Fall 2009

HIS 383 • STALINIST RUSSIA

Course Description

This graduate seminar will examine the history and historiography of the Stalinist period. The course will focus primarily on the interaction between the party-state and society: both how government policies affected people's daily lives and how social and economic realities, as well as popular resistance, shaped and constrained state policy. We will focus on forced collectivization and industrialization, the "Great Terror," and the "Great Patriotic War."

Weekly reviews of the readings, two pages in length each, constitute the written work for the course. The final grade will be based on class participation as well as on the written work.

Texts

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Getty, J. Arch. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. Goldman, Wendy. Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression. Figes, Orlando. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. Khlevniuk, Oleg. The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror. Overy, Richard. Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort: 1941-1945. Berkhoff, Karel. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule. Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953.

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