Russia The World

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

How different will Russian and Soviet history, so long interpreted through narratives of exceptionalism, look when debated in light of transnational and global history? To address this major question for the field and the discipline, this course critically engages key issues and noteworthy works in Russian/Soviet transnational, entangled, international, regional, and world history. Its chronological scope is broad, encompassing the modern period roughly from the Russian empire’s rise as a great power in Europe in the 18th c. to the USSR’s global engagement as a superpower during the Cold War. Geographically, there will be a special emphasis on three key areas where scholarship is particularly important and developed: Russia and Europe, Russia and the Ottoman world, and Russia and China. At the same time, however, the class also includes incursions into treatments of global history from the 19th c. to the global Cold War and targets broadly comparative and global thematic areas such as empire, revolution, modernization/modernity, and political violence.