This course has two main goals. It provides a basic overview of the Soviet Russian political-economical and sociocultural development 1917-1991 and seeks to illustrate certain aspects of this development: the interaction between official rhetorics and politics on the one hand and the realities of everyday life, and popular opinion on the other. To what extent did the official rhetoric and the popular discourses coincide or differ from each other?

During the course questions will be asked like ?Was the October Revolution of 1917 a coup or a revolution?' and ?Did Nikita Khrushchev succeed to de-Stalinize Russia?'. It will deal with topics like ?Stalinism in ideal and reality' and ?Did the late Soviet period mean stagnation or stability?' The course problematizes the development in the 1980s by asking questions like ?Did the pressure of Perestroika and Glasnost eventually topple Soviet social mechanism?' This is a course that also aims to view the Soviet Russian history from a gendered perspective by looking into officially proclaimed ideals of women's liberation and practices of gender politics in everyday life.

Preliminary programme:

1. Why revolution(s) in Russia? Explanations in economic, social, political and cultural terms

2. October 1917 - coup d'état or revolution?

3. Soviet Union - a state of nations

4. Marxism-Leninism: Sociel theories & power rhetoric

5. Stalinism - realities and ideals

6. The Kchrushchev era: Problems of de-Stalinization and Stalinist continuity

7. The Soviet economy - models and realities

8. The Brezhnev regime - stagnation or stabilization?

9. Class and gender in social relations in Soviet Russia

10. Soviet Union and the surrounding world - a geopolitical model of concentric circles

11. Russia today and the Soviet legacy - politics, economics and culture

12. Perestroika and glasnost - too much of both in order to keep the Soviet empire together?

Kurssi toteutetaan yhteistyössä valtakunnallisen Venäjän ja Itä-Euroopan tutkimuksen maisterikoulun kanssa.

Enrolment via NettiOpsu http://www.uta.fi/nettiopsu/