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

Multiple Choice Questions

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

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

3. Who was a video healer who appeared on state television?
(a) Arbatov.
(b) Kashpirovsky.
(c) Obolensky.
(d) Rasputin.

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

5. What American movie was shown to students at the Moscow Higher Party School?
(a) The Matrix.
(b) Forest Gump.
(c) Wall Street.
(d) Schindler's List.

Short Answer Questions

1. What did Mikhail Leontyev, who studied economics at Plekhanov Institute, do to avoid working for the regime?

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

3. What major event in Soviet history was preserved the longest?

4. Where did Stalin have his prison camps?

5. How did the Baltic republics win their independence?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why would the Sinegorsk mine on Sakhalin Island never be profitable in a normal economy?

2. Why would it be difficult for the hard-liners to chart a new historical orthodoxy?

3. What happened when Gorbachev withdrew his support for the 500 Days plan?

4. How did Yeltsin win his first battle inside the "horror house" of the Soviet system?

5. Describe Shcharansky's celebration of Hanukkah in Perm-35.

6. Why did Ilya Zaslavsky hobble to the podium at the Congress the day after Sakharov's death?

7. Who was the free man Remnick met on Sakhalin island?

8. What happened when the tanks were sent to Lithuania in January 1991?

9. How did Yeltsin's appeal to the people for resistance to the coup get published in Izvestia?

10. What did Volkogonov's team reveal in a draft of a history they were writing that appalled the hard-liners?

(see the answer keys)

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