Curriculum
The course consists of 30 80-minute lessons. Lessons will be held three times a day—two in the morning and one in the afternoon. All lessons are divided into three categories based on their format. Besides lectures and seminars, program participants will also have an opportunity to analyze in class historical events that have not been described in the program but relate to the previously studied topics.
This course is not about “how it all really was.” It is designed for those who want to learn today how to reflect on the past—and consequently on the future.
Course Program
- Political ecology: Formation of the Northern Eurasia region.
- Inverse perspective: The year 862 in the South and in the West.
- Challenges of nation-building on “non-historical” territories: Experience of the Carolingians.
- Mechanisms of political and cultural self-organization of Northern Eurasia’s first polities: Formation of the Rouskaya land.
- Lithuania: Birth of the forest monarchy.
- Consolidation of new political systems: State-building in Northern Eurasia (from 11th to 13th century)
- From local political space to hierarchical statehood: interaction between and interweaving of local power scenarios (13th and 14th centuries).
- New times: Problem of justifying sovereignty and its limits in the Grand Duchy of Moscow (15th and 16th centuries).
- 17th century: Alternative scenarios, the time of troubles.
- Counter-reformation in Rzeczpospolita as the rejection of the “common cause.”
- The long 18th century and the establishment of the modernization empire.
- Dilemma of stability and progress: Empire and reforms, 19th century.
- Empire and revolution: Revolutionary movement in imperial society before the era of mass politics.
- 20th century: Empire in the era of mass society. Collapse of the regime of the Russian national empire.
- 20th century: Empire in the era of mass society. Self-organization of a “progressist empire.”
- 20th century: Empire in the era of mass society. War of globalization.
- The Soviet 20th century from the point of view of the new imperial history of Northern Eurasia.