AQA
A-level
HISTORY
7042/2N
Component 2N Revolution and dictatorship: Russia,
1917–1953
Version: 1.0 Final
, A-level
HISTORY
Component 2N Revolution and dictatorship: Russia, 1917–1953
Friday 9 June 2023 Afternoon Time allowed: 2 hours 30 minutes
Materials
For this paper you must have:
• an AQA 16-page answer book.
Instructions
• Use black ink or black ball-point pen.
• Write the information required on the front of your answer book. The Paper Reference is
7042/2N.
A • Answer three questions.
In Section A answer Question 01.
In Section B answer two questions.
Information
• The marks for questions are shown in brackets.
• The maximum mark for this paper is 80.
• You will be marked on your ability to:
– use good English
– organise information clearly
– use specialist vocabulary where appropriate.
Advice
• You are advised to spend about:
– 1 hour on Question 01 from Section A
– 45 minutes on each of the two questions answered from Section B.
IB/M/Jun23/E4 7042/2N
, 2
Section A
Answer Question 01.
Source A
From ‘I Chose Freedom’ by Viktor Kravchenko, 1946. Kravchenko was a Red Army
captain during the Great Patriotic War but defected to the USA in 1944.
Had the Nazi invaders displayed good political sense, they would have avoided a lot of
the fierce guerrilla resistance that plagued them day and night. Instead, the Germans
proceeded to kill, torture, burn, rape and enslave. Upon collectivisation, which most
peasants abhorred, the conquerors now imposed an insufferable German efficiency. In
place of the dreaded NKVD, the Germans brought their dreadful Gestapo. Thus the 5
Germans did a magnificent job for Stalin. They turned the overwhelming majority of
people, whether in captured territory or not, against them and gave Stalin material for
arousing a burning national hatred of the invaders. Refugees and escaped prisoners
spread the news of German atrocities and how they regarded all Slavs as a sub-human
species. I know from my own emotions that indignation against the Germans drove out 10
resentments against our own regime. Hitler’s armies succeeded in inflaming Soviet
patriotism more effectively than all the new cries of race and nation in the Stalinist
propaganda.
Source B
From a post-war letter sent to her cousin, the writer Boris Pasternak, by
Olga Freidenberg. Freidenberg was a Jewish university professor who worked as a
nurse in Leningrad in wartime.
The siege of Leningrad was a double act of barbarity, Hitler’s and Stalin’s. People
walked and fell, stood and toppled. The streets were littered with corpses. In doorways
and on landings there were bodies. They lay there because people threw them there.
The doorkeepers swept them out in the mornings like rubbish. Yet the hunger and the
killing of people in Leningrad were kept a secret. The censors had a legal right to check 5
all our letters. You could not tell, nor complain, nor appeal. The newspapers and radio
screamed about the courage and valour of the besieged; the deaths were vaguely
termed ‘sacrifices on the altar of the Fatherland’. Our hardships were not only hidden
from the world, but the official version spread the rumour that things were better in
Leningrad than in the rest of the country, including Moscow. There was something 10
bizarre about these besieged people, these starving ghosts left without water and fuel,
being officially proclaimed as the luckiest people in the country.
IB/M/Jun23/7042/2N
A-level
HISTORY
7042/2N
Component 2N Revolution and dictatorship: Russia,
1917–1953
Version: 1.0 Final
, A-level
HISTORY
Component 2N Revolution and dictatorship: Russia, 1917–1953
Friday 9 June 2023 Afternoon Time allowed: 2 hours 30 minutes
Materials
For this paper you must have:
• an AQA 16-page answer book.
Instructions
• Use black ink or black ball-point pen.
• Write the information required on the front of your answer book. The Paper Reference is
7042/2N.
A • Answer three questions.
In Section A answer Question 01.
In Section B answer two questions.
Information
• The marks for questions are shown in brackets.
• The maximum mark for this paper is 80.
• You will be marked on your ability to:
– use good English
– organise information clearly
– use specialist vocabulary where appropriate.
Advice
• You are advised to spend about:
– 1 hour on Question 01 from Section A
– 45 minutes on each of the two questions answered from Section B.
IB/M/Jun23/E4 7042/2N
, 2
Section A
Answer Question 01.
Source A
From ‘I Chose Freedom’ by Viktor Kravchenko, 1946. Kravchenko was a Red Army
captain during the Great Patriotic War but defected to the USA in 1944.
Had the Nazi invaders displayed good political sense, they would have avoided a lot of
the fierce guerrilla resistance that plagued them day and night. Instead, the Germans
proceeded to kill, torture, burn, rape and enslave. Upon collectivisation, which most
peasants abhorred, the conquerors now imposed an insufferable German efficiency. In
place of the dreaded NKVD, the Germans brought their dreadful Gestapo. Thus the 5
Germans did a magnificent job for Stalin. They turned the overwhelming majority of
people, whether in captured territory or not, against them and gave Stalin material for
arousing a burning national hatred of the invaders. Refugees and escaped prisoners
spread the news of German atrocities and how they regarded all Slavs as a sub-human
species. I know from my own emotions that indignation against the Germans drove out 10
resentments against our own regime. Hitler’s armies succeeded in inflaming Soviet
patriotism more effectively than all the new cries of race and nation in the Stalinist
propaganda.
Source B
From a post-war letter sent to her cousin, the writer Boris Pasternak, by
Olga Freidenberg. Freidenberg was a Jewish university professor who worked as a
nurse in Leningrad in wartime.
The siege of Leningrad was a double act of barbarity, Hitler’s and Stalin’s. People
walked and fell, stood and toppled. The streets were littered with corpses. In doorways
and on landings there were bodies. They lay there because people threw them there.
The doorkeepers swept them out in the mornings like rubbish. Yet the hunger and the
killing of people in Leningrad were kept a secret. The censors had a legal right to check 5
all our letters. You could not tell, nor complain, nor appeal. The newspapers and radio
screamed about the courage and valour of the besieged; the deaths were vaguely
termed ‘sacrifices on the altar of the Fatherland’. Our hardships were not only hidden
from the world, but the official version spread the rumour that things were better in
Leningrad than in the rest of the country, including Moscow. There was something 10
bizarre about these besieged people, these starving ghosts left without water and fuel,
being officially proclaimed as the luckiest people in the country.
IB/M/Jun23/7042/2N
