20th-Century Russia: From Rasputin to Putin

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This upper division lecture course examines some of the most important events, ideas, and personalities that shaped late Imperial, Soviet, and early post-Soviet periods of Russian history during the last one hundred years: from the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolutions of 1905, WWI, and 1917 through the Great Terror of the 1930s, the experience of the Second World War and the emergence of the Soviet Empire, late Stalinism, the developed or mature socialism, the collapse of the communist regime and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, as well as Russia's uneasy transition "out of Totalitarianism" and into Putin's authoritarianism. The course is open to all students, including freshmen, with or without background in modern Russian and European history.