RUSS 388 - From Lenin to Putin: Soviet Experience and its Aftermath through Film, Literature, & Human Document

This course explores Soviet culture and its aftermath in Russia through the prism of human experience. In our interdisciplinary approach to history, we will study films and works of literature, as well as personal documents, such as diaries and memoirs, looking for reflections in them of Soviet and post-Soviet people’s experience and subjectivity. How were the lives and identities of ordinary people affected by the revolutions, utopian ideology, totalitarian government, political terror, and partial modernization? The themes include the reforms of calendar; organization of industrial time; city and house planning; communal living; pedagogical undertakings (the concept of New Men and Women); regulating family, sexuality, and gender; living through terror and forms of resistance to it; the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire as lived experience. We will conclude with surveying main social, cultural, and political developments in post-Soviet Russia. Our primary sources will include both artistic masterpieces (films by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko, Larisa Shepitko, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Alexander Sokurov; writings by Isaac Babel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova, Lydia Ginzburg, and Svetlana Alexievich) as well as testimonial and personal writings. All readings and discussions will be in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): For Russian credit: RUSS 220
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): LIT 388
Not offered: 2024-25
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).