EUROPEAN HISTORY
SECTION II
Part A
(Suggested writing time---45 minutes)
Percent of Section II score---45
Directions: The fallowing question is based on the accompanying Documents 1-12.
(Some of the documents have been edited for the purpose of this exercise.) Write your
answer on the lined pages of the Section II free-response booklet.
This question is designed to test your ability to work with and understand historical
documents. Write an essay that:
•
•
•
•
Has a relevant thesis and supports that thesis with evidence from the documents.
Uses a majority of the documents.
Analyzes the documents by grouping them in as many appropriate ways as
possible. Does not simply summarize the documents individually.
Takes into account both the sources of the documents and the authors’ point of
view.
You may refer to relevant historical information not mentioned in the documents.
1. Analyse the effects of Stalin’s policies on the Russian people and the
Soviet Union from the late 1920s to the early 1950s.
Historical Background: Stalin took power in the early 1920s and became
the leader of Russia. He was a paranoid man who created a number of
policies which would end up killing millions of Russians (known as the
purges or ‘the great purge’); many more would be deported into northern
Siberia where they would be worked to death in forced labour camps.
They were often charged with the crimes of being traitors of the state, and
anyone who spoke out was killed. His five-year plans, which are some of
his most famous policies, resulted in widespread industrial growth,
making the Soviet Union the 2nd most powerful industrial country, behind
only the U.S.; and many cities were also created to exploit Russia’s vast
mineral wealth. A large portion of the military was also ‘purged’,
resulting in near-defeat when Germany invaded the U.S.S.R.
Document 1
Source: Famine Testimony of Tatiana Pawlichka
In 1932, I was 10 years old, and I remember well what happened in my native village
in the Kiev region. In the spring of that year, we had virtually no seed. The
Communists had taken all the grain, and although they saw that we were weak and
hungry, they came and searched for more grain. My mother had stashed away some
corn that had already sprouted, but they found that, too, and took it. What we did
manage to sow, the starving people pulled up out of the ground and ate.
In the villages and on the collective farms (our village had two collectives), a lot of
land lay fallow, because people had nothing to sow, and there wasn't enough
manpower to do the sowing. Most people couldn't walk, and those few who could had
no strength. When, at harvest time, there weren't enough local people to harvest the
grain, others were sent in to help on the collectives. These people spoke Russian, and
they were given provisions.
Document 2
Source: From the text book History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(Bolsheviks): Short Course (1948)
The achievements of Socialism in our country were a cause of rejoicing not only to
the Party, and not only to the workers and collective farmers, but also to our Soviet
intelligentsia, and to all honest citizens of the Soviet Union.
But they were no cause of rejoicing to the remnants of the defeated exploiting classes;
on the contrary, they only enraged them the more as time went on …
Purging and consolidating its ranks, destroying the enemies of the Party and
relentlessly combating distortions of the Party line, the Bolshevik Party rallied closer
than ever around its Central Committee, under whose leadership the Party and the
Soviet land now passed to a new stage - the completion of the construction of a
classless, Socialist society.
Document 3
3
Source: from An Economic History of the USSR Document
(1969), by Alec
Nove
The Five Year Plans
Coal - millions of tons
Oil - millions of tons
Pig-iron - millions of tons
Steel - millions of tons
Electricity - thousand million kilowartt
hrs.
Wollen cloth - millions of meters
1927-8
35.4
11.7
3.3
4.0
1932
64.3
21.4
6.2
5.9
1937
128.0
28.5
14.5
17.7
5.0
17.0
36.2
97.0
93.3
108.3
Document 4
Source: A letter to Sergo, a close and longtime friend of Stalin, who was latter thought
to have been planning to denounce him and was found dead in 1937
I'm writing you from Novosibirsk. I have driven around several collective farms
[kolkhozes] and consider it necessary to inform you about a few items. I was in
various kolkhozes--not productive and relatively unproductive ones, but everywhere
there was only one sight--that of a huge shortage of seed, famine, and extreme
emaciation of livestock.
In the kolkhozes which I observed I attempted to learn how much the livestock had
diminished in comparison with the years 1927-28. It turns out that kolkhoz Ziuzia has
507 milch cows at present while there were 2000 in '28; kolkhoz Ust'-Tandovskii
collectively and individually has 203 head, earlier they had more than 600; kolkhoz
Kruglo-Ozernyi at present has 418 head of beef cattle and 50 held by kolkhozniks, in
1928 there were 1800 head; kolkhoz Goldoba collectively and individually has 275
head, in 1929 there were 1000 plus head, this kolkhoz now has 350 sheep, in 1929
there were 1500. Approximately the same correlations were found also in the
kolkhozes Ol'gino and Novo-Spasski.
Document 5
Source: 'Peasants can live like a Human Being', A propaganda poster of 1934 showing
what Stalin’s five-year plans had brought to the people
Document 6
Source: Exert from The Time of Stalin, written by Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, a
survivor of the Stalinist era and who’s parents died as a result of Soviet policies
Fear became a nutrient of the medium, part of the atmosphere you breathed. Everyone
and everything was feared. The neighbors in your building, the caretaker in the
building, your own children. People lived in fear of their coworkers, those above
them, those beneath them, and those on the same level. They feared oversights or
mistakes on the job, bit even more, they feared being too successful, standing out.
Document 7
Source: Written on Dec. 14, 1926 by prisoners in reference to the conditions in the
forced labor camps
To the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Communist
Party (Bolshevik)
We appeal to you, asking you to pay a minimum of attention to our request.
We are prisoners who are returning from the Solovetsky concentration camp because
of our poor health. We went there full of energy and good health, and now we are
returning as invalids, broken and crippled emotionally and physically. We are asking
you to draw your attention to the arbitrary use of power and the violence that reign at
the Solovetsky concentration camp in Kemi and in all sections of the concentration
camp. It is difficult for a human being even to imagine such terror, tyranny, violence,
and lawlessness … due process sends workers and peasants there who are by and large
innocent (we are not talking about criminals who deserve to be punished) …
Document 8
Source: From Behind the Urals, written by an American who is describing the
Working conditions in the city of Magnitogorsk in the early 1930s, one of the many
cities created by Stalin’s five-year plans
In early April it was still bitterly cold, everything was frozen. By May the city was
swimming in mud. Plague had broken out not far away. People were in poor health
because of lack of food and overwork. Sanitary conditions were appalling. By the
middle of May the heat had become intolerable.
Document 9
Source: Nikita Khrushchev in a speech to the 20th congress of the communist party of
the Soviet Union
The negative characteristics of Stalin, which, in Lenin's time, were only incipient,
transformed themselves during the last years into a grave abuse of power by Stalin,
which caused untold harm to our party
Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people,
but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion.
Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint and the correctness of
his position was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent
moral and physical annihilation.
Document 10
Source: from Stalin (1949), written by Isaac Deutscher, who had been kicked out of
the communist party for being to critical of Stalin
In Tsarist days political offenders had enjoyed certain privileges and been allowed to
engage in self-education and even in political propaganda. Oppositional memoranda,
pamphlets, and periodicals had circulated half freely between prisons and had
occasionally been smuggled abroad. Himself an ex-prisoner, Stalin knew well that
jails and places of exile were the 'universities' of of the revolutionaries. Recent events
taught him to take no risks. From now on all political discussion and activity in the
prisons and places of exile was to be mercilessly suppressed; and the men of the
opposition were by privation and hard labour to be reduced to such a miserable,
animal-like existence that they should be incapable of the normal processes of
thinking and of formulating their views.
Document 11
Source: Stalin in a speech, November 3, 1929
We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization -- to socialism,
leaving behind the age-old "Russian" backwardness. We are becoming a country of
metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors. And when we have put the
U.S.S. R. on an automobile, and the muzhik on a tractor, let the worthy capitalists,
who boast so much of their "civilization," try to overtake us! We shall yet see which
countries may then be "classified" as backward and which as advanced.
Document 12
Source: Estimated number of Red Army Officer ‘purged’
The Purge of the Red Army, 1937-38
Political Officials and Officers
Original Number
Executed
Members of Supreme Military Soviet
80
75
Vice-Commissars of Defense
11
11
Army Commissars
17
17
Corps Commissars
28
25
Bridgade Commissars
36
34
Marshalls
5
3
Army Commanders
16
14
Corps Commanders
67
60
Division Commanders
199
136
Bridgade Commanders
397
221
Military Officers
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