Russia and Eurasia: Empires, Societies, Cultures I (formerly Introduction to Russian Civilization)

Undergraduate / Graduate

The first quarter spans the centuries between early medieval Rus', which furnished modern Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus with a story of origins, to the intellectual, social, and national mobilization in the mid-19th century. Major themes include: the influence of Byzantine, Mongol-Tataric, and Western cultures; medieval principalities, city-states, and the rise of the centralized state, its oversized role in Russian and regional social and economic development, its hyper-modernizing schemes and its periodic collapse; cross-cultural interactions in the steppe and the Baltic and Black Seas littorals; Russia's wars and the emergence of the Russian empire; varieties of resistance, from peasant uprisings and flight to religious dissent to aristocratic opposition, and the emergence of the repressive machinery of the state; forces of change and continuity in political, intellectual, and cultural life.