The Teaching Company: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism by G

The Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism

Course Number 827-16 lectures (45 minutes/lecture)


Taught by:
Professor Gary Hamburg—University of Notre Dame
"Enjoyed this course very much!"
Kenneth Levin, West Bloomfield, MI

From the Oval Office to the streets of Moscow, world leaders and ordinary citizens alike wonder whether democracy can survive in Russia, what the future holds for the once-expansive and still powerful Russian nation, and whether Soviet communism is truly dead.
Top diplomats struggle daily with questions like these. You can begin investigating them for yourself with this two-part, 16 lecture course. Professor Gary Hamburg of the University of Notre Dame leads you on a probing historical journey that sheds light on the recent history and near future of a key world power. Whether your chief interest is Russian or world history, political theory, or international relations, you will take away a wealth of knowledge and insight from this scholarly and comprehensive look at the improbable origins of communist rule in Russia, the ascent of the red star to its zenith, and its decline and apparent end in the wake of 1989’s epoch-making events.

Beginning with the failures of the Czarist regime and the horrors of the First World War, then moving through the bloody era of Josef Stalin’s purges and beyond to Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika , Professor Hamburg familiarizes you with the story of 20th-century Russia. Using new material from previously sealed Soviet archives and covering recent controversial findings by both Russian and Western scholars, Professor Hamburg offers you a vibrant and masterful analysis of The Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism that stands out from other accounts of the Soviet experiment.

A professor of Russian history at Notre Dame since 1979, Gary Hamburg has written, edited, and translated a number of works on Russia and her intriguing past. A respected authority on Russian social, political, and intellectual history, Professor Hamburg has studied at Leningrad State University and Moscow University.

Czarist Russia’s disastrous involvement in the First World War sets the stage for the fall of the Czar and the rise of Lenin, who masterminded the Bolshevik coup that has gone down in history as the October Revolution. Along with Lenin’s role in the suppression of "bourgeois" democracy and the creation of the Soviet state, Professor Hamburg explores his decisive theoretical influence on the form that Marxism took in Russia—a largely agrarian society that Marx himself would not have thought "ripe" for revolution.

Professor Hamburg closes the first half of the course by introducing the cruel dictatorship of Stalin, who used forced starvation, murderous secret-police purges, and brutal labor camps—the infamous "gulag archipelago to consolidate his grip on power.

Next you examine the Nazi invasion and the "Great Patriotic War" of 1941-45, which nearly toppled Stalin and killed millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians. If you’ve ever wondered about he parallels between Stalin and Adolf Hitler, you will find much food for thought in Professor Hamburg’s careful comparison of the two.

The course's final quarter starts with Stalin's death in 1953 and provides you with a searching look at the three intriguing, intense, and largely misunderstood decades of de-Stalinization that followed. You will see how Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev all tried to curb the abuses of power and tendency toward the "cult of personality" associated with Stalinism, while preserving the power structure that Stalin had created and the principles of communism itself. In his closing lecture, Professor Hamburg apprises you of communism’s prospects in Russia and assesses the possibility that the Soviet Union will re-emerge in some form.

The Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism offers you a superior understanding of Russians future possibilities through a profound examination of the path she traced through this, our most turbulent of centuries.


Part I



Lecture 1: Nicholas II and the Russian Empire

Lecture 2: The Failure of Constitutional Government

Lecture 3: Russia and the First World War

Lecture 4: Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevism

Lecture 5: Lenin Comes to Power

Lecture 6: Lenin and the Making of a Bolshevik State

Lecture 7: The Twenties

Lecture 8: Stalin and the "Second October Revolution"



Part II

Lecture 9: Stalin and the "Great Terror"

Lecture 10: Stalin, Hitler and the Road to War

Lecture 11: The USSR at War

Lecture 12: Stalin's Last Years

Lecture 13: De-Stalinization

Lecture 14: Gorbachev and Peristroika

Lecture 15: The Disintegration of the USSR

Lecture 16: Rebirth of Russia or Rebirth of the USSR?