HY242      One Unit
The Soviet Union: Domestic, International and Intellectual History

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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This course will cover the history of the Soviet Union, from its inception as a combination of the Russian Revolution and a Bolshevik dictatorship, through the Stalinist terror and World War II, its role as an international centre of the ‘socialist camp’ during the Cold War, to the fumbling search for “socialism with a human face” that ended in the epic failure of Gorbachev's reforms and the sudden demise of the Soviet system and state. Rather than dealing separately with power politics, social history, wars, international relations, and intellectual/cultural developments, this course connects these threads into one narrative by focusing on major issues that delineate the place of the Soviet Union in modern history. The course takes advantage of the extraordinary wealth of new sources and interpretations produced by last decades of scholarship. Putin’s war in Ukraine brought some of them into focus and challenged the others. The following questions will be examined during this course. Was the Soviet Union a continuation or rejection of its Russian imperial heritage? What were the sources of Soviet mode of modernization and expansionism? Why did “the Great Patriotic War” against the Nazis become a centerpiece of Soviet identity? How did the outside world affect Soviet domestic evolution? Why it was so hard for the Soviet state and society to overcome Stalinist legacy? The course provides an essential background for understanding  of Russia’s imperialism, militancy, and illiberalism today.

1 hours of classes in the Spring Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students will be required to write two 2,000-word essays (one in the AT and one in the WT) and make two class presentations (one in the AT and one in the WT).

Laura Engelstein, Russia in flames: war, revolution, civil war, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2018); Terry D. Martin, The affirmative action empire: nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Jochen Hellbeck. Revolution on my mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War. Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (Picador, 2007); 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; Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Belknap, 2009); William Taubman, Krushchev. 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); Vladislav Zubok, Collapse. The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale, 2021).

Exam (100%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period