Course Number:

Credit Hours:

4

Course Title:

Soviet Secret Police

Course Description:

Explores a vast array of primary and secondary sources, supplemented by literature and film, and traces the roles of the domestic and international branches of the Soviet secret police throughout its seventy-year history. Explores the role of ideology in Soviet clandestine organizations; the foundations of Soviet policing; political terror and denunciations; informants’ networks; recruitment of agents at home and abroad; the British spy scandals of the 1930s-1950s; Soviet intelligence successes and failures in World War II; the origins of the Cold War; the atom spy networks; the popular culture of “spy mania” in the McCarthy era; the Cuban missile crisis; the Brezhnev era; the KGB and the Soviet collapse; and spies and spying in the post-Soviet era.