Can you beat them?
The Soviet Union Quiz
Ten questions on the rise and fall of the USSR, from the revolution that made it to the coup that broke it. Each answer comes with a story worth repeating.
- 10 questions
- About 3 minutes
- Medium
- Includes 2 photos
About this quiz
Communist rule in Moscow lasted 74 years, from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to the lowering of the red flag over the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991. In between, the Soviet Union industrialized a peasant empire, survived Hitler, put the first human in orbit, built thousands of nuclear weapons and lost the Cold War.
The quiz covers Lenin, Stalin and his great rival, the Gulag, Gagarin's flight, Chernobyl, Gorbachev's reforms and the bungled coup of 1991. Several questions test stories most people think they already know.
Read up first
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Blog
Why did the Soviet Union collapse?
The USSR had 30,000 nuclear weapons and the world's second-largest army. Within three months it dissolved without a war. Here is how a superpower talked itself out of existence.
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Encyclopedia
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin was the Soviet dictator who industrialized the USSR through forced labor and famine and led it through World War II.
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Encyclopedia
Gulag
The Gulag was the Soviet Union's forced-labor camp system, through which roughly eighteen million people passed between 1930 and 1953.
