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

1. A Russian Past, the Putin Future (31 min)
   Russia’s search for identity through its vast geography and power dynamics.
2. Ivan the Terrible’s 500-Year Reign (31 min)
   How Russia’s first tsar created a template for authoritarian spectacle.
3. The Russian Orthodox Church (32 min)
   Faith’s profound influence on state culture from medieval icons to modern politics.
4. Peter the Great and a European Empire (31 min)
   Westernization through calendar reforms and a new capital city.
5. Russia’s Northern Window on Europe (31 min)
   St. Petersburg’s golden age of architecture and opera.
6. Nobility, the Tsar, and the Peasant (31 min)
   The social fissures that made revolution inevitable.
7. The Authentic Russia: Popular Culture (30 min)
   Folk traditions from banya baths to matryoshka dolls.
8. Catherine the Great and the Enlightenment (32 min)
   How a German princess expanded empire while importing European ideas.
9. Alexander Pushkin’s Russia (33 min)
   The poet who captured Russia’s soul in Eugene Onegin.
10. Alexander II, Nihilists, and Assassins (31 min)
    Why Russia’s “great reformer” tsar met a violent end.
11. The Age of Realism in Russian Art (32 min)
    Rimsky-Korsakov, Turgenev and Repin’s nationalist inspirations.
12. Russian Fin de Siècle and the Silver Age (32 min)
    Chekhov’s plays, Fabergé eggs, and Ballets Russes brilliance.
13. Empire across Two Continents (32 min)
    Colonization from Alaska to Siberia and the policy of Russification.
14. The Rise and Fall of the Romanovs (32 min)
    From 1613 glory to 1917’s bloody end with Rasputin’s machinations.
15. Russian Radicals, War, and Revolution (33 min)
    How WWI devastation and Nicholas II’s failures enabled Lenin.
16. The October 1917 Revolution (31 min)
    Bolshevik statecraft through the barrel of a gun.
17. Lenin and the Soviet Cultural Invasion (33 min)
    Propaganda radio to “secular sainthood” of Lenin.
18. The Roaring Twenties, Soviet Style (33 min)
    Attacks on religion, gender norms and traditional culture.
19. The Tyrant Is a Movie Buff: Stalinism (31 min)
    Socialist Realism’s suppression of creative freedom.
20. The Soviets’ Great Patriotic War (31 min)
    How 27 million died as culture mobilized for WWII.
21. With Khrushchev, the Cultural Thaw (33 min)
    De-Stalinization’s limits amid lingering anti-Semitism.
22. Soviet Byt: Shared Kitchen, Stove, and Bath (32 min)
    Everyday life in communal apartments under Brezhnev.
23. Intelligentsia, Dissidents, and Samizdat (32 min)
    Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov’s challenges to autocracy.
24. Soviet Chaos and Russian Revenge (30 min)
    From Gorbachev’s reforms to Putin’s rise.