HIST 5568
Stalinism: Life and Death in Soviet Russia
This graduate course will explore the enormous transformations in life in the Soviet Union under the rule of Stalin, one of the most ruthless dictators of the 20th century and the architect of massive social transformation that turned Russia from a predominantly agrarian nation to a powerful industrial state. We will take a broader perspective on this history by looking at the roots of Stalinist rule in the Russian Revolution in 1917 and follow that story to the dismantling of the Stalinist system in the 1950s. During this period, Soviet society was engulfed in a series of massive traumas that included: a brutal civil war, heavy industrialization, collectivization of farmland, widespread upward social mobility, the establishment of a labor camp system known as the Gulag, the Great Terror in the late 1930s, the horrific experience of World War II, and postwar reconstruction during the early Cold War. In the course we will explore each of these phenomena in great detail with a broad interest in underlying social, political, and cultural phenomena. We will make use of both recently declassified primary source material available since the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as a wealth of new and innovative recent literature on the history of Stalinism. At its core, the students will interrogate the basic ideology of “Stalinism” as a historical phenomenon at the ideological, social, and cultural levels as situated in the broader vista of modern European history.