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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How did Yeltsin lose a thumb and forefinger?

2. What book did Solzhenitsyn want Novy Mir to publish first?

3. Which Russian author wrote about Sakhalin Island?

4. What did the battle over the draft for a new history book represent to Yazov?

5. During what years had Lithuania been a free country?

Short Essay Questions

1. After watching the film "Wall Street" at the Moscow Higher Party School, how did Remnick know that Communist ideology was dead?

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

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

4. What did the designer of the Chernobyl reactor say about the nuclear accident?

5. Why did Yakovlev say that rehabilitation was an act of repentance?

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

7. When did healers, mystics, and "holy fools" usually come to prominence?

8. What did Sakharov try to tell Gorbachev one evening during the first Congress session?

9. Who was Edward Lee Howard?

10. In 1991, why were the Kremlin hard-liners terrified of the strikes?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

In the Soviet Union a common power struggle involved truth and the Party's version of truth. Using examples from Lenin's Tomb, explain why man's struggle against power is also the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Essay Topic 2

In the book, Remnick states that "Chernobyl...was a kind of run of the Soviet system, a horrible metaphor for the era that began with the Revolution in 1917 and was now ending." Using examples from the book, explain Chernobyl's metaphor for the Soviet system.

Essay Topic 3

During the Gorbachev era, there was loosening of restrictions and a small shift toward truth. Compare the Stalin era and the Gorbachev era, and show what changed, what did not change, and how, in some ways, the Gorbachev era retained elements from Stalin's days. Use examples from the book.

(see the answer keys)

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