Stalinism

Catalog description

In this course we will examine in detail one of the deadliest and most perplexing phenomena of the twentieth century: Stalinism. During Joseph Stalin’s reign the people of the Soviet Union experienced events of astonishing scale and revolutionary change. Rapid industrialization, massive collectivization, famine, purges, state terror, devastating world war, and foreign occupation brought unprecedented suffering and premature death to tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Given the size of the topic and the limited hours in a semester, this course focuses on Stalin’s rise to power and his reign in the 1930s. Rather than surveying the views of a wide range of scholars, we will delve into two very long works of recent scholarship in depth. This is a reading intensive course.