HIST 3363 - Russia and the USSR: Multiethnic Empire, Revolution, and Communism

This course provides students with the information and interpretive tools to analyze the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations that took place in the last half-century of tsarist rule in the Russian Empire (1860s to 1917) and in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. An emphasis is places on the diversity of experiences of the country's population in terms of social class, ethnicity, religion, and geography. The course examines the crisis of autocratic rule in the late empire, the emergence of Bolshevik power in the cauldron of World War I, the influence of a diverse, multiethnic population on both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the nature of the radical and often violent experiment that was Soviet rule, the role of the Soviet Union in World War II and in the Cold War, and the ultimately revolutionary policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. Post-Soviet Russia and the Soviet successor states of Ukraine and Belarus are also examined. Toward the end of the semester students will make presentations based on their own research conducted in the course. 3 credits.