That Pesky Russian Vocabulary!

One thing I've found with teaching Russian History is that some students have trouble accessing the content because the terms are so unfamiliar with them. About a year and a half ago, one of my Year 12s disparagingly exclaimed, "I can't get my head around all these bolsheviks and nosheviks and yesheviks!" 

I was a little sad about it, but in hindsight it shouldn't have surprised me. A lot of the words that come into play during the Russia and the Soviet Union HSC National Study aren't even in English, and then there's also the tricky English terms too, all the -isms; nationalism, communism, marxism, stalinism, totalitarianism... these are new terms for the vast majority of students. 

Like most teachers of Modern History, I try to enforce and reinforce all these terms by teaming up the National Study with a Russian Personality Study (Trotsky), and setting it up in Preliminary with 'The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty'. I therefore hope that most students can at least remember a smattering of the tricky new words by the time they get to the end of all their Russification. 

But, just in case they haven't, I decided to create a quick vocabulary activity that will help my current class as they grapple with their 'isms and 'sheviks. The premise is fairly straightforward: 

• Students are given a wordbank of Russian terms and concepts.
• Underneath the wordbank is a table with a list of some key terms.
• Students have to match up the wordbank terms with the key terms in the table. All of the wordbank terms are synonyms or near-synonyms for the key terms in the table.

Activity found here. 

I put this together because, whilst programming this unit last term, I found myself swept under the sheer weight of information I had to impart onto the students. Which terms do I include? Do I stick to socialism or communism? What about Marxism? Aren't they all basically the same thing? Maybe, maybe not. Like it or not, I wasn't going to be able to prevent the students being exposed to all of these terms in their study of Russia so it was useless for me to try and moderate or censor the new glossary they would be learning.

A nice little bit of extension is to then prompt some of the higher ability students to determine which two groups of terms represent the 'Left' and 'Right' wings of the political spectrum. 

Hopefully this activity helps them connect a few ideas together. Heck, if it helps one student remember one new word, then it's definitely worth doing.