Fall 2025 | MWF | 11:15–12:05PM | Professor Alexis Peri
Fall 2025 – Alexis Peri
| Days | Start | End | Type | Bldg | Room |
| MWF | 11:15 AM | 12:05 PM | IND |
Focuses on the history of Russia under the Romanov Dynasty and its establishment as a Eurasian power and empire. Emphasizes issues of religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity, modernization, reform and revolt, and the vexed question of Russian identity. This course cannot be taken for credit in addition to the course that was numbered CAS HI 272 and previously entitled “Russia and Its Empires until 1900. BU Hub Areas (Effective Fall 2018): Historical Consciousness, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Creativity/Innovation.
Additional Course Materials:
Course Description: DOOMED! Peek inside most popular histories of the Romanov family and you will read that: “the Romanovs were doomed from the start.” They were weak, illiberal, and archaic—inevitable victims of modernization and revolution. The bloody demise of the Romanovs has so engrossed the popular imagination that it has blinded many folks (including some scholars) to the fact that they were one of the longest ruling dynasties in European history. When a family stays in power for nearly 300 years and rules one of the largest, most diverse—home to nearly 200 different ethnic groups—and most enduring empires in history, we should ask: what allowed them to rule successfully for so long? And what might this suggest about autocracy as an effective, dynamic form of government? The typical view of tsarist Russia is one of conservatism and stagnation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Romanovs believed that autocracy was necessary for stability, but they constantly worked to modernize and reform their empire. Along the way, they contended with the challenges of secularization, westernization, and industrialization, and revolt. And many of these threats they fomented themselves. Russia’s first revolutionaries came from within the ruling family itself.
Course Themes:
- the interactions between reform and revolution
- imperialism and internal colonization
- the stunning diversity of Russia’s multi-ethnic, multi-confessional empire. It was home to nearly 200 ethnic groups and the largest Muslim population in Europe
- the origins of Russia’s enormously consequential theories of terrorism and socialism
Selected Readings:
- Days of a Russian Noblewoman: The Memories of Anna Labzina
- Nadezhda Durova, The Calvary Maiden: Journals of a Female Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars
- Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murat
- S. Nechaev, “Catechism of a Revolutionist”
Instructor:
