HIST/REST 245: Russia at War

Examines five Russian wars fought between 1800 and the present: the Napoleonic wars, the Crimean War, World Wars One and Two, and the current conflict in Ukraine. Russia’s modern wars have been particularly (although certainly not uniquely) traumatic, with profound impacts on government and citizen alike. The course examines the ways in which the events leading up to war, wartime conditions, and eyewitness accounts were recorded and internalized by citizens and managed by an autocratic state to create collective historical understandings of events. By analyzing the changing ways in which social hierarchy, gender and exclusivity have been structured during and in the aftermath of war, the course offers an important guide to understanding the emergence of ethno-nationalism in one of the world’s largest and longest­lasting multi-ethnic Empires.