Wednesday, July 28, 2004

A different sort of quiz

and one that really brings meaning to the term Anger of Compassion, which is the website that pointed me to it.


You correctly answered...

25 %

of the questions. This marks you as

an Intermediate
student of Communist atrocities.


It says something about our knowledge of things that actually matter, if a score of 25% marks me as an Intermediate instead of Pretty Clueless. Take the test and read the answers.


Sample:

EXCLUSIVE of the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, the numbered of "kulaks," or better-off peasants (and their families) murdered by Stalin numbered about:

A) Only a few thousand village leaders - almost all of the "kulak" fatalities actually occurred during the Ukrainian famine following the dekulakization campaign.

B) 100,000 - about as many Japanese who died from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

C) 250,000 - about equal to the number of Gypsies exterminated by Hitler.

D) 1.5 million - about as many as the Turks killed in the Armenian holocaust.

E) 2 million - about as many as killed by Pol Pot in Cambodia.

 
F) 6.5 million - somewhat more than the number of Jews murdered by Hitler.


Your answer, C, was incorrect. The correct answer was F.

"Dekulakization" was truly the crime of the century - for not only did it exterminate on a Hitlerian scale, but it also largely escaped the world's attention then and since. The mass deportations of kulak families preceded forced collectivization - it was apparently directed at "decapitating" peasant communities of any leaders who might organize resistance to Stalin's policies. "Kulaks," incidentally, were often very poor - an extra cow or a careless word spoken to a Party member were easy ways to earn this deadly label. While Soviet sources long denied the Ukrainian famine, they have always admitted that entire kulak families were "liquidated" on a large scale. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.



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