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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Who started what was billed as the first independent newspaper in the Soviet Union?
(a) Shatrov.
(b) Karpinsky.
(c) Tretyakov.
(d) Karaulov.

2. What was the radical opposition faction called that Sakharov, Yeltsin, and Popov put together in the legislature?
(a) Inter-Regional Group.
(b) The New Party.
(c) The Freedom Group.
(d) Perestroika.

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

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

5. 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.

6. Where did Stalin have his prison camps?
(a) Ukraine.
(b) Siberia.
(c) Kolyma.
(d) Sakhalin Island.

7. Where did Yakovlev study abroad?
(a) Columbia University.
(b) Cambridge University.
(c) Yale.
(d) Harvard.

8. Who was the Soviet who supposedly collaborated with Christine Keller to bring down Profumo, Britain's minister of war?
(a) Andrei Nuikin.
(b) Yevgeny Ivanov.
(c) Grigori Vasiliyev.
(d) Nikolai Yakovlev.

9. When did Sakharov die?
(a) January 4, 1990.
(b) October 24, 1989.
(c) December 14, 1989.
(d) May 14, 1989.

10. What did Pugo's men do during Bush's visit to the Soviet Union?
(a) Rounded up editors of dissident newspapers and imprisoned them.
(b) Slaughtered eight Lithuanian border police.
(c) Instituted martial law.
(d) Stationed tanks in Latvia.

11. What was the first major monument to victims of the regime?
(a) A replica of a prison barracks.
(b) A statue of Solzhenitsyn.
(c) A stone from Solovki.
(d) A plaque on Lubyanka Square.

12. Why did democratic leader Anatoly Sobchak have a picture of Lenin in his office?
(a) Because there was a stain on the wallpaper.
(b) Because he was afraid of people's reaction if he took it down.
(c) Because he still respected Lenin.
(d) Because Gorbachev asked him to leave it up.

13. When were tanks sent to Lithuania? .
(a) April 1991.
(b) June 1991
(c) December 1990.
(d) January 1991.

14. When did Shevardnadze resign as foreign minister?
(a) September 1990.
(b) December 1990.
(c) January 1991.
(d) November 1990.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What did an elderly factory worker write on a banner that angered Gorbachev?

2. Who came from Iowa to coach baseball?

3. What young politician was elected chairman of the October District in Moscow during the first elections?

4. What were the chiefs of the KGB and Interior Ministry police telling Gorbachev in 1991?

5. How old was Boris Yeltsin when he had his first encounter with the Communist Party?

(see the answer keys)

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