Politics of Russia and Eastern Europe

Catalog description

This course introduces you to the politics of Russia and Eastern Europe through a comparative analysis of the political systems, political economies, and the post-communist trajectories of Russia and other former communist countries in Europe. The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, we trace the ideological underpinnings and the workings of the communist systems that dominated the region in the second half of the twentieth century. The focus will be on the communist ideology and how it spread, the centrally planned economy, totalitarianism and the 1989 revolution that led to the collapse of communism in Europe. This part of the course will enable us to situate more recent political developments in Eastern Europe in their larger historical and institutional context of the post-World War II era. In the second part, we focus on the challenges of post-Communism in Central Eastern Europe that arose from the transition from command economies to market-based ones and the introduction of multiparty elections and democratic institutions. The topics discussed include democratic consolidation, ethnic conflict and disintegration, economic reform, European integration, and democratic backsliding. The third part of the course focuses on post-communist Russia and its experience with the political and economic transition away from communism. Here we explore the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rocky years of the Yeltsin era, the rise of the oligarchs, the consolidation of authoritarianism under Putin, and Russia’s efforts to restore its global role and to influence domestic politics in the West. Satisfies a requirement in the Russian Studies major and minor. Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement. Counts toward the International Relations or Comparative Politics areas in the major