RUSS 241
Imperial Russia: State and Society between Europe and Asia Fall 2020
Division I
Cross-listed RUSS 241 / HIST 241

Russia. The name alone evokes wonder, fear, romance, and history itself. Over the past ten centuries, the territory that we now call the Russian Federation has witnessed dramatic transformations that underwrote its transition from feudal backwater to global superpower. Its journey from tribalism to imperialism, feudalism to autocracy, agrarianism to industrialization, monarchism to parliamentarianism, Orthodox Christianity to revolutionary atheism, left a mark not just on the collective Russian conscious, but on a world that has grown accustomed to viewing Russia as a site for ideas, projects, and processes both exemplary and tragic. How did Russian state power borrow and depart from west European norms? How did foreign and domestic norms contribute to the creation of a “Russian” identity? How did Russian elites and ordinary people resist, collaborate with, or develop an apathy towards the Russian state, and to what success? This course will seek to answer these questions through a survey of Russian Imperial history from its founding in Kievan Rus’ in the 10th century to the October Revolution of 1917.