Brandon Schechter

This course is designed to help us understand and critique the meaning of violence in the modern era. Drawing on theoreticians of violence and case studies of events, we will explore a variety of types of violence and their impact on politics and society, with a particular focus on Europe and its colonies. At the center of this course will be a number of questions: Is violence modern or archaic? What are the causes and uses of violence? What are the costs of violence on both its perpetrators and its victims? What is the legacy of different kinds of violence? What can comparing different times and places tell us about the use of violence in different contexts? Topics covered will include the establishment of state control over violence, terror, terrorism, total war, The Holocaust, and attempts to come to terms with mass violence, among others.

World War II led to destruction of such magnitude that the international order shifted fundamentally and new terms had to be coined to describe its violence. This course will examine the events that led to the war, the war itself, and its aftermath. It will begin with a chronological outline of the Great War, the interwar years, and the war itself and then shift to explore key themes such as The Holocaust, military life, women at war, the changing meaning of race and ethnicity, occupation, etc. This course will discuss battles and leaders, but its main focus will be on the impact of the war on culture, politics, and society. Students will be asked to think seriously about how these global events were experienced by what Stalin called “the little screws of history”—i.e., “ordinary people.” This course is really about them. Issues such as total war, genocide, occupation, the terrifying new technologies of the war, and soldier’s life in the different armies will be examined. We will also look at how, after the devastation of the war, people tried to make sense of what had happened. Politicians reacted by creating new laws and institutions, while artists painted, sculpted, and made films and authors turned to the page to understand what they had seen and done.

This course examines the experience of people living in the Soviet Union and other socialist states via things. Objects under socialist regimes were supposed to be transformative, turning yesterday’s backward peasants into new socialist men and women. Communism promised unheard-of abundance, but those who lived under the system often suffered from severe shortages. Things from outside of the communist world often took on an aura of forbidden fruit. People learned a variety of tricks to survive and, today, are even nostalgic for many of its trappings. Beginning with a reading of theoretical texts to get us thinking about how to think through stuff, we will proceed to look at a number of cases in Soviet history where objects are key to the story. Each week, students will be responsible for a short written response, 250-500 words, and providing two questions to feed our discussion. At the end of the semester, each student will design a display for a virtual museum of the Soviet Union, in which they will use one or more objects to tell a story about Soviet history. At the center of this course is the idea that all objects are the products and markers of social, political, and economic change that are filled with meaning—even if those meanings are not obvious or can be highly variable.

This seminar looks at the history of the Soviet Union through the lens of ethnonational diversity. To be a Soviet person, one had to be identified by “nationality” (closer to our understanding of ethnicity), a category that outlasted class. Soviet policy toward different nationalities varied widely from 1917 to 1991, ranging from the aggressive promotion of indigenous cadres and cultures to the deportation of whole nationalities. The USSR was the largest country in modern history and the first attempt to build a communist state, yet it ended up as a union of federal republics organized along national lines. The nation was supposed to be the vehicle that ushered people through Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist phases of historical development, yet the nations that constituted the Soviet Union outlasted it. We will look at the ways in which Soviet conceptions of nationalities shaped the Soviet project and how being a member of one or another nationality impacted people’s fates. Our readings begin with a brief overview of the diversity of the Russian Empire on the eve of revolution and continue to address the major events of Soviet history through to the continued relevance of the history of Soviet nationalities policies today.