logo             Spring 2020
Revised March 19, 2020
 

 History 343     russian flag       Russia and the Soviet Union

Hunt Tooley
Sherman Hall 108
htooley@austincollege.edu
903 813 2292
Course Schedule
 Office: 
MW 3:30-4:30
TTH 9:30-10:30 
And by appointment or serendipity


Course Goals

This is a course about the sometimes turbulent history of Russia and its imperial lands over the last two or three hundred years.  It is a history that is integral in the education of any twenty-first century person who hopes to have a grasp on the recent history of the world, the violent course of the twentieth century, and much else.  We will attempt to understand Russian "cultures" on their own, and we will really try to get beyond the kind of superficial knowledge that has passed for public awareness of Russia in the Western world for the last couple of hundred years.



Course Components

Midterm Exam
 20
Final Exam
 35
Topic Proposal 0
Solzhenitsyn Paper
 20


Class Reading Quizzes & partic. 15
Map Quizzes (2@ 5%) 10
Final Grade:                                       % 100

The writing assignments are described below.

For the exams, you will need to bring a bluebook or two (available in the bookstore).  I may have you trade bluebooks just before the test.  YOU MUST WRITE IN INK, AND ANY ERASURES OF ERASABLE INK WILL DISQUALIFY THE TEST.  NEATNESS DOES NOT COUNT:  JUST MARK OUT WHAT YOU DON'T WANT READ AND GO ON.  If pages are torn from the bluebook when I receive it, this will disqualify the test.  Absolutely no use of cellphones is permitted during exams.  There is a clock in our classroom, so there will be no need to check the time.  Finally, leaving the classroom during the test is permitted only in case of dire emergency. 

Attendance, Late Assignments, and Academic Integrity

You need to come to class.  After more than five absences, you run the risk of being dropped from the course with a failing grade  (see AC Bulletin).

This course will follow the policies on academic integrity laid out in the Environment and other official college publications.  Please read these guidelines carefully; we will follow them strictly.  Academic honesty is absolutely essential.  This means:  no cheating.  If you are ever in doubt as to what constitutes plagiarism, please feel free to come by and discuss the question with me, or any other faculty member for that matter.  We will also be talking about this when we get to the paper assignments.  On the plagiarism issue, just remember:  whenever you use someone's words or ideas, you must tell that you have used them.  You must give credit where credit is due.

If you are in doubt about what constitutes plagiarism, please see this excellent website:
https://www.plagiarism.org/
 
There will be a penalty for late papers, usually five points per day.
MAP STUDY/MAP QUIZ MATERIALS
Map Quiz 1:  European Russia and Surrounding Lands
 Map Study Sheet # 1
Use the older map, just above, in addition to the following larger-scale map.  On the quiz, you can put the entities on whichever map you like, using both maps if that is convenient for you.

Map Quiz 2:  Total Space of Modern Russian Empires 1
Map Quiz 2:  Total Space of Modern Russian Empires 2
For quiz 2, please use any of the three maps you find helpful.  All three will be available for the quiz.
 Map Study Sheet # 2

Web Links of Special Importance for Us

AlexanderPalace.org   An outstanding history site by Bob Atchison, who lives in Austin.  There are numerous books, exhibits, and links about late Imperial Russia.  You will want to look around.
http://www.alexanderpalace.org/

Many of our nineteenth-century readings come from this site.
http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/365Read.html

Full-fledged book by Walter Moss
(http://people.emich.edu/wmoss/publications/),   Alexander  II and His Times.

Documents in Russian History, Seton Hall University, Russian and East European Studies Program
http://academic.shu.edu/russianhistory/index.php/Main_Page

Alexander Boguslawski, "Russian Lubok"  (Rollins College)
http://www.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/Lubok/lubok.html

Don Mabry's Historical Text Archive has a very nice list of links on Russian history
http://historicaltextarchive.com/links.php?op=viewslink&sid=53

Turgenev Writings (Get Sketches here, as A Sportsman's Sketches, I. and II.)
A Sportsman's Sketches I    http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8597
A Sportsman's Sketches II   http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8744

The World War I Document Archive has MANY sources on Russian history before, during, and after the conflict:  http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/

The Cold War International History Project.  https://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/cold-war-international-history-project?gclid=CjwKCAiAyeTxBRBvEiwAuM8dnTFgavWHCIaiaibOUH__iu44oPc_mLHTTVRX3-5Li-rU1f9zBR4xUhoC4XUQAvD_BwE
     This site is full of primary and secondary sources on the Cold War, many from the Russian perspective.  This is a project of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The Harvard Cold War Online Archive.  http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/documents.htm

The National Security Archive http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ is maintained by scholars at George Washington University.  There is some excellent primary material here made up of declassified materials from the NSA and other American intelligence agencies--including a lot pertaining to the Cold War and Russia.

The American State Department's massive collection of US diplomatic documents has material related to Russia for every year since the 1890s.  This collection is available in hard copy in Abell, and online at several spots on the interet.  Here is one: https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/frus/
Marxist.org has a good collection of English-language writings and documents on the Bolshevik Revolution:  https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/revolution/

Actually, there is some great primary material on Stalin's Russia and more in a Library of Congress Exhibition which is reflected online:  http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/intn.html

The full text of Documents of Russian History 1914-1917 is online at archive.org:  https://archive.org/stream/documentsofrussi027937mbp/documentsofrussi027937mbp_djvu.txt
PLEASE ACQUIRE A COPY OF:
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Volume I


 

Writing Assignment

For our revised setting, there will be only one paper: an essay on The Gulag Archipelago. I will explain more about this during class.

 

--The paper must be at least 1900 words of text, excluding title page and backmatter (based on MSWord word count—about eight pages, for example, in courier type, 12 pt, though you may use a different font).  Please double-space.  The title must be separated from the text by at least two double spaces. 

 

--Citation will be in the form of footnotes.  The footnotes must correspond to the form given for "Chicago-Turabian" or Chicago "notes-bibliography" style, outlined at:

the Chicago Manual of Style website, https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html


Please note that in addition to the footnotes, a Works Cited, or Bibliography page is required.

The assignment is an essay rather than a research paper. But you must draw in some sources besides the book. These sources must, of course, be solid, non-anonymous scholarly or intellectually respectable sources. They may be primary, but they need not be. Five sources besides the book itself is plenty.

 

You should choose some aspect of the book to ruminate on. It might be some detail of Solzhenitsyn’s life which you want to build on. It might be aspects of the book’s reception in the West in the early 1970s. It might be the legal system S. describes so thoroughly. It might be a comparison with some other Gulag survivor (Yevgenia Ginzburg’s book Into the Whirlwind certainly provides a contrast in some ways). It might be some aspects of the camps themselves.

 

Any of these topic areas would be fine, or something else on this scale. Be sure to write with a thesis and structure: Intro, Body, Conclusion.  And make sure your transitions are clear.

 

If you have questions about possibilities, feel free to contact me. 

 


Note on academic journals pertaining to Russian History

Many journals containing scholarly articles on the history of Russia are available to you.  Abell Library carries the major European history journals:  The Journal of Modern History, The Journal of Contemporary History, Historical Journal, and The American Historical Review.  You also have available to you many articles in HTML form, or better yet, pdf files that you can simply download and read, or download and print and read.  The best avenues for us are probably JSTOR, Project Muse, and then simply a Wilson Web search, which takes you to all kinds of sources.  JSTOR carries, among other journals of interest to us, the back issues of Russian Review, which offer many articles on Russian History, and Slavic Review, the leading history journal devoted to Russian and other Slavic history.  Project Muse carries The Journal of Cold War Studies, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and other useful journals.