Team U

Quiz on Stalin Materials

1.  Stalin’s dictatorship was even worse than under the tsars because:

1. Modern technologies of surveillance allowed Stalin’s secret police to be more thorough in policing its citizens.
2. The aspiration of totalitarian systems to control every sphere of life, even private and personal domains, was more ambitious than in previous centuries.
3. Russian tsars held peasants in high regard and gave them favorable treatment.
4. Both A and B

2.   Stalin treated his fellow “Old Bolsheviks”

1. the same way that Lenin did.
2. favorably and he guaranteed their safety as long as they were loyal to him.
3. as potential rivals and he systematically eliminated all of them by 1940.
4. B and C

3.   Stalin’s stance within the Industrialization Debate of the mid to late 1920s

1. shifted cynically as he aligned himself with various factions and maneuvered to take over the Party.
2. was similar to Trotsky’s and Preobrazhensky’s position once he gained supreme power in the party even though he gave them no credit for the ideas.
3. was similar to Lenin’s late in life NEP policies.
4. A and B

4.  Osip Mandelstom’s poem about a “murderer and a peasant-slayer”:

1. had nothing to do with Stalin although his accusers in the secret police said it did.
2. was never written down.  The secret police learned about it from informants who had been recruited to keep tabs on fellow citizens.
3. was only a poem and yet the poet was killed because of it.
4. demonstrates that to insult Stalin even in private was considered a crime so serious that death or deportation was justified.
5. All but A

5.  Stalin used terror

1. as a lever of control against fellow Party members
2. as a form of entertainment
3. to enforce his policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization
4. to create a pervasive sense of fear and loss of control within society so that no opposition to his government could take root.
5. All of the above

6.  At his show trial of 1937, Bukharin wrote a letter:

1. to confess his guilt as a Trotskyite conspirator scheming to undo the November Revolution.
2. To denounce the “hellish machine” that the Party had become.
3. To warn future generations that anyone--even Central Committee members--can be arbitrarily “rubbed out.”
4. All of the above
5. B and C

7.  Stalin’s March 1930 writing entitled “Dizzy with Success”

1. heralds the purported success of Stalin’s collectivization program.
2. blames local officials for excesses in implementing collectivization policies.
3. Declares that Old Bolsheviks are all Trotskyites deserving of the death penalty.
4. A and B
5. A, B, and C

8.  The 1932-33 famine in the Ukraine

1. was a natural disaster.
2. brought about by disruptions caused by collectivization policies and Stalin’s response to peasant resistance with a campaign of terror.
3. Went undetected by foreign governments.
4. Was well-known in the USA because of the courageous reportage of Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Duranty. 

9.  Collectivization meant that the peasants had to

1. give up their livestock and farming implements to the State.
2. Peasants became wage-earners dependent on the State for subsistence.
3. Experienced peasants became subject to outside managers who did not always understand local farming conditions.
4. All of the above.

10.  Alec Nove’s article argues

1. That democracy might have taken root in Russia had constitutional government been given a sufficient chance.
2. That coercive leadership usually accompanies rapid industrialization.
3. That “whole-hog” Stalinism was not pre-ordained but that some form of absolutism was the “necessary” outgrowth of Russia’s situation of backwardness.
4. B and C

1. D
2. C
3. D
4. E
5. E
6. E
7. D
8. B
9. D
10. D