HIST 435: Living the Revolutionary Utopia: Selected Topics in Intellectual, Cultural, and Sociopolitical History of the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s
Tuesdays, 3.30 pm – 6.05 pm Class: 2BSB 133 Office: UH 1001 Office hours: Tuesdays 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM; Wednesdays 11:00 AM – 12 PM
Course description:
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that put an end to the dynastic imperial regime and inaugurated a long and bloody period of civil war was a quite momentous event that took place in October 1917. The Russian Revolution as a modernist project of the fundamental remaking of social order and human nature has a much longer history. It had been unfolding since at least the nineteenth century in multiple spheres of human activity and imagination, including politics, science, literature, and arts. The period of the 1920s through the early 1930s became the moment when the Revolution as the Bolsheviks’ seizing political power and the Revolution as a futuristic project of global transformation of the old world clashed in the context of the post-civil-war reconstruction of society. The configurations of the new Soviet life and the new Soviet multinational state became the focus of contested projects. One perceptive historian compared this early Soviet period with a laboratory as a site of experiments. It was only retrospectively that this process of trial and error became reinterpreted as an element of some initial plan, on the road to “totalitarianism.” In this seminar, we will familiarize ourselves with multidisciplinary innovative studies of the period. We will consider different examples of elaboration, implementation, domestication, taming, or overcoming of revolutionary utopianism and futurism, in trying to understand how people create new forms of life, moral, knowledge, gender order, postcolonial arrangements, and new state institutions—in other words, how they live the Revolution.
Requirements:
Weekly attendance and oral participation. It is expected that students will come to all classes and participate fully in discussions. This is an advanced undergraduate seminar, not a lecture course. Hence, most of the work takes place during class sessions. Please complete all readings in advance before each seminar meeting, annotate them, and think hard about your reaction to them. Come to class prepared to ask and answer questions and share your substantiated opinion about the assigned readings. Class participation accounts for 35% of your final grade for the course.
Short critiques of weekly readings (approx. 300 words each; 3 pp or more for graduate students). Each week students are expected to write a response to the week’s readings. These should include a brief (one paragraph) summary of the material in the reading, followed by an assessment of its contribution to the historical literature, the author’s particular perspectives, a brief analysis of a specific debate, and a consideration of shortcomings or inconsistencies in the assigned texts. In addition, it should suggest how the assigned historical source(s) can be interpreted in the light of the weekly reading. The critiques are due via e-mail to me each Monday before noon. Students may skip two of these weekly papers without penalty (however, I will require explanations). Weekly critiques make up 30% of your final grade.
Final project and class presentation. Students will select a topic within one of the larger themes of the course and write a research paper of approximately 8-10 (12-20 for grad students) pages. Papers should make use of both primary and secondary materials, include formal footnotes and a bibliography, and have a clear thesis and interpretive framework. Topics must be approved by the instructor. Deadlines for each element of the paper are included in the weekly schedule. Students will share their findings in class during the last three weeks of the semester. Total value of the term paper and presentation is 35% of the final grade.
Graduate students may select a topic pertaining to their specific disciplinary interests, yet formulated within one of the themes and approaches discussed in class. Topics must be approved by the instructor.
Senior history papers. Those interested in writing a senior paper in this course are required to communicate that to me by the end of the second week of class or earlier.
Statement on plagiarism. If you take words from any source, you must use quotation marks and acknowledge the source with proper citation in your footnotes. Even when you use your own words but have borrowed an idea from another source, you must reference it. Presenting someone else’s work as your own can result in the disqualification of your work and a failing grade for this class.
Textbook: Textbook is not required for this course. Most of the required reading will be available via Blackboard, electronic reserve and the library reserve.
Additional collections of useful sources:
William Rosenberg, ed. Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution (Ann Arbor, 1984) see content here http://bit.ly/2iQUajq
Liliana Lungina, Word for Word. A Memoir (New York: Overlook Press, 2014) (first part) http://www.overlookpress.com/word-for-word.html
Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1922) (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925).
Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918, Translated by H. Ermolaev. Introduction by M. Steinberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Larisa Malashenko and Alexander Vatlin, eds., Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution: Bolshvevik Self-Portraits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921–1941, Translated by T. Shebunina (New York, 1963).
Emma Goldman, My Further Disillusionment in Russia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, & Company, 1924).
Alexander Evstifeef, Why I Escaped from Soviet Russia (Seattle, 1932). DK268 E8A3 1932
Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt, Brrace & World, Inc., 1967).