Society in 1930s Stalinist Russia

The HSC Modern History National Study for Russia and the Soviet Union can pose a challenge for Modern History teachers due to the sheer breadth of content that begs to be covered. Aside from the best essay responses on the subject revealing a broad and in-depth contextual knowledge of Bolshevik Russia, it's also a fact that any half-interested History teacher will find it difficult to resist the magnetic pull of Stalinist Russia's more fascinating asides. 

For example, Stalin's second wife Nadezhda was 17 years old when she married the 43 year old Joseph Stalin. And as if that wasn't creepy enough, she was the daughter of one of Stalin's friends and Stalin had known her since she was 4! 

Of course, this is largely irrelevant if your student is faced with an essay question about collectivisation and Stalin's attempts to close the industrial gap between the USSR and the rest of the developed world. But how can we ignore the juicier bits of Russian history when it helps engage our students with the wider narrative surrounding the madness of Stalin's Soviet Union? 

My weakness with this topic is, undoubtedly, the 1930s. I tend to spend the larger slice of time teaching students about the Bolshevik consolidation of power in the 1920s and the move towards the Five Year Plans. The part that I have more trouble disseminating is the various aspects of living in Stalin's totalitarian regime - there just seems to be so much to cover, and I get so fascinated by each and every facet of this intense society that it becomes a bit of a Hobson's choice trying to work out the ones that should make up the narrative that's taught to the students. 

In addition to this challenge, I have to be careful not to ignore the skills-based part of the course. It's very appealing sometimes to just stick to the content and travel through the narrative but Year 12 students need to be able to sit down at the end of the year and write a series of essays in the pressure-cooker that is the HSC. It's sometimes assumed that Modern History students are au fait with structuring essays because the subject is so academic, however, as I've probably mentioned elsewhere on this blog, my Modern History classes tend to range from students who do Advanced English to those who do English Studies. With that in mind, I need to ensure that I'm teaching enough of the skills to support all of my students in being able to communicate what they've learned. 

This means teaching one of the key Super Six Comprehension strategies; summarising. It's easy to associate the Super Six with just primary school and Stages 4 and 5, but it can be dangerous to assume that Stage 6 students are experts at comprehension. Because, well, they often aren't. 

It's never too late to teach literacy.

Here's a resource on society in 1930s USSR: Stalin's Russia. 

And a graphic organiser to go with it: Graphic Organiser for Russian Society.

Get your students to read through the resource and use the graphic organiser to summarise the various aspects of Soviet society under Stalin. The graphic organiser is fairly straight-forward and isn't particularly different to a series of comprehension questions, however, by arranging the information in this fashion students can get an idea on how to separate their ideas. It also acts as a scaffold towards hopefully engaging the kids in creating their own summaries of documents.