HIST 140
Crime and Punishment in Russian History
Last Offered Spring 2020
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed RUSS 140 / HIST 140
This course is not offered in the current catalog or this is a previous listing for a current course.

For centuries, people have used crime in Russia and the Russian state’s response to crime as lenses through which to examine Russian history and the Russian experience. This tutorial will follow in this tradition, but will adopt a more critical approach to question how or if crime and deviance can speak to the nature of the Russian state and its relationship to Russian society writ large. To answer this question, we will read a combination of original historical sources and recent scholarship that cover the entirety of Russian history: from the creation of the first legal code in Medieval Muscovy to the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1962 and beyond. By semester’s end, students will have developed an understanding of both the major historical actors and events in Russian criminal and legal history, and the intellectual debates that they sparked among contemporaries and present day scholars alike.