The Broad Sweep of Russian History: 5 Wednesdays at 2:00 p.m. March 3, 10, 17, 24 and 31 in the Hopi/Hohokam (rotating) Rooms.
$10.00
Presenter: Doug Weiner was professor of History at the U of Arizona from 1988 to 2022 when he retired. His Ph.D. in History is from Columbia and was a Mellon Fellow at Harvard University; he has served as president of the American Society for Environmental History. His first book, Models of Nature: Conservation, Ecology and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Indiana University Press, 1988) was secretly synopsized by the Soviet government and then officially published in Russian translation in the USSR in 1991; subsequently it won an award from Russia’s oldest scientific society, the Moscow Society of Naturalists.
Description
This course will examine the broad sweep of Russian history, beginning with the first Russian state, Kievan Rus, in the 9th century. Until the Mongol invasion of the 1230s, Rus was a lively and important trading state. We will see how that invasion, and a two-hundred year occupation, ‘the Mongol-Tatar yoke’, radically changed the course of Russian history. Its legacies – autocratic rule, the idea that the ruler owned the whole land, serfdom, and the idea that the population should serve the state – defined tsarist and Communist party rule, and still affect Russia today.
5 Wednesdays at 2:00 p.m. March 3, 10, 17, 24 and 31 in the Hopi/Hohokam (rotating) Rooms.
