AQA A-LEVEL HISTORY 7042/2N [Component 2N Revolution and dictatorship: Russia, 1917–1953] QUESTIONS & MARKING SCHEME|GRADED A+

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 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 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. 5 10 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 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 bizarre about these besieged people, these starving ghosts left without water and fuel, being officially proclaimed as the luckiest people in the country. 5 10 3 IB/M/Jun23/7042/2N Turn over ► Source C From secret telegrams sent to Stalin by Beria, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and Chief of Soviet security (NKVD), 1944. 29 February: This is to report the results of the resettlement operation of the Chechens and Inguish. The resettlement began on 23 February in the majority of districts with the exception of high mountain areas. 177 special trains have been loaded of which 159 have already been sent to the new place of settlement. Today special trains departed carrying former leaders and religious authorities. 10 May: Taking into account the treacherous activities of the Crimean Tatars against the Soviet people and the undesirability of the further habitation of the Crimean Tatars in border zones of the USSR, the NKVD presents for your consideration a draft resolution on the resettlement of all Tatars from the Crimea. We consider it expedient to resettle the Crimean Tatars as special settlers in regions of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, to be used for agricultural work and also in industry and transport. The resettlement operation will begin on 20/21 May and be completed by 1 July. 5 10 0 1 With reference to these sources and your understanding of the historical context, assess the value of these three sources to an historian studying the impact of the Great Patriotic War on the Soviet people.