part I. lecture 1. Understanding the Russian past ; lecture 2. The Russia of Peter the Great's childhood ; lecture 3. Peter the Great's revolution ; lecture 4. The Age of empresses - Catherine the Great ; lecture 5. Social rebellion - The Purgachev uprising ; lecture 6. Moral rebellion - Nikolai Novikov ; lecture 7. Alexander I - Imagining reform ; lecture 8. The Decembrist rebellion ; lecture 9. Nicholas I - Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality ; lecture 10. Alexander Pushkin, Russia's national poet ; lecture 11. The birth of the intelligentsia ; lecture 12. Westernizers - Vissarion Belinskii

part. II. lecture 13. Alexander II and the great reforms ; lecture 14. "Nihilists" ; lecture 15. Populists and Marxists ; lecture 16. Paths to revolution - Lenin and Martov ; lecture 17. Lev Tolstoy ; lecture 18. The reign of Alexander III ; lecture 19. Nicholas II, the last tsar ; lecture 20. The revolution of 1905 ; lecture 21. Peasant life and culture ; lecture 22. The modern city and its discontents ; lecture 23. Fin-de-siècle culture - Decadence and iconoclasm ; lecture 24. Fin-de-siècle culture - The religious renaissance

part. III. lecture 25. War and revolution ; lecture 26. Democratic Russia - 1917 ; lecture 27. Bolsheviks in power ; lecture 28. Civil War ; lecture 29. Paths to socialism - the 1920s ; lecture 30. Joseph Stalin ; lecture 31. Stalin's revolution ; lecture 32. Joy and terror - Society and culture in joy and terror ; lecture 33. The "Great Patriotic War" ; lecture 34. The Soviet Union after Stalin ; lecture 35. Private and public dissidence ; lecture 36. Mikhail Gorbachev - Perestroika and Glasnost.