About the Programme

The programme is delivered in Russian. Applicants are required to take an oral test in history and written and oral tests in English, German or French.

The course is structured in 4 parts:

• Theory, which requires learning about different kinds of knowledge, basic social theories, and contemporary anthropological approaches.
• History, which consists of taking a comparative look at different aspects of social history in Russia and Western countries from the late medieval period to the present (forms of social structures, principles of social hierarchies, types of social institutions, forms of social connections, particularly on an everyday level).    
• Historiography, the main aim of which is to master the historiography legacy on the history of knowledge about the past, social history through familiarising oneself with the methodology of one or another historian, with the basic theme of his/her work and its historical context.
• Sources, which means studying special disciplines of history, textual criticism, oral history, how to analyse visual sources, and acquainting Master’s students with the major sources for social history in Russia and the West, the main archive heuristics and methods of revealing new layers of information on social history in sources.

Foreign partners of the faculty

Thanks to the established contacts and agreements, master's students have the opportunity to expand their knowledge, gain new experience, taking an internship in one of the partner universities:

1. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

2. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

3. Uniwersytet Warszawski

4. Paris-IV Sorbonne (double degree program)

5. Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences societies

6. Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

In addition to internships, students also have the opportunity to listen to courses of invited teachers from different universities. In 2017, our students were able to listen to the courses they were taught:

• Alison Smith, University of Toronto, presented his report on the topic of "Microhistory of the global Empire of cotton: Istanbul in the XIX century".
• Judith Devlin, University College Dublin, national University of Ireland, completed a course on the history of emotions
• Paul valéry (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France), Serge Brunet (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France), together with an employee of the laboratory of media studies prof.M. V. Dmitriev will hold a course "Christianity, society, the state in France and Western Europe at the dawn of the New age (XV – XVII centuries)"at the School of history of the HSE.