1. 2. INTRODUCTION TO SOVIET HISTORY PART 1, 1917-1941

2. CLASS PRESENTATIONS
10 minutes on a subject relating to the week’s theme OR
5-10 minutes on a specialist subject of the presenter’s choice
Presentations can be individual or joint
Contact me for advice or to look over your presentation
Everybody should try to give one presentation over the course of the year

3. LECTURES AND SEMINARS: TERM 1#
Date
SUBJECT 1
29 Sept
Introduction 2
6 Oct
Soviet History I 3
13 Oct
Soviet History II 4
20 Oct
Pre-revolutionary Precedents 5
27 Oct
Avant-Gardes in Poetry and Prose 6
3 Nov
READING WEEK 7
10 Nov
Avant-Gardes in Visual Culture 8
17 Nov
Avant-Gardes in Film and Music 9
24 Nov
From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realism 10
1 Dec
Socialist Realism 11
8 Dec
Case Study: The Stalin Cult

4. LECTURES AND SEMINARS: TERM 2
Date
SUBJECT 12
12 Jan
The Thaw 13
19 Jan
Khrushchev-era Film 14
26 Jan
‘Developed Socialism’ or Stagnation 15
2 Feb
Underground Literature 16
9 Feb
Underground Art: Sotsart, Moscow Conceptualism 17
16 Feb
READING WEEK 18
23 Feb
Underground Music 19
2 Mar
Perestroika 20
9 Mar
Perestroika Film 21
16 Mar
Post-Socialism 22
23 Mar
Conclusions

5. SOVIET HISTORY TIMELINE
WORLD WAR I
Feb 1917
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
Oct 1917
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
CIVIL WAR (WAR COMMUNISM)
NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (NEP)
1924
LENIN’S DEATH: BATTLE FOR SUCCESSION
c. 1927
STALIN’S DICTATORSHIP
THE ‘GREAT BREAK
1935
PURGE OF ‘LEFT OPPOSITION’
1936
NEW ‘STALIN’ CONSTITUTION
GREAT TERROR
1939
MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT
June 1941
GERMANY INVADES RUSSIA

6. A PERIOD OF DILEMMAS, 1921-29 The State
How to consolidate state power?
Who is fit to lead?
Foreign Policy
World revolution or ‘socialism in one country’?
Economics
Private trade or centralization?
Society
How to mould a new individual and a new society?

7. How did Soviet authorities attempt to mould a new individual and a new society after the Civil War?
Education
Mass literacy campaigns
The ‘Complex Method’
Public Health
Improvements in childcare
Anti alcohol campaigns
Redefinition of the Family
Legalisation of abortion
Liberalisation of divorce laws
Attacks on religion
New forms of propaganda and indoctrination

9. TENSIONS IN SOVIET CULTURE
Initiative v Control
Entertainment v Education
Utopia v Reality
Revolution v Consolidation
Experiment v Tradition
Highbrow v Popular

10. KEY DILEMMAS OF NEP Power: institutions or individuals?
Party: Ideological purity or strength in numbers?
Economy: capitalism or socialism?
Society: Stability or radicalism?
Geography: Centre or periphery?

11. CONSTRUCTING STALINISM, 1929-1941
Five Year Plan and Collectivization
What were they?
Why were they carried out?
What were the effects?
Why might this be called a period of flux?
Population movements
‘Cultural revolution’
The Great Terror
Rhetoric of the enemy (whether ethnic or class-based)
What were the mechanisms of social cohesion in this period?
Cult of the hero
Hierarchy
Mass participation and mass culture

12. MASS CONSTRUCTION CAMPAIGNS

13. CULT OF THE HERO

14. MASS PARTICIPATION RITUALS

15. CULTURAL REVOLUTION Attack on ‘bourgeois specialists’
Battle within institutions over correct interpretation of Marxism
Promotion of proletarian workers [vydvizhentsy] to white-collar positions

16. THE SHAKHTY TRIAL (1928)

17. GREAT TERROR Multiple interpretations:
An event staged by Stalin (beginning with murder of Kirov) to consolidate his rule
The result of the failure to ‘renovate’ the Party
Ezhov’s own agenda?
Tension between two models of rule, autocratic v bureaucratic
Key questions:
What was Stalin’s role? How involved was he?
How much social support was there for the Terror?
What were the broader structural/cultural factors that allowed it to take place?

18. HOW WAS THIS CHAOS REFLECTED IN THE ARTS?
Tradition or experiment (revolution)?
Proletarian or bourgeois?
Russian or western?
Agitation or ‘spiritualism’ (or art for art’s sake)?
Control or creativity?

19. Agitation v spiritualism

20. TRADITION VS REVOLUTION
[W]hy, out of nowhere, did the persecution of the opera and ballet suddenly coalesce? Is this type of art really incompatible with the Soviet order? Or are the auditoriums ever empty? … If it is a matter of closing the theatre for purposes of economy, then this consideration … does not hold up under criticism either. For who would ever think, for example, to shut down or destroy the Rumiantsev Museum or the public library for the purposes of economy merely on the grounds that few workers go there? The Bolshoi Theatre without a doubt plays no less of an educative role for its visitors than the public library does. Mikhail Kalinin to the Central Committee, 12 January 1923

21. TRADITION V EXPERIMENT
The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist distortion in opera stems from the same source as Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching, and science. Petty- bourgeois "innovations" lead to a break with real art, real science and real literature. […] The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music. As though deliberately, he scribbles down his music, confusing all the sounds in such a way that his music would reach only the effete "formalists" who had lost all their wholesome taste. He ignored the demand of Soviet culture that all coarseness and savagery be abolished from every corner of Soviet life. ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, Pravda 28 January 1936

22. NEXT WEEK Freeze (ed.), Ch. 12, pp. 319-346.
If you get a chance, please look at the website ‘Seventeen Moments in Soviet History’, and go to the sections on 1956 and read ‘Khrushchev’s Secret Speech’, the ‘Hungarian Crisis’ and the ‘International Youth Festival’ and, under 1985, read ‘Perestroika and Glasnost’, ‘Female Sexuality’ and ‘Meltdown in Chernobyl’.