Thoughts on Soviet Union History

While at Olin, I'm required to taken seven Arts, Humanities, or Social Science (AHS) classes. One of those is the first semester AHS foundation, and another is The Entrepreneurial Initiative. I get to choose the other five. Three of those five have to form a concentration of some kind. Because my Azerbaijani language classes from the summer transferred as two AHS courses, I wanted to take another related class to finish a concentration. I took The Tragic Colossus, a Soviet Union history class, at Wellesley. Here are my thoughts on Soviet.

According to the professor and the other students in the class, the course had a heavy reading load, but the reading for each class period generally only took me two hours. That's what I had expected from a Wellesley history class. I enjoyed most of the reading, and I thought Professor Tumarkin chose a good mixture of readings to give us a well-rounded view of Soviet history and culture. The general background came from a textbook, and then we read a lot of primary sources, excerpts from books by Soviet history scholars, and one novella.

Class was a mix of lecture and discussion (and Professor Tumarkin's stories). I thought Prof. Tumarkin's lectures were good at highlighting important points form the reading, so I found them useful. The class fell behind pretty quickly, so the readings, the lectures, and the discussion would all be about different topics, and as a result, I never really felt prepared for discussions. It was hard for me to predict what we would be discussing, both in terms of which readings would be the focus and what questions Prof. Tumarkin would pose. I think I should have been reading differently, but I never figured out exactly what was wrong and how I could fix it.

I was much more successful in the writing assignments. A handful of times, we all had to post comments on the course website about readings. The longer writing assignments were two papers and a midterm exam, which included two timed essays. Those assignments weren't always easy or fun, but they were easier than discussion, and they turned out well. I was surprised that all the topics were given to us. For some reason I had expected the class to include a more open-ended research paper, though I'm not sure where I got that idea.

I enjoyed Soviet, and it definitely gave me a better context for understanding modern Azerbaijan, which was one of my reasons for taking the course. Despite the disorganization, I learned a lot, mostly from readings and lectures, and I would take one of Prof. Tumarkin's classes again. (There was actually one I would have liked to take this spring, but it conflicts with one of my Olin courses.) I've also become more interested in Soviet ballet, and I might do a Soviet ballet Passionate Pursuit this spring.