The Soviet Collapse

This course tries to understand how one of the most successful empires of modern times collapsed seemingly overnight. We focus on the domestic and internal sources of this profound transformation by looking at the forces and personalities inside the USSR. Our time is short so we will get partial, confusing, and sometimes contradictory answers, using a small and inherently biased sample of the literature. Nevertheless, we will do our best to consider this historical event from a variety of perspectives, and perhaps even speculate about what it means for Russian politics today.