HISTORY OF IMPERIAL RUSSIA

WEEKLY READING SCHEDULE

TO RECOMMENDED WEB SITES FOR WEEK: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]

TO: RECOMMENDED LINKS

TO: MAPS

Week 1: Forest, River, & Steppe: Geographical and Historical Background.

Edward Keenan, "An Approach to Russian History," in coursepack (8 pp.).
Andrzej Kaminski, "Pre-Petrine Russia," in coursepack (10 pp.).
Start to read Billington, Icon and the Axe, pp. vii-xii, 3-77.

Finish reading in Billington.
Excerpts from "The Life of Avvakum by Himself," in coursepack (21 pp.).

Week 2: Seventeenth Century Muscovy.

Billington, Icon and the Axe, pp. 97-162.

Excerpts from Paul of Aleppo, in coursepack (44 pp.).
Excerpts from Olearius, in coursepack. (27 pp.).

Week 3: How Great Was Peter?

Skim Billington, Icon and the Axe, pp. 163-180; read pp. 180-205.
Marc Raeff, "Peter the Great's Revolution," in coursepack (21 pp.).

M.V. Lomonosov, "Panegyric to the Sovereign Emperor Peter the Great," in coursepack (17 pp.).

Week 4: The Reign of the Empresses in an Era of Palace Revolutions.

A.B. Kamenski, "The Age of Catherine the Great," in coursepack (47 pp.).

Sergei Aksakov, A Russian Gentleman.

Week 5: Imperial Expansion in 18th-Century Russia.

Marc Raeff, "In the Imperial Manner," in coursepack (50 pp.).

The Treaty of Georgievsk (1783), in coursepack (8 pp.).

Week 6:

MID-TERM EXAM.

Week 7: The Price of Victory & the Birth of the Intelligentsia.

Billington, Icon and the Axe, pp. 258-358.

Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev, "Apology of a Madman," excerpt in coursepack (12 pp.).
Vissarion Belinsky, "Letter to Gogol," in coursepack (5 pp.).

Week 8: Reign of Nicholas I: The Conquest of the Caucasus.

Susan Layton, "Nineteenth-Century Russian Mythologies of Caucasian Savagery," in coursepack (20 pp.).

Excerpt from Leo Tolstoy, "Hadji Murat," in coursepack (2 pp.).
Excerpt from Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise, in coursepack (43 pp.).

Week 9: Alexander II & The Great Reforms.

Billington, Icon and the Axe, pp. 360-401.

Fedor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (novel only without commentaries).

Week 10: High Imperialism.

Dov Yaroshevski, "Empire and Citizenship," in coursepack (22 pp.).

Ilia Chavchavadze, "Notes of a Journey from Vladikavkaz to Tiflis," in coursepack (20 pp.).

Week 11: Russia: the World's First "Developing Society"?

Excerpt from G.T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime, in coursepack (37 pp.).
Alexander Gerschenkron, "Problems and Patterns of Russian Economic Development," in coursepack (27 pp.).

Excerpt from Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, in coursepack (24 pp.).

Week 12: Revolutionary Russia, 1905-1907.

Historiographical Review Essay due.

Excerpt from A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov, in coursepack (65 pp.).

Week 13: Constitutional Autocracy?

Leopold Haimson, "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917," two parts in coursepack (40 pp.).

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok, "The People and the Intelligentsia," and "The Intelligentsia and the Revolution," in coursepack (14 pp.).

Week 14: The Russian Revolution of 1917.

Excerpt from John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, in coursepack (55 pp.).

FINAL EXAM

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Last update 1/15/04