Russian History

Russia's millennium-long arc from a loose confederation of Slavic principalities to the collapse of the Romanov order is the spine here, and the course uses that arc to ask how a single political space kept reinventing itself through reform, autocracy, and revolution. You'll read narrative history alongside primary debates on ideology and society, write a research paper, and sit midterm and final exams that expect you to argue causally rather than recite dates. It's a regional-history elective that pairs naturally with IR's Eurasia and Cold War tracks, giving you the pre-1917 grounding most contemporary Russia courses assume but rarely teach.