History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1950s – 1980s

This course is dedicated to one of the most dynamic and contradictory periods in Soviet history, a time that combined in an astounding way criticism of the Stalinist cult of personality and the Krushchev Thaw with processes of re-Stalinization. Foreign policy was equally contradictory: the struggle for disarmament and the search for new principles in relations with the outside world were combined with major crises in foreign policy – in the Caribbean, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, among other places. Cultural life in the Soviet Union was also extraordinary: the culture of the 1960s, the dissident movement, artistic breakthroughs combined with the growth of ideological censorship – all of this formed the unique cultural world of the postwar Soviet generation. The course will examine major political processes of the second half of the twentieth century, in which the USSR played a key role in world politics; it will also provide the background to study the formation of the Russian foreign policy outlook of the 21st century. Students will be required to participate actively in class discussions and comment on assigned readings, to make an in-class presentation, and to write brief assignments and a final exam or paper