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Department
Winter '02
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HISTORY 320: THE GROWTH OF IMPERIAL RUSSIA, Fall
Term 1999
Instructor: Richard Bidlack
This course is a survey of a millennium of Russian history from the ninth century, when written language first came to Kievan Rus, up to the twilight years of the Romanov Dynasty in the early years of this century. Class lectures, discussions, and assigned readings are concerned fundamentally with explaining how the vast and powerful Russian Empire was created by forceful absolutist monarchs and how that empire confronted the modern era. The early centuries of Russian history from the establishment of Kievan Rus in the ninth century through the reign of the first two Romanov tsars in the seventeenth century will be covered in a series of broad thematic lectures during the first three weeks of the course. Among the topics we shall consider during that period are: the growth of ancient Kiev; the impact of the Mongol conquest, the emergence of Muscovy, the formation of Russian Orthodox Christianity and its relation to secular authority, and the origins and development of serfdom. Closer attention will be devoted to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Imperial Russia reached its peak in power and size. Specific topics that we shall investigate include: the establishment and expansion of the far-flung Romanov Empire; the reigns of Russia's "great" eighteenth-century rulers, Peter and Catherine; Russia’s defeat of Napoleon's Grande Armee during the reign of Alexander I; and the strains that increasing popular consciousness, industrialization, ethnic tension within Russia, and international conflict exerted on the rule of Russia's tsars during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will attempt to understand how Russia's most dynamic rulers accumulated and used their power, and, at the same time, to study the causes, characteristics, and consequences of grass-roots revolutionary movements that opposed centralized tsarist power. Toward the end of the course, we shall study the empire's attempt to reform itself, to "catch up" with a modernizing West, and stave off mass revolt. The course concludes in the year 1917, with the fall from power of Nicholas II and the onset of the bleakest of chapters in Russian history -- communist revolution, civil war, and the establishment of a dictatorial regime. REQUIRED READING: Thompson, John, Russia and the Soviet Union, fourth edition (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1998)
CLASS SCHEDULE FIRST WEEK: Introduction to the course
SECOND WEEK: Important themes in Kievan and Muscovite history:
Kievan Rus and the emergence of Muscovy
THIRD WEEK: Important themes ... (con't.)
FOURTH WEEK: Peter the Great
FIFTH WEEK: Peter the Great (con't.)
SIXTH WEEK: Catherine the Great (con't.) SEVENTH WEEK: The brief reign of Paul I
EIGHTH WEEK: Alexander I (cont.)
NINTH WEEK: Nicholas I and the apogee of imperial power
TENTH WEEK: Alexanders II and III: Reforms and counter-reforms
THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY ELEVENTH WEEK: The growth of a radical opposition
TWELFTH WEEK: The end of the Russian Empire
Grading System:
Any student who misses class more than three times without a valid excuse
fails the course.
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