Stalin: Reign of Terror Trivia Quiz

Answer: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili

He adopted the name of Josef Stalin in 1910. Freely translated it means man of steel.
http://www.freeinfosociety.com/site.php?postnum=79

Answer: A call for Stalin to be removed from his post

Lenin felt that Stalin held too much power in government.
http://www.fatherryan.org/holocaust/russian/stalin.htm

Answer: The figure widely varies from source to source

The exact number is not known. Some historians put the number around twenty million, but this often includes the victims of the Ukrainian famine. The (Russian) Memorial Society has released a list of 1.346 million named victims. (This figure is obviously lower than the actual total). The KGB reports that 681,692 were executed from 1937 to 1938 alone.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1599804,00.html
http://www.biocrawler.com/encyclopedia/Great_Purge#Victim_toll

Answer: Theology

He had received a full scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. According to most accounts he was expelled or asked to leave after reading books by Karl Marx and joining a forbidden political group.
http://www.toy-soldier-gallery.com/Articles/Stalin/Stalin.html

Answer: He allied himself with the right wing of the Communist Party

The right wing was led by Nikolai Bukharin and had considerable influence in the party at the time. In time Stalin would turn on them and associate with his former co-triumvirates to have Leon Trotsky exiled (his chief opponent) along with members of the right wing. Stalinists eventually let the right wingers back in but only after they accepted Stalinism. Also in a short period of time he would have the Left Wing removed from Soviet government as well.
http://www.geocities.com/robert_cuschieri/stalin.html
Definition of Left Wing/Right Wing:Left/Right is the basic polarity of political temperament, the axis of political antagonism which manifests itself across all shades of politics, all epochs and social movements. Broadly speaking, the left-wing expresses that social force which is the most marginalised by, and has the least commitment to, the status quo and power relations of the existing society, and it responds to this position by being reformist or revolutionary. Meanwhile, the right-wing is by and large committed to reinforcement of, or at least adaptation to, the status quo and its power relations by being conservative or reactionary. In this context, 'right wing' means those committed to 'socialism in one country' and 'left wing' those who wanted to promote international revolution.

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/e.htm

Answer: A plot to overthrow the government

The real reason was to solidify Stalin's power in the country. He had political opponents executed after show trials (Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, as well as many others); and their followers were imprisoned and killed. He also gave orders to the NKVD to go abroad and execute former opponents including Trotsky whom he said was plotting from overseas.
http://www.russiansabroad.com/russian_history_63.html

Answer: True

No one was immune from Stalin's paranoia, not even the military. Some 35,000 officers were shot or imprisoned including experienced generals. This led to inexperienced or elderly officers defending the borders and severely crippled the military leadership when Germany attacked.
http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html

Answer: The Ukrainians did not want to go with his agricultural plan

They still clung to their national identity and kept the idea of village level communal landholdings. So Stalin engineered a famine by raising their quota for grain to impossible levels. Between six to seven million people were killed as a result. It also broke the back of the Ukrainian resistance.
http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html

Answer: Yes

In the late 1920s a call went out to other communist parties world wide for skilled laborers inside the Soviet Union, mainly in the area of Karelia (near Finland which attracted a number of people of finnish descent from Canada)where they worked as Lumberjacks. The ones who stayed were accused by Stalin of 'infiltration', spying, sabotage and spreading discontent. Those brought in for questioning were never seen again.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0012807

Answer: The title of a book

The gulag was adopted from existing tsarist camps by Lenin, but under Stalin it was used for 'rehabilitation' of prisoners through slave labor. The book is written by, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, a former prisoner in the Soviet gulag, based on his experiences. In 1970 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his previous writing but did not collect the prize, fearing the authorities would not let him back into the Soviet Union. In 1974 he was expelled from the Soviet Union anyway.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9068637