RUS 280 - Russia and the West (in English)

With Russia’s war against Ukraine, the need to understand Russia’s conflicted relationship with the West takes on new urgency. This course will equip you to approach contemporary relations with Russia from nuanced and historically informed perspectives. As many scholars have noted, history has essentially replaced politics as the national conversation in Putin’s Russia. Whether erecting monuments to past tyrants, rewriting the history textbooks for secondary schools, waging war against Ukraine with calls to an ancient, shared past, or leveraging WWII memory and nostalgia for the USSR, the Putin regime deftly exploits historical narratives for its present aims. One constant amidst these efforts to reshape Russian history is the place of “the West” as either an idealized model or a hostile other against which Russians define their national identity. In “Russia and the West” we will examine the vast sweep of Russian history and culture through the lens of the country’s efforts to define itself vis-à-vis the West, starting by interrogating the very notion of “the West” and the identity of “the Russians.” We will then learn about Peter the Great’s Westernizing reforms, 19th-century Slavophilism vs. Westernism, Cold War tensions, émigré culture, and today’s persistent sense of humiliation at the hands of the West still resonating almost thirty years after the fall of the USSR.


Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.
Satisfies a requirement for the Russian minor.
Satisfies a requirement for the major in Russian Studies.
Satisfies a requirement for the major in Russian Language and Literature.
Satisfies a requirement in the History major.

Prerequisites & Notes
No knowledge of Russian required or expected.