History 239
Russia: The U.S.S.R. and Afterwards
History 239 examines the political, social, and cultural history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its successor states. The course, which relies heavily on its students, is less a lecture-based narrative survey, and more an introduction to the different questions raised by this history, as well as the conflicting ways in which historians have attempted to answer them. No prerequisites are required for enrollment, but the course does assume some familiarity with 19th- and 20th-century history and culture. Students who have taken this course in the past include: history majors; Russian language or area studies majors; European studies majors; economics majors; philosophy majors; political science majors; literature majors; math majors; biosci majors; Lennon, and various other personages.
Course Requirements
1)format and attendance
Lectures and tutorials, as scheduled below. “Students are expected to attend all scheduled meetings of classes in which they are enrolled; they have an obligation to contribute to the academic performance of all students by full participation in the work of each class. … Class attendance…cannot fail to influence the grade even when it is not considered explicitly. …(E)xcused absences…include participation in sponsored University activities, observance of officially designated religious holidays, serious personal problems (illness, death of family member), graduate or professional school interviews. …(C)onflicts arising from personal travel plans or social obligations do not qualify as excused absences.” [Undergraduate Catalog, 2005-2006, p.143.] Registration in the course signals your agreement to this contractual obligation.
2)readings:
Readings include secondary texts, scholarly articles, literature, and primary documents. Books are available for purchase at VU Bookstore. Other readings, as listed, are available through OAK Blackboard and are required. Timely reading of the syllabus is essential if you are to participate in the course. Its success or failure thus depends as much on you as me.
3)reading tutorials and OAK Blackboard:
Twelve tutorials give students, as individuals and as a group, the responsibility of reading, interpreting, organizing, and developing ideas about the subject matter of the course. A general question for each of the scheduled tutorials appears in the syllabus under the date of a given session. Read with this question in mind. Write a brief answer (one paragraph/one page), and post it at History 239-01 OAK Blackboard Communication/Discussion Boards/History 239 Electronic Tutorials prior to the class. Posts after the class will not be counted. Course members are encouraged to read each other’s written comments. All written essays in the course will in some fashion be discussed in tutorials. I also read these responses prior to the tutorial; insight and risk-taking impress more than skimming and wholehearted agreement with the previous post. Responses to all OAK posts are required for, but do not guarantee, a grade of “A” in the class participation component of the final grade.
4)essays:
Four essays, based on tutorial question found in the syllabus. Essay I (4 pages, 9/14) is a characterization of the Russian Revolution, using secondary (Suny) and primary (Fitzpatrick/Slezkine) sources. Essay II (5 pages, 10/10) treats daily life and political terror in the stalinist 1930s (Ginzburg and Fitzpatrick/Slezkine). Essay III (5 pages, 11/4) treats Soviet postwar dissidence in essays (Brodsky) or a novel (Dovlatov). Essay IV (4 pages, 12/5) is a book review (Shevtsova)
5)examinations:
Typed comprehensive take-home final (8-10 pages), which emphasizes ability to analyze, synthesize, and draw conclusions about the course. The final will be distributed on the last day of class and due at the later of the two scheduled examinations for this course.
6)honor code
Honored. It is your responsibility as a member of the university community to uphold the Honor Code. Failure to acknowledge prior ownership of ideas (printed, electronic, or other media) or conscious representation of another’s idea as your own is theft, also known as plagiarism. This action can ruin your life and potentially lead to expulsion from the university. The reward is not worth the risk. Ask if you do not know.
7)grading and late policy:
essay I--15%; essay II, 20%; essay III, 20%; essay IV, 10%; final 20%; class participation, 15%.
PLEASE NOTE LATE DAYS POLICY
All course members have three late days to use at their discretion on deadlines for essay assignments (all three on essay I, one day on each assignment, etc.). After an individual has used these days, however, late essays will be graded down 1/2 grade (A, A-) per 24 hours overdue, including weekends. Other extensions require written documentation of physical or psychological illness, as well as personal tragedy, which the Dean’s Office of your respective school will supply willingly to all your instructors. If this is happening to you, notify all your instructors through such a memo.
Readings [readings are assigned at the beginning of a syllabus section]
Sheila Fitzpatrick and Iurii Slezkine (eds.), In the Shadow of Revolution. Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War [Princeton University Press, 2000] 0691019495
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States [Oxford University Press, 1997] 0195081056
Evgenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind [Helen and Kurt Wolff Books, Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002] 0156027518
Sergei Dovlatov, The Compromise [Academy Chicago Publishers; Reprint edition, 1990] 0897333535
Lilia Shevtsova, Putin's Russia [Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003) 0870032011
OAK E-Reserves
1)Excerpts from the show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, 1938 [The President]
2)Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad, excerpts [The Night Without End]
3)Vasilii Grossman, Life and Fate: 7-12, 532-563
4)Khrushchev, “Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” 24-25 February 1956,” [Dmytryshyn, A Concise History]
5)Joseph Brodsky, “Less Than One (3-33),” [1976] and “In a Room and a Half (447-501)” [1986], in Less Than One. Selected Essays (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1986)
6)Gorbachev, "27 November 1978" in Memoirs, pp.3-17
7)”Introduction. A Nation in Search of Its Authors” in Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey, Glasnost. An Anthology of Russian Literature Under Gorbachev (Ardis, 1990): xv-xxx
8)Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, “Our Crowd” (1988)” [4-24] in ibid.
9)Tatiana Tolstaia, “Night,” (1987) [187-194] in ibid
I.The Russian Empire [Suny, chs.1-5; Fitzpatrick and Slezkine, Part I]
8/24 Introduction: Russia’s Long Century, 1861-1991
8/26 and 8/29 Late Imperial Society and Socio-Cultural Identities
8/31 Tsarist Autocracy and the Politics of the Ancien Regime
II. Revolution and Civil War [Continue Suny; Fitzpatrick & Slezkine]
9/2 The 1917 Revolution and Smuty (The Troubles)
9/5 Civil War
9/7 tutorial Suny, chs. 1-4. Explain the “Russian Revolution.” What are the major thematic elements of Suny’s explanation of the revolution. Why is Part I entitled “crisis and revolution”?
9/9 tutorial: The Russian Revolution can only be understood as a set of events that unfolded over 1917 and the civil war that followed. Given your reading of the autobiographical remembrances of women who lived through these years, how is your understanding of “the revolution” altered or reinforced? What thematic words would you use to describe it? Fitzpatrick and Slezkine, Pt. 1
III.The "Roaring Twenties": NEP (New Economic Policy) [Suny, chs.3-8; Fitzpatrick & Slezkine, Part II]
9/12 The New Economic Policy and the Politics of Industrial Modernization
9/14 Women, Revolutionary Culture, and the 1920’s
ESSAY I DUE, 9/14 [Suny and Fitzpatrick/Slezkine]
9/16 The Succession Struggle within the Party: The Role of Personality in History and the Political Victory of Stalin
9/19 tutorial: Especially in the later 1980s, when the Gorbachev reforms (perestroika) were at their zenith, there was much talk in the press and the academy about “alternatives (alternativy)” to stalinist communism, that there was not one but many paths of development that could have followed from the Bolshevik revolution. Based on your reading of secondary and primary sources, to what extent is this true? Suny, 6-8 and Fitzpatrick/Slezkine, pp.167-218
IV. The Revolution from Above and Prewar Stalinism [Suny, chs. 9-12; Fitzpatrick & Slezkine, Part III; Ginzburg ]
9/21 Revolution from Above or the Stalin Revolution
9/23 and 9/26 Collectivization and the Collectivized Countryside
9/28 Urban Daily Life
9/30 tutorial “Life has become merrier!” This claim, made by Stalin in the 1930s, was widely quoted and, much evidence suggests, believed by the generation who lived through this decade. Assess daily life in the 1930s. Fitzpatrick and Slezkine, Part III
10/3 The Great Terror reading: Excerpts from the show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, 1938
10/5 tutorial One of the great texts of the 1960s was Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, a memoir of a Communist Party member who was caught up in the Great Terror. Assess her experience and how she understood it.
VI. The Great Patriotic War (World War II) and the Making of the Modern Soviet Union [Suny, chs.13-16; Salisbury; Grossman; Brodsky]
10/7 and 10/10 The "Real" War, 1939-1945
ESSAY II DUE, 10/10 [Ginzburg and Fitzpatrick/Slezkine]
Mid-Term Deficiency Reports Due Wed. 10/12
10/12 tutorial Assess the impact of the war on society and culture through two very different sources, the foreign journalist’s historical study [Salisbury, The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad] and a Soviet journalist’s novel, also written after the events [Grossman, Life and Fate]
10/14War as Transformation: Society and Economy, 1941-1953
10/17 tutorial After World War II, American families parents lived life in “the freest, wealthiest, most powerful country on earth.” What about the other victor? Characterize the life of Joseph Brodsky’s family after World War II? Joseph Brodsky, “In a Room and a Half”.
VII.Whither the U.S.S.R.? The Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, Soviet-Style [Suny, chs.17-19; Khrushchev; Brodsky; Dovlatov]
10/19 and 10/21 Destalinization and the Khrushchev "Thaw"
reading: Khrushchev, “Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” 24-25 February 1956
FALL BREAK, 10/24-10/25
10/26 tutorial Culture in the fifties and sixties. Joseph Brodsky, a young poet in Leningrad, would eventually win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was first a Soviet beatnik, a member of that society’s beat generation of the late fifties and sixties? What was his generation’s "beat"? Joseph Brodsky, “Less Than One”
10/28 The Other Superpower in the Brezhnev Years
10/31 tutorial Satire historically was an instrument of political dissidence in Russia, primarily because it held up a mirror in which readers could see reflected their cultural mores and patterns of behavior. Soviet readers were especially adept at laughter and self-deprecation. What did they see in Dovlatov, The Compromise
VIII. The Gorbachev “Era”and the Collapse of the USSR [Suny, chs.20-22; Gorbachev; Petrushevskaya and Tolstaya]
11/2 tutorial Subsequently it was argued that the CPSU leadership elite had aged to such an extent that it was perceived as a gerontocracy, a rule by old men, who in turn served as the most explicit symbol of an increasing stagnation throughout the Soviet system. Mikhail Gorbachev was an up and coming, young party member in the late 1970s. What did Gorbachev remember of that time? Gorbachev, Memoirs [27 November 1978]
11/4 NO CLASS [American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies]
ESSAY III DUE, 11/4 [Brodsky and Dovlatov]
11/7and 11/9 The Gorbachev Reforms
11/11 video: “Perestroika from Below” (Donetsk, 1989)
11/14 Glasnost’ and the Language of Film: The Glasnost’ Film Festival [“This is How We Live (1988)” and “Early on a Sunday” (1988)]
11/16 tutorial “Russian talk” and the discourse of glasnost. Based on the evidence of videos and short stories, (films, Goscilo, Petrushevskaya, Tolstaya), what themes about Soviet life and culture were percolating in the decade of the 1980s?
THANKSGIVING BREAK, 11/19-11/27
IX.Contemporary Post-Soviet Russia: The Beginning of History? [Shevtsova]
11/28 and 11/30 The Revolutions of 1989-1991
12/2 The Russian Federation in the 1990s: Power, Free Markets, and Oligarchies
12/5 tutorial Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia. What is taking place in Putin’s Russia? What sort of country is succeeding the old Soviet Union?
ESSAY IV DUE 12/5 [ Shevtsova]
12/7 Conclusions
