HIST241

This course focuses on the "Soviet Century," or a twentieth century defined by the Soviet Union's birth, growth and demise. It begins with the revolutionary seeds of Soviet rule, the Russian empire and the revolution of 1905, and concludes with an examination of the former Soviet space in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse in 1991. During the Cold War, Western pundits often referred to all Soviet citizens as "Russians." But this characterization grossly misrepresented the Soviet Union's ethnic diversity. Even the Soviet Union's most famous leader, Josef Stalin, was not Russian. He was Georgian. This course seeks to dismantle the long-standing notion that "Russian" and "Soviet" are the same thing. Instead, it emphasizes the Soviet Union as a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society, one in which Russians interacted with myriad other ethnic groups, including Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Tatars, Armenians, Lithuanians, Tatars and others.