In this module you will explore the ascent of Russia as a great power, examining first how Peter the Great’s desire to open a ‘Window on the West’ helped to lay the foundation for tsarist Russia to become a European great power, and then how nineteenth-century Russia sought to balance its role in European politics with ‘imperial’ expansion to the south and East. You will then explore the role of the USSR in the international political system, before examining how Russia’s contemporary international presence can be understood in terms of both the Soviet and the Tsarist past.
Gaining a broad historic overview of key themes and developments, you will also have the opportunity to study particular events in depth in order to relate them to broader patterns of change (eg Seven Years War, Napoleonic Wars, Crimean War, Russo-Japanese War, First World War, Great Patriotic War; etc).