Unit HISTORY OF EASTERN EUROPE
- Course
- Foreign languages and cultures
- Study-unit Code
- 35064503
- Curriculum
- In all curricula
- Teacher
- Emanuela Costantini
- Teachers
-
- Emanuela Costantini
- Hours
- 36 ore - Emanuela Costantini
- CFU
- 6
- Course Regulation
- Coorte 2018
- Offered
- 2019/20
- Learning activities
- Base
- Area
- Discipline storiche, geografiche e socio-antropologiche
- Academic discipline
- M-STO/03
- Type of study-unit
- Opzionale (Optional)
- Type of learning activities
- Attività formativa monodisciplinare
- Language of instruction
- Italian
- Contents
- The object of the course are the salient stages of the political, social and economic evolution of Russia from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
The monographic part for attending students will start from the story of Limonov to reflect the Russian reality in the Soviet and post-Soviet age. Non-attending students are instead invited to study Aldo Ferrari's book on Russian identity. - Reference texts
- Students are supposed to know geographical, antropical and political features of today's Russia. Please check in an atlas (sucha s the Calendario Altlante De Agostini) or in http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/russia/General part
Recommended manual:
G. Cigliano, La Russia contemporanea. Un profilo storico (1855-2005), Carocci, Roma, 2005, pp. 258
Monographic part
Attending students:
E. Carrère, Limonov, Adelphi, Milano, 2012
Non-attending students:
A. Ferrari, La foresta e la steppa. Il mito dell'Eurasia nella cultura russa, Libri Scheiwiller-Federico Motta, Milano, 2003 - Educational objectives
- At the end of the course students should know contemporary Russian history and understand the links between political context and socio-economic and cultural evolution.
- Prerequisites
- A general knowledge of contemporary history.
- Teaching methods
- Lectures and seminars, use of power points, audiovisual materials and written documents.
- Learning verification modality
- Oral
- Extended program
- The course of Eastern European history traces the salient stages of the political, social and economic Russian history from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
Starting from the rise to power of Alexander II and the start of the nineteenth-century reforms, the stages of the gradual political-administrative, economic and social modernization of Russia will be described. The course aims to contextualize the historical events in the cultural landscape, whose evolution is an essential element to understand the emergence of political movements included in the European debate, but which took on a specific profile in Russia and then became protagonists of the crisis of tsarism and its fell in February 1917. A reflection on the reasons for the failure of the liberal experiment of February-October 1917 will lead to the central junction of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and will analyze the complex and difficult construction of the communist state in the years in which Lenin was in power. Space will then be dedicated to the Stalinist regime and its evolution during the Second World War and in the first phase of the Cold War. The change and the crisis of the Soviet Union from Khrushchev to Brezhnev will therefore be included in the international framework, to then start a reflection on the Gorbachev experiment and its failure. The last lessons will be dedicated to post-Soviet Russia, from Yeltsin to Putin, adopting a point of view aimed at investigating the characteristics of domestic politics and the new location on the world chessboard.
The monographic course will be inspired by the fictional biography of Limonov to reflect on the problems and contradictions of contemporary Russia.