Study alongside Russia's future political and business leaders at Russia's leading institution for international studies. Choose from an extensive list of courses in Russian or English and enjoy regular opportunities to attend talks given by visiting diplomats, politicians, economists, religious leaders, and other experts.
Additional out-of-classroom activities take advantage of the wide intellectual and cultural resources of Moscow in a hands-on program designed to give you broad perspectives on Russian history, geography, international relations, economics, politics, and demographics.
Moscow, Russia's political and economic capital, is home to not only most of Russia's federal government, but also most of Russia's major businesses and the Russian headquarters of international corporations. The city overflows with NGOs, museums, and cultural institutions. All of this offers students an extraordinary opportunity to make potential professional contacts, understand Russia's current development trajectory, and to take in as much Russian culture as possible in one location. Moscow is also Europe's largest city and a major regional hub for all of Eurasia. It is a diverse city, with cultural infrastructure serving a diverse population. In Moscow, you'll explore all of this as part of your guided cultural program.
In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the United States alone as the world’s superpower. These four immersive weeks will see us working to understand why the winds of change blew across communist Russia and its central and east European satellites during the 1980s and why these events are the essential backdrop for understanding current events, some thirty years later. Why did Mikhail Gorbachev seek to reform the Soviet challenge to Western hegemony and how did the population at home and in the Warsaw Pact countries take advantage of this situation? Why did liberal democracy have so much difficulty then solidifying itself across this space in the decades after? And why does Vladimir Putin once again poise a real challenge to the US and the independent countries which surround him?
This program will travel to four former communist nations (Russia, Poland, Germany, and Ukraine) to examine this time of change and its lasting legacy in the region.
