Bachelor
2019/2020
English Language Historiography of the 20th Century History of Russia
Category 'Best Course for New Knowledge and Skills'
Type:
Elective course (History)
Area of studies:
History
Delivered by:
School of History
Where:
Faculty of Humanities
When:
3 year, 1 module
Mode of studies:
offline
Instructors:
Irina Ivanovna Filatova
Language:
English
ECTS credits:
3
Contact hours:
42
Course Syllabus
Abstract
The course is designed to introduce students to the main concepts and approaches of Anglo–American historians to the Russian history of the 20th century. It presents the development of Anglo-American historiography of Soviet history from its roots in the 1920s and 1930s through the development of academic “Sovietology” during the Second World War and the Cold War to the ‘revisionist’ and ‘post-revisionist’ innovative approaches in the last decades of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century.
Learning Objectives
- To introduce students to the main problems of the course, to its notions, concepts and terminology, to the existing literature.
- To enable students to master methods of historiographical analysis and to the application of this analysis at theoretical, ideological, institutional and research-tools levels.
- To inculcate into students the understanding of the dynamics and causality of political processes of the 20th century.
- To introduce students to the English language terminology relevant to the course.
Expected Learning Outcomes
- Know the main theoretical and ideological approaches of British and American historians to Russian history of the 20th century.
- Be able to identify, analyse and categorise the approaches of British and American historians to Russian history of the 20th century.
- Know the main stages of the development of English language historiography of Russian history of the 20th century.
- Have the experience of discussing and analysing the problems of Anglo-American historiography of Russian 20th century history on the basis of the appropriate English language terminology.
- Be able to identify, analyse and categorise the approaches of British and American historians to Russian history of the 20 the century.
Course Contents
- The Era of the Deceived: 1930s – mid 1940s. ‘Useful Idiots’ and ‘Unreliable’ Critics.Officialdom and the media from 1917 to the early 1920s. Anti–communists and communists. The Zinoviev letter. The changing attitudes from the mid 1920s to the late 1930s. Communists and socialists in Britain and the USA. Ideological and academic limitations of Western historians’ knowledge and research. Left book clubs. The deceivers and the deceived: Walter Duranty, Maurice Dobb, the Webbs, Bernard Shaw. Critics from the left: Trotsky. 1940s: some truths get through (with difficulty) but the glorification continues. Testimonies by Russian émigrés. The Dewey commission.
- The War, the Cold War and the Birth of Soviet Studies: 1940s to early 1960s. Loyalists, Spoilers and Disillusioned communists.The Cold War ideological divide. Political pressures and historians’ responses. The new sources and the new revelations. Academic achievements and failures. Political influence and ideological limitations. Cold war journals. The last believer: E.H. Carr and his History of Soviet Russia. The new political climate: Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin. Critics from the right and from the left. Sbigniew Brzezinski, John Shelton Curtiss. Merle Fainsod, Leonard Schapiro, David Dallin, Franz Borkenau, Jane Degras, Ruth Fisher, Milovan Djilas, Isaak Deutscher.
- The Cold War: late 1960s to mid-1980s. ‘High’ Cold War and detente.Better knowledge, more new sources and great break throughs. The ‘high’ Cold War mantra. The ‘cold warriors’, ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’. Sovietologists, political scientists and historians. Neo-Marxists and other critics from the Left. Détente, the convergence theory and historians. Robert Conquest and The Great Terror. Robert Tucker. Richard Pipes. Geoffrey Hosking. John Erickson. George Katkov. Norman Stone. Annie Kriegel. Perry Anderson and the New Left Review.
- Revising History: late 1970s to late 1990s. ‘The New Historiography’.The short-lived ‘end of history’. ‘Revisionist’ history and ‘revisionist’ historians. Opening dialogues, new sources, reinterpretations. Interaction with Russian historians. First publications of documents. Translations. Events and places. Biography as history. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Geoffrey Hosking, Robert Service, Antony Beevor, Orlando Figes.
- Post-Revisionist historiography: late 1990s to the present. The Golden Era.Deeper understanding, better sources and better background. Open archives. Russian historians. The emergence of regional histories. The diminishing attention to and interest in Russia among the general public and the academia. Stalinism as the major subject of Russia’s 20th century history. The emergence of the Putin era and ‘Putinism’ as subjects of historical research. Robert Service, Stephen Kotkin, Richard Sakwa, Orlando Figes, Oleg Khlevniuk.
- The new mantra and the new ideological divide.A different take on Russia’s history of the 20th century. The blame game. ‘Offensive neorealism’ in history and the case of Ukraine as a litmus test. Is the balanced approach achievable? Balance and ideology in writing Russian history.
- Post-post-revisionist historiography: 2000-2010s (round table).The studies in the Soviet mind and the impressionistic history. Yuri Slezkine.
Bibliography
Recommended Core Bibliography
- Applebaum, A. (2010). Gulag : A History. New York: Anchor. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=720010
Recommended Additional Bibliography
- A State of Nations : Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, and Terry Martin, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2001. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hselibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=430519.
- Fitzpatrick, S. (DE-588)132798344, (DE-576)160958431. (1999). Everyday Stalinism : ordinary life in extraordinary times; Soviet Russia in the 1930s / Sheila Fitzpatrick. Oxford [u.a.]: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edswao&AN=edswao.075108488