|
Imperial Russia 1700-1917 Fall 2011 Monday-Wednesday 13:15-14:30
SES154 HIS154 RUS154 |
click for
poster |
This course traces Russian imperial history from the reign of Peter the Great in the early-eighteenth century to the fall of the Romanov Dynasty in 1917. Using a rich collection of primary sources that range from travel notes and bureaucratic correspondence to some of the best works of Russian literature, in addition to state-of-the-art historiographic analyses, we will seek answers to some of the major questions of this interesting history: How did a land-locked state north of the Black Sea grow into an empire that expanded from Eastern Europe to Alaska? What were the institutions of governance that created and sustained the Russian empire? How did these institutions function or fail to function? How did the Russian empire become a world power? How did this world-power status affect the course of Russian history? Whose empire was this: Russians, Germans, Turks... tsars and tsaritsas, aristocrats, bureaucrats, clergy, peasants? What held the extremely diverse multi-ethnic and multi-confessional population of the Russian empire together? What were the ideologies that justified and challenged the existence and institutions of the Russian empire? What can we learn from the experience of one of the largest and most enduring empires of the world as supranational institutions, multinational corporations, a global market, and perhaps, even newly emerging empires challenge the primacy of nation-states?