Learning Outcomes:
On completion of this module, students should be able to:
1. Explore in detail the connections between power, identity, culture and environment within the social and political history of the period.
2. Demonstrate a good awareness of the key actors, events and processes in the broader history of Russia’s nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
3. Develop a working knowledge of the relevant key debates in environmental history, and of the historiography of Russian environmental history in particular.
4. Critically engage with a variety of primary and secondary material.
5. Contribute regularly and in a meaningful way to class discussion
6. Write scholarly essays to the standard of a level 3 student of history.
Indicative Module Content:
The module will cover the following main topics:
Week 1: Russia: Land, people, power
Week 2: Rural land and the late imperial state
Week 3: Frontier expansion and settlement
Week 4: The forest question: Resource management and Russian identity
Week 5: The late imperial city
Week 6: Revolutionary environments
Week 7: Stalinism: The Great Break
[Reading week]
Week 8: Nature and the quest to build socialism, 1933-1953
Week 9: Khrushchev and the years of peaceful coexistence
Week 10: The world of developed socialism
Week 11: Disasters, perestroika and the Soviet legacy