First, An Introduction

Welcome to History 20: The History of Russia and the former Soviet Union! I hope you will enjoy the course. A little bit about me (Professor Davison):

My B.A is in European History from UC Davis, with minors in Political Science (emphasis on comparative communist political systems) and Russian. My M.A, in Russian and Soviet History, is from the University of Oregon; my master's thesis was on Reform and Religion in the Reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich. My PhD coursework major field is Russian history, and one of my minor fields is in Soviet history, at the University of Illinois Chicago. My dissertation (in process) is on a religious sect known as the Old Believers; I am specifically studying a women's monastic community in northern Russia (in the Olonets region). I have been a full time Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies(tenure track) at Foothill College since 2000, and spent six years prior to that teaching at the college parttime. I have also taught at St. Xavier University in Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago. This is my 8th year teaching online; I also teach American history and Introduction to Women's Studies online (and my first online course was taught while I was in Moscow, so I think I have come full circle!)

I have lived in both St. Petersburg and in Moscow, and am fluent in Russian; I have also studied the Old Church Slavonic and pre-revolutionary Russian languages. None of the course will be conducted in Russian, but from time to time I will include comments about specific aspects of the language and its links to other languages, etc.

I welcome your questions and queries, either in the dialogue chamber or in the private message center, or feel free to email me at doloresdp@yahoo.com if you have a more urgent question.

Some quick terminology

Over the course of the last ten years, there have been major changes in the way that the former Soviet Union is dealt with. One of these changes is in terms of the names used.

The most common term used to discuss the state of Russia is simply Russia. This term refers to the geographical area that extends from Western Europe across the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. The Russian Empire, first recognized under the reign of Peter the Great (Peter I), included areas which were not Russian in origin but which the Russian state had successfully captured; in time, those areas would include the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Poland, Bessarabia, and other regions. The all-encompassing term "Russia" continued to be used for these areas until the creation of the Union of Soviet Sociaiist Republics, on December 30, 1922. The U.S.S.R. incorporated the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (the state of Russia, for all intents and purposes), Ukraine, White Russia (Belorussia/Belarus), and Transcaucasia. In the later 1920s, several of the Central Asian republics were also incorporated into this union. Most of the western parts of the Russian empire, including the Baltics, Poland, and parts of Western Ukraine, had been lost in the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in 1918 (more about that later), and were not incorporated into the USSR until after World War II.

Following the downfall of the communist government in the Soviet Union, the name changed again. In December 1991, after the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev and the rise of Boris Yeltsin to the position of president, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. This led to the formation of the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) on January 1, 1992, which incorporated eleven of the fifteen former republics. In the spring of 1992, all of the autonomous republics of the former Soviet Union, with the exceptions of Chechnaya and Tatarstan, signed a treaty agreeing to form a federation. In various forms, under various names (Newly Independent States, etc), Russia and most of the other former republics of the Soviet Union have continued to form an at times uneasy alliance, in many cases for economic reasons.

For the purposes of this class, I will primarily use the term "Russia", except for the period 1922-1991, when I will use "Soviet Union".

City and Street Names

One of the most confusing aspects of studying Russian history is the fact that names are always changing. This is true not only of the state itself, but of cities, streets, provinces, etc. The major political city, Moscow, has remained constant; the state that developed around it is known as Muscovy, and in Russian the city name is pronounced "Moskva". The other major Russian city, St. Petersburg, was not created until the eighteenth century, when Peter the Great decided to build a new capital on the northern shores of the area captured from Sweden during the Great Northern War (again, more on that later). The city remained St. Petersburg until 1914, when it was decided that Petersburg sounded too German (and since the Russian were fighting the Germans in World War I at the time, this was a bad thing). It was instead changed to Petrograd ("grad" is the Russian word for city, so "City of Peter"). It remained Petrograd until 1924, when, in honor of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks who died in January of 1924, the city was renamed Leningrad. It remained Leningrad until the fall of the Communist Party in 1991, at which point the name reverted to St. Petersburg; however, many older Russians still refer to it as Leningrad, and when I was in Russia in 1998, many of the maps still had it listed as Leningrad.

Other cities also took on the names of famous leaders of the Bolshevik party; Volgograd became Stalingrad, after Josef Stalin (and is now back to Volgograd again); Ekaterinburg, which was named for Peter I's wife Catherine, was renamed Sverdlovsk in 1924 in honor of Yakov Sverdlov, who was one of Lenin's closest associates and the chairman of the Central Executive Committee. Sverdlov was also the Bolshevik official most commonly associated with the execution of the Romanov family in Ekaterinburg in July, 1918; that is why the city was named after him. Following the fall of the Communist Party in 1991, many of these names reverted back to their original titles, as did most of the street names in the major cities.

Spellings

As is usually the case with foreign languages, Russian does not always translate directly into English, and as a result, pronounciations can vary greatly. There is, for example, a difference between the Muscovite accent and the accent of someone from St. Petersburg; compare it to the difference between someone from New York versus someone from Chicago. Spellings also vary wildly. For example, until the 1980s, the title of the Russian ruler (pre-empire) was most commonly spelled as "czar"; the word is taken from the word caesar. However, the pronounciation of the first two letters is more of a "ts" sound, so starting in the mid 1980s, many publications began using "tsar" instead. Either is fine, and you will see both used depending on the sources you choose. Words with a "ye" sounds at the beginning (such as Ekaterinburg) are spelled both with and without the "y". And Czech sources (and some Polish sources) like using "j" instead of "i" or "y" at the end of names; hence the name Aleksei (which can also be spelled Alexis or Aleksey) is rendered Aleksej in some sources. Again, any of these is correct; the usual rule of thumb is to use whatever spelling is found most frequently in your sources. Whereever possible, I will provide multiple spellings the first time a term is used, to hopefully prevent some confusion.

Most early Russian rulers' names are spelled in the more traditional form; hence Mikhail, Iurii, etc. However, the rulers during the time of the empire were more Europeanized, and their names are spelled in the European fashion (so Peter instead of Pyotr, Nicholas instead of Nikolai, etc). In these cases, you will rarely find a difference in spellings; with the exception of Mikhail Romanov, virtually all of the rulers' names after 1600 are given with the Europeanized spellings.