Political Science 156A, Spring 2006: Government and Politics of Russia

Instructor: Richard D. Anderson, Jr.

Office: 4351 Bunche Hall

Phone: (310) 206-5228

Purpose: To examine the move from Soviet authoritarianism toward Russian democracy and the question of backsliding. Lectures open with a discussion of the Soviet order and its breakdown under the Gorbachev leadership, 1985-1991. The bulk of the lectures will concern the emergence of Russian political institutions and the political contest during the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin, 1991-1999, and Vladimir Putin, 2000 to the present.

Reading Assignment: Only two books are assigned for this course: David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb, and M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics.

Reading Schedule:

Weeks 1-5: Lenin's Tomb

Weeks 6-10: Democracy Derailed

Office Hours: You may see me by appointment or, if I'm in my office, by knocking on the door. To make an appointment, please email me. In your email give me times when you are available and I will respond with a suggested appointment time. Please confirm the appointment time. I do not keep fixed office hours, as these invariably conflict with students' schedules and they need appointments anyway. Please use email to arrange appointments rather than telephone or oral requests that are harder for me to keep track of.

Course Requirements: Students will be evaluated by a take-home mid-term and a take-home final. The midterm prompt will be distributed at the Wednesday meeting of the fifth week and the response will be due at the Wednesday meeting of the sixth week. The final prompt will be distributed at the Wednesday meeting of tenth week and the response will be due on Wednesday of examination week between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. in my office, 4351 Bunche. (Students required to attend another a final examination during these hours should so inform me.) For both the midterm and the final, in addition to the hard copy, students must also submit an email copy through turnitin.com, which is available for each student through myucla.edu. The email copy is the official copy of each essay; the hard copy will not be graded or returned and is required only against the eventuality of a breakdown in email communication. The email copy of the midterm must be submitted before the beginning of class on the due date, and the email copy of the final must be submitted before 12:00 p.m. on the Wednesday of finals week.

Do not request extensions of these deadlines because you have other finals or other midterms. You have been given a week to write a short essay in order to provide flexibility for organizing the completion of my assignment around your other obligations.

Length of midterm and final: The midterm must be no less than 2000 words and the final must be no less than 3000 words. You may write more. Papers are graded in part for concision. Report the word count on the title page of your paper.

Citations: Your final and midterm must provide proper citations to the assigned readings, as well as to any other sources you use, such as my posted lecture notes. Most UCLA students (this probably means you!) have never learned to cite properly. Correct rules for citation are posted on my web page. Your grade will reflect whether you learn and follow them properly. Of course, any student engaging in deliberate plagiarism will be referred to the Dean of Students for disciplinary action.

Paraphrasing: You may quote from the assigned readings and other sources. If you quote, make sure the quotation is precisely accurate and enclose it in quotation marks, or if it is longer than three lines, block indent. These essays are short and do not leave room for lengthy quotations. If you are not quoting, you must paraphrase – thoroughly rewrite – any information you draw from another source. Inadequate paraphrasing will result in a grade of zero for that portion of your essay and a deduction of at least a third of a grade. Do not copy!

Grading: UCLA places on me the responsibility to evaluate each student's performance in my class. I am obligated to announce in advance the method of evaluation, which announcement I make in this syllabus, and not to change it without the express agreement of each student in the class, which agreement I will not seek. I must also live up to a variety of ethical standards that, taken as a whole, merely require my evaluations to be fair. I am also required to submit grades to the university in a timely manner, except when circumstances preclude timely submission, for example, when students fail to complete their work on schedule. As far as I know, these are my only obligations. In particular, I am not obligated to, and do not, weight the midterm and final. When the examinations are essays, I would not know how to apply a numerical weighting to a non-numerical evaluation, and just as important, as far as I know the university cares not about when you learn but about whether you learn. Because some students learn later in the quarter than others, I have been known to discount the midterm entirely.

I grade the essays according to the following scheme. An "A" paper makes an argument and discusses evidence for and against this argument. A "B" paper discusses evidence without organizing it into an argument or, rarely, presents an argument but fails to discuss evidence. "C" papers do neither. D and F papers discuss some topic other than the assignment. Plus and minus are recorded when a paper meets the standard for a given letter grade but does so especially well or especially poorly (I am enjoined to grant very few A+). These principles of grading do not require me to apply a curve. If I get 80 papers which make an argument and evaluate the evidence available to the student for and against that argument, I will gladly record 80 grades of A. Occasionally a student will submit an essay that does not address the assigned question. In this case I try to make a judgment about the quality of the paper, but such a paper cannot earn an A. Part of the assignment in my courses is to learn and practice proper citation and paraphrasing. Papers without proper citations cannot receive a grade of A. Citation is a matter of form, and your grade will depend on whether I think you have attempted conscientiously to learn the rules of citation. Papers which contain inadequate paraphrases, for which the student has provided a citation and therefore is judged not to have deliberately plagiarized, will incur a deduction of at least one-third of a grade and perhaps more. Each student is entitled to an explanation of his or her grade and to consideration of upward or downward revision. If, after discussing a grade with me, a student persists in feeling that the grade is unfair, the student is entitled to ask the college ombuds to discuss the grade with me and is also entitled to appeal the grade, in order, to the Department Vice-Chair, the Chair, and the Dean of Social Sciences.