Courses

This course is dedicated to understanding one of the most paradoxical and deadly periods of history – the years of Stalin’s rule of the Soviet Union. Stalinism came to encompass massive losses of human life alongside unprecedented growth in education and modernization in the space of the Soviet Union. Bolshevik policies destroyed whole peoples’ ways of life, but also defeated fascism. Individuals could rise high in society or be destroyed at the whim of a bureaucrat. Over the semester, we will explore this society, the people who comprised it and the dramatic changes they lived through. We will touch on major events in the political history of the Soviet Union, but its primary focus is on how people experienced life under Stalin.