The Soviet Empire, 1917-1991

Harvard FAS

This course will analyze the Soviet Union as a multi-national state and ask to what extent it functioned as an empire and how its strategies of national rule evolved from the revolution to 1991. It will also analyze Soviet foreign policy towards other Communist states in eastern Europe and in Asia and ask to what extent these were imperial. Finally, it will look at how strategies of domination over non-Russians in the USSR and abroad interacted in the collapse of European Communism.