View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Approximately how many prisoners died working on the Moscow-Volga Canal built from 1932 to 1937?
(a) 10,000.
(b) 50,000.
(c) 200,000.
(d) 500,000.

2. What was the title of the letter published in the Sovetskaya Rossiya that contradicted everything Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and the liberal intelligentsia had been saying?
(a) Nina's Letter.
(b) History of Socialism.
(c) A Letter from a Chemistry Teacher.
(d) I Cannot Forsake Principles.

3. Where did the people at Spasskaya get their food?
(a) Buy it in Vologda.
(b) Grow it on the collective.
(c) Buy it in Ashkhabad.
(d) Grow it in their garden plots.

4. How did inmates from the Kolyma camps learn that Aleksandr Medvedev had died?
(a) The camp foreman was wearing Medvedev's wool jacket.
(b) They saw him shot.
(c) The camp commandant was wearing Medvedev's wool hat.
(d) They were told by the camp commandant.

5. Which former cellmate of Solzhenitsyn was a role model for Pavel Litvinov?
(a) Shalamov.
(b) Daniel.
(c) Kopelev.
(d) Sinyavsky.

Short Answer Questions

1. Remnick saw a man with no legs on his way to the Lenin Library. How was the man getting around?

2. How many Polish soldiers were killed the first night in Kalinin?

3. What was the news on August 19, 1991?

4. What was Karpinsky's job after entering Moscow State University in 1947?

5. When did Gorbachev take office?

Short Essay Questions

1. In the 1980s, why did Gorbachev say that there should be no more "rose-colored glasses"?

2. Why is Misha Litvinov a reserved person?

3. Was the corruption in the Party a secret to the Soviet people?

4. Why was Andropov important to Gorbachev?

5. Who was the most flamboyant mafia figure in the Soviet Union?

6. Why did Shakhnazarov say that Gorbachev, himself, and all the others who surrounded Gorbachev were double-thinkers?

7. As people learned about the true history of the Stalin era, why were they weary and bored?

8. Why did Natasha Rapoport not emigrate to Israel?

9. What gnawing uncertainty is the condition of life in the Soviet Union for an empire inhabited by holocaust survivors and the children of survivors?

10. Why is life in the mines not fit for human beings?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,080 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample