History 12-1: Stalin - Collectivization and the Great Purges

Katy Perry will never be the same for you!

We started the day reading excerpts from Ronald Rayfield's Stalin and His Hangmen. This should give you some anecdotes to use in your writing. Next we debriefed the DeMarco questions on collectivization and the Great Purges. I hope you are starting to get the "flavour" of life in Stalin's USSR. The idea of this dictatorship is that things are often not as they are reported and that any opposition will be crushed. Stalin becomes a ruthless dictator who personally orders the deaths of millions including many of the able leaders who were bringing the country into the modern era. There is irony in the idea that his paranoia led others to be hyper-vigilant (dare I say, paranoid themselves) always looking over their shoulders for members of the NKVD and the OGPU.

We ended with an activity to compare Stalin's USSR with contemporary Canada. We noted that while the USSR had many negative characteristics, when compared to the West, women's equality and access to doctors was better in the dictatorship. Please complete the back side of that sheet for homework.