Story of Russian Power

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This course combines military and diplomatic history with the study of film, music and literature to tell the story of Russian power (past and present). It offers a composite picture of Russian national security as it has evolved over the centuries, incorporating culture, geography and political economy and looking at these topics both from within and from without. It traces the internal logic of Russian strategy, the factors that have led Russian policy makers to conceive of national security as they do. It also examines the effect of their logic on the outside world and the many ways in which the outside world has shaped formulations of Russian national security. Starting with medieval Russia, this course winds its way through imperial Russian history, arriving at the caesura of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. It then explores the geopolitics of the Soviet Union, from World War II to the arrival of the nuclear age and the Cold War. It details the emergence of Putin’s Russia, analyzing Putin’s foreign and national-security policies across multiple axes: U.S.-Russia, Russia-Europe, Russia-China, Russia-Middle East and Russia-Ukraine. This course’s various parts come together in an assessment of the causes of Russia’s serial wars against Ukraine, the first in 2014-2015 and the second in 2022. This course concludes by scrutinizing the problem of Russian power from the vantage point of contemporary U.S. foreign policy.