220099 Soviet History since World War II. USSR: From the Rise of Superpower to the Disintegration, 1945-1991 (K) (SoSe 2012)

This course will survey the history of Russia and its peoples in the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the role of ideology and politics in Soviet society. The students will explore the experience of late Stalinism and post-Stalinist socialism, the emergence of the Soviet Empire at the end of the Second World War, the collapse of the communist regime and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. The course will be divided into two parts. The first, introductory section aims to familiarize students with the historical background of the Soviet experience, its roots in the revolutionary quarter-century of 1905-1929 and the succeeding Stalinist quarter-century of 1929-1953. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, after horrors of the collectivization of agriculture and of the purges, the frenzied industrialization drive of the first five-year plans, the monstrosity of the “personality cult,” and the savagery of the Second World War, the Totalitarian/Authoritarian Soviet model of state and society was fully developed and prepared to weather the storms of the Cold War. The second part of the course deals with the period of 1954-1991. The new Soviet leader – Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev – modified and humanized the Stalinist police state and improved the people’s living conditions without, however, jeopardizing the dictatorship itself. After Khrushchev’s forced resignation from power in 1964 the regime went into terminal decline. The Stalinist regime proved incapable of either adapting to global economic and military changes or meeting the changing demands of its own people. To a degree, the regime’s demise was thus foreordained. However, as we shall see, happenstance – particularly the personality and actions of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, and his immediate associates in 1985-1991 also played a crucial role.