This course is a study of the origins of the development of the U.S.S.R., the social, economic and political transformation of old Russia into a socialist state under Lenin and Stalin, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the civil war, the struggle for power and the great purges, Soviet foreign policy before and after World War II, the cold war, and the post-Stalin era of Khrushchev, the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.