Prof Vladislav Zubok SAR 3.13

This course is available to General Course ‘Spring Semester’ students.

This course will cover the history of the Soviet Union, from its victory in World War II to the failure of Gorbachev's reforms and a surprisingly peaceful demise in 1991. Many courses on Soviet history deal separately with politics, social history, foreign policy, and intellectual/cultural developments. This course seeks to connect disparate threads into one historical and analytical narrative by focusing on major issues confronting the interpretation of the Soviet Union and its role in the international history in the second half of the twentieth century. The course takes advantage of the extraordinary wealth of new sources about Soviet history that appeared in recent years. The following questions will be examined during this course. What were the sources of Soviet legitimacy, modernization, and expansionism? What was Stalinism about? How did the outside world affect Soviet domestic evolution and devolution? Why did the Soviet state collapse so suddenly? Running through the course is the discussion about change and continuity, agency and contingency, reform and path dependency. The course helps to understand the origins of Putin’s Russia.

Recorded lectures. Classes will be on campus or via Zoom as circumstances dictate. There will be a reading week in the Lent term.

Students will be required to write one 2,000-word essay in the LT and make one class presentation in the LT.

Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire. The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007); Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (2009); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy. A History of Socialism in Russia (Free Press, 1995); Ronald Suny, The Structure of Soviet History. Essays and Documents (Oxford, 2002); Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War : Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957 (E.M.Sharp, 1998); Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims: Russians in the Soviet Union (Belknap, 2006); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2006); relevant chapters on the Soviet Union and Soviet foreign policy from Melvyn Leffler and Arne Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), vols. 1-3; William Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and His Era (W.W.Norton, 2003); Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2005); William Taubman, Gorbachev. His Life and Times (W.W.Norton, 2017).

Exam (100%, duration: 3 hours) in the summer exam period.