This site includes recent research and teaching syllabi.
Comments always welcome.
Peter Rutland has taught at Wesleyan since 1989. Before that he
taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of
York and London University in the UK. He has a BA from Oxford and a D.
Phil from York. He has been a visiting Fulbright professor at the
European University in St.
Petersburg and at Sophia University in Tokyo. From 1995-97 he was on
leave from Wesleyan and served as assistant director of the Open Media Research
Institute attached to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague.
His research interests focus on all things Russian and places "where the
Russian boot has trod" (Nicholas II) in the former Soviet Union and the
former East Europe. He started off studying workers and the Communist
Party, moving on to broader questions of economic policy in the
socialist and post-socialist economies. Along the way he studied
nationalism and ethnic conflict in the region. In 2002-03 he made field
trips to study the dynamics of national identity in Azerbaijan, Abkhazia
and Mary-El. He is on the program committee for the annual conference of
the Association for
the Study of Nationalities.
He has written two books, The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the
Soviet Union (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and The Myth of
the Plan: Lessons of Soviet Planning Experience (Hutchinson, 1985);
and edited a third, Business and the State in Contemporary Russia
(Westview Press, 2000). Recent articles cover topics such as the rise of
President Putin, the Russian oil and gas industry; the reform of the
Russian electricity monopoly; and Russia as an Asian power.
In October 2011 we organized a conference on the theme "Looking Back at Brezhnev". Here is the program and poster.
