How Dictatorships Come to Power
In this course, we will consider how dictators come to power, liberation schemes deteriorate into tyranny, and the democratic process paves way for authoritarianism.
- Day:Saturdays
- Times: 9:30am-12:30pm CST
- Dates: June 21 - August 23
Taught by:
About the Course
In this course, we will consider how dictators come to power, liberation schemes deteriorate into tyranny, and the democratic process paves way for authoritarianism. We will examine the seizures of power (revolutions, coups d’etat, elections) and the tools of authoritarian governance (state violence, censorship, emotional and political mobilization, militarism) in a comparative perspective, ranging across case studies from the 20th century. Our readings will consist of scholarship and primary documents. The impetus for this course is my attempt to understand historically and comparatively the profound transformations that have taken place in Russia itself before and after it invaded Ukraine.
This class will satisfy the following curriculum requirement:
- Non-Western Elective
About the Professor
Eleonory Gilburd
I specialize in the history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, with particular interest in Soviet culture, society, and their international context. Currently, I am completing my first book, a comprehensive history of the Soviet opening to the West during the 1950s and 1960s. This project brings together the...
I specialize in the history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, with particular interest in Soviet culture, society, and their international context. Currently, I am completing my first book, a comprehensive history of the Soviet opening to the West during the 1950s and 1960s. This project brings together the ideas that justified cultural exchange and the diplomatic negotiations that made it possible, the secrets of museum storage rooms and the publicity of radio broadcasts, lavish international film festivals and backwater countryside screenings, enormous print runs and home-made books, state-sponsored travel and emigration. I analyze the reception of Western texts, paintings, cinema, and melodies, following them as they spread to the remotest corners of the Soviet Union. Interpreting the significance that these imports acquired, I highlight translation – as a mechanism of transfer, a process of habituation, and a metaphor for cultural interaction. The book examines what happened in this encounter to entrenched ideas of class morality and cultural supremacy, familiar ways of looking at paintings, as well as the established languages of literature and cinema.
Future projects include Stalinist culture through the prism of the tango and Russia’s port cities, littoral subsystems, and maritime engagements over the past three hundred years.
Before coming to the University of Chicago, I taught at New York University.