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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How did Yeltsin lose a thumb and forefinger?
(a) During the war.
(b) Playing with a stolen grenade.
(c) He fell on a sword.
(d) He cut himself with a knife.

2. Who was a self-proclaimed pioneer of Soviet capitalism who set up a private commodities brokerage?
(a) German Sterligov.
(b) Vasiliyev.
(c) Anton Danielets.
(d) Zaslavsky.

3. Who did Volkogonov say was probably responsible for the 1934 murder of Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov?
(a) Zinoviev.
(b) Kamenev.
(c) Trotsky.
(d) Stalin.

4. Which Russian author wrote about Sakhalin Island?
(a) Solzhenitsyn.
(b) Pushkin.
(c) Chekhov.
(d) Tolstoy.

5. How old was Boris Yeltsin when he had his first encounter with the Communist Party?
(a) 12.
(b) 5.
(c) 15.
(d) 18.

6. Where did Aleksandr Yakovlev almost die during World War II?
(a) A battlefield outside Berlin.
(b) A battlefield outside Moscow.
(c) A battlefield outside Stalingrad.
(d) A battlefield outside Leningrad.

7. During the Gorbachev era, what did old women sell in city parks as a vaccine against Aids?
(a) Bottled medicines made mostly of alcohol.
(b) Magnets.
(c) Herbal sachets.
(d) Copper bracelets.

8. During what years had Lithuania been a free country?
(a) 1920-1932.
(b) 1918 to 1940.
(c) 1840-1858.
(d) 1898-1935.

9. In 1989, with whose portrait did some older women replace their portraits of Lenin?
(a) Gorbachev.
(b) Ligachev.
(c) Shakarov.
(d) Kashpirovsky.

10. Why did poet Varlam Shalamov spend seventeen years in a camp at Kolyma?
(a) For writing poetry that made fun of the military.
(b) For writing articles blasting the KGB.
(c) For speaking against Stalin.
(d) For saying Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin was a classic author.

11. Why was Vitaly Goldovitch, a physicist who had worked in defense research, in a labor camp in the 1980s?
(a) He tried to row a raft to Turkey.
(b) He was accused of espionage for the United States.
(c) He was accused of selling state secrets to Britain.
(d) He was accused of being a dissident.

12. In what city did the Party cancel the May Day parade in 1990?
(a) Leningrad.
(b) Irkutsk.
(c) Moscow.
(d) St. Petersburg.

13. Where did Sakharov's body lie in state?
(a) Moscow State University.
(b) Palace of Youth.
(c) Palace of Congresses.
(d) Hall of Columns.

14. Who was Miss KGB?
(a) Larisa Bogoraz.
(b) Regina Bogachova.
(c) Katya Mayorova.
(d) Valentina Alisovna.

15. Who was the television czar who stopped the television stations from broadcasting news about Lithuania?
(a) Aleksandr Nevzorov.
(b) Leonid Kravchenko.
(c) Raimondas Sestakauskas.
(d) Boris Pugo.

Short Answer Questions

1. What event in the Ukraine signaled the end of the old Soviet regime?

2. What was the plan called that was supposed to dismantle the Soviet system?

3. Who replaced Ligachev as party ideologist?

4. Who was the first CIA operative ever to defect to the Soviet Union and the KGB?

5. How long after Gorbachev's 1989 visit to Berlin did the Berlin wall collapse?

(see the answer keys)

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