterize the nature of Soviet politics, from Lenin to Gorbachev, by looking closely at the Soviet Union' sources of legitimacy and at the instability that is a recurrent theme in Soviet history. It will cover the national and ethnic composition of the Soviet Union as well as the cultural and religious questions that mattered to Soviet citizens, both within and outside the Kremlin.