Understanding Russia: A Cultural History
Explore Russia’s extraordinary cultural journey from Ivan the Terrible to Putin through 24 illuminating lectures with an award-winning historian.
Course Overview (No. 8374)
This comprehensive survey reveals how Russian culture – from Orthodox icons to Soviet cinema – shaped national identity across centuries of empire, revolution, and reinvention.
Video Lectures
- A Russian Past, the Putin Future (31 min)
Russia’s search for identity through its vast geography and power dynamics. - Ivan the Terrible’s 500-Year Reign (31 min)
How Russia’s first tsar created a template for authoritarian spectacle. - The Russian Orthodox Church (32 min)
Faith’s profound influence on state culture from medieval icons to modern politics. - Peter the Great and a European Empire (31 min)
Westernization through calendar reforms and a new capital city. - Russia’s Northern Window on Europe (31 min)
St. Petersburg’s golden age of architecture and opera. - Nobility, the Tsar, and the Peasant (31 min)
The social fissures that made revolution inevitable. - The Authentic Russia: Popular Culture (30 min)
Folk traditions from banya baths to matryoshka dolls. - Catherine the Great and the Enlightenment (32 min)
How a German princess expanded empire while importing European ideas. - Alexander Pushkin’s Russia (33 min)
The poet who captured Russia’s soul in Eugene Onegin. - Alexander II, Nihilists, and Assassins (31 min)
Why Russia’s “great reformer” tsar met a violent end. - The Age of Realism in Russian Art (32 min)
Rimsky-Korsakov, Turgenev and Repin’s nationalist inspirations. - Russian Fin de Siècle and the Silver Age (32 min)
Chekhov’s plays, Fabergé eggs, and Ballets Russes brilliance. - Empire across Two Continents (32 min)
Colonization from Alaska to Siberia and the policy of Russification. - The Rise and Fall of the Romanovs (32 min)
From 1613 glory to 1917’s bloody end with Rasputin’s machinations. - Russian Radicals, War, and Revolution (33 min)
How WWI devastation and Nicholas II’s failures enabled Lenin. - The October 1917 Revolution (31 min)
Bolshevik statecraft through the barrel of a gun. - Lenin and the Soviet Cultural Invasion (33 min)
Propaganda radio to “secular sainthood” of Lenin. - The Roaring Twenties, Soviet Style (33 min)
Attacks on religion, gender norms and traditional culture. - The Tyrant Is a Movie Buff: Stalinism (31 min)
Socialist Realism’s suppression of creative freedom. - The Soviets’ Great Patriotic War (31 min)
How 27 million died as culture mobilized for WWII. - With Khrushchev, the Cultural Thaw (33 min)
De-Stalinization’s limits amid lingering anti-Semitism. - Soviet Byt: Shared Kitchen, Stove, and Bath (32 min)
Everyday life in communal apartments under Brezhnev. - Intelligentsia, Dissidents, and Samizdat (32 min)
Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov’s challenges to autocracy. - Soviet Chaos and Russian Revenge (30 min)
From Gorbachev’s reforms to Putin’s rise.

