A Cultural History of the Soviet Century

In the English-language literature, the history of the Soviet Union is often dominated by the Cold War. As a result, events central to the lives of Soviet citizens are viewed within a wider geopolitical context that often overlooks regional and ethnic specificity. Cultural products from music, film, dance, and literature provide insight into individual and collective responses to traumatic events. In this course, students study the history of the USSR through the lens of memory and trauma studies by analyzing cultural artifacts as a form of testimony and social history. This course engages with varied cultural products chronologically from the formation of the Union and Revolution through Soviet collapse and the kleptocratic rise of Putin. Materials include poetry and prose by Solzhenitsyn, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova, music by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Vysotski, primary sources and speeches, and historical analyses by Kotkin, Snyder, and Fitzpatrick. To present a de-Russified view of the USSR, materials also include those produced by marginalized Soviet populations like Indigenous and Eveny scholars, Holocaust and GULAG survivors, and veterans.