Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Marchant, and thank you for joining me for today's history lesson.

I'll be guiding you through all of our resources today, and my top priority is to make sure that by the end of our lesson, you are able to successfully meet our learning objective.

Welcome to today's lesson, which is part of our unit on the Russian Revolution, where we're asking ourselves, did communism completely transform Russian society? By the end of today's lesson, you'll be able to assess the extent of difference between tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia, and that involve comparisons of things like politics and economics between those two societies.

There are two key words which will help us navigate our way through today's lesson.

Those are wealth inequality and elites.

Differences in how many valuable things people own, such as land or businesses can be described as wealth inequality.

Members of the most powerful group in a society can be described as elites.

Today's lesson will be split into free parts, and we'll begin by focusing on tsarist Russia.

To evaluate historical change, it is key to have a clear understanding of the different periods being compared.

It is necessary to understand what tsarist Russia was like to judge how much change communism created.

So we'll start by thinking about the politics of tsarist Russia.

Russian tsars had absolute power.

This included the very last tsar of Russia, Tsar Nicholas II whose portrait is shown on the screen.

The army and secret police were used by Russian tsars to prevent and remove opposition to themselves.

Leading Bolsheviks like Lenin had to spend many years living in exile exactly because Russian tsars did not accept opposition to themselves.

So thinking about what we've heard so far, I want you to write the missing word in the following sentence.

Some leading opponents of the Russian tsars were forced to live in blank.

So what is the missing word? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said the missing word was exile.

Some leading opponents at the Russian tsars were forced to live in exile.

This include Vladimir Lenin, who is the leader of the Bolshevik Party.

And now we can move on to think about the economics of tsarist Russia.

Russia's industrial economy was far smaller than Britain's, Germany's and the USA's during the tsarist period.

Most Russians worked in agriculture, but the agriculture in tsarist Russia was poorly organised and inefficient.

You can see on the screen a painting of Russian peasants farming.

And one notable thing to keep in mind is that all the work is being completed by handheld tools.

There was very little machinery in use in Russian agriculture, which meant that it was actually quite backwards compared to other advanced countries.

So thinking about what we've heard so far, let's make sure our understanding is secure.

How big was tsarist Russia's industrial economy? Was it larger than the USA's, Germany's and Britain's? Smaller than the USA's but larger than Germany and Britain's? The same size as the USA's, Germany's and Britain's? Or smaller than the USA's, Germany's and Britain's? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well, to everybody who said that the correct answer was D.

The industrial economy of tsarist Russia was smaller than the USA's, Germany's and Britain's.

So now we can think about society in tsarist Russia.

Inequality was a major issue in tsarist Russia.

Aristocrats made up just 1% of the total population, and yet they owned 25% of all the land in the Russian Empire.

The middle classes were growing in wealth, so although they weren't as wealthy as the aristocrats, they still had a lot of wealth, more than enough to be comfortable.

By contrast, peasants and industrial workers lived in terrible poverty.

This meant that being poor was an issue affecting the majority of people who lived in both rural areas and urban areas.

So I want you to study the illustration representing tsarist Russian society that you can see on the screen.

Four details labelled as A, B, C, and D have been highlighted from the illustration.

Which one of those details most clearly suggests that peasants and workers had more difficult lives than other groups? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was D.

If we think about what we can see at D, there are the largest number of people shown in the entire illustration, and they are holding up the rest of the pyramid.

In fact, there are also some written words which say, "We work for all and we feed all." So not only are we told that these people at the bottom of the pyramid are working for all and feeding all, but we can see them holding up the rest of society.

This gives us a good impression of the burden being placed on those groups, workers and peasants, and shows us that their lives could be difficult, especially when we contrast that to the group immediately above the aristocrats in the middle classes who are eating for all and able to celebrate and enjoy themselves rather than work.

So now we're in a good position to put all of our knowledge and understanding about tsarist Russia into practise.

I want you to complete the passage which you can see by adding in the missing words.

The words to use are listed underneath the paragraph.

Now there are six gaps which you need to fill.

So think really carefully about which words would be most appropriate for completing our passage.

Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answers.

Okay, well done for all of your hard work on that task.

So I ask you to complete the passage by adding in the missing words and your answer should have looked like this.

Industry and agriculture in tsarist Russia were inefficient.

Many peasants and industrial workers lived in poverty suffering from problems such as overcrowding.

By contrast, the aristocracy and middle classes enjoyed great wealth and lived very comfortably.

Nevertheless, even wealthier groups in tsars Russia had limited political power because the tsars had absolute power.

tsars often used the secret police to remove any opposition.

It's really well done, especially if you got every single one of those six gaps filled correctly.

And we're now ready to move on to the second part of our lesson for today where we are gonna focus on Soviet Russia.

Communist party rule over Russia began in 1917.

The Communists were led by Lenin until his death in 1924, and by Stalin thereafter.

You can see an image of Lenin and Stalin shown on the screen.

Russia became part of the Soviet Union or the USSR during this time of communist rule.

So let's focus on the politics of Soviet Russia first.

The USSR was a one party dictatorship.

Only the communist party had the right to govern, and that meant the Communist Party had absolute power in the country.

The secret police were used to remove opposition to the Communist party and its leaders.

The Red Terror began very soon after the Bolsheviks or Communist Party took power in 1917 and lasted for four years in which time 200,000 Russians were killed.

The purges which were begun by Stalin in the 1930s, led to the deaths of millions.

Exile and gulags were also used as a way of removing opposition to the Communist Party and its leaders.

Again, if we focus on the example that the purges which took place under Stalin, millions of people in the Soviet Union were sent into gulags where they were forced to complete manual labour.

So thinking about what we've heard so far, I want you to write the missing word in the following sentence.

The Communist Party had blank power in the USSR.

So what's the missing word? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said the missing word was absolute.

The Communist Party had absolute power in the USSR and the USSR became a one party dictatorship where only the communist party had a right to govern.

And now we have a statement on the screen which says, "tsarist Russia had a secret police force, but the Communist party did not." Is that statement true or false? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that that statement was false, but we need to be able to justify our response.

So two justifications have appeared on the screen.

The first says that, "Lenin and Stalin use their secret police to lead the Red Terror and the purges." The second says that, "Lenin and Stalin used their secret police mainly to guard the USSR'S borders." So which one of those two justifications is correct? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that A was the correct justification.

"Lenin and Stalin used their secret police to lead the Red Terror and the purges." This was the way that they removed some of the opposition to themselves.

During the Red Terror, 200,000 people were killed and millions were killed during the purges.

So now we'll shift our thinking to the economics of Soviet Russia.

Stalin introduced modernization policies in 1928.

In agriculture, these policies were known as collectivization.

And for industry, these were known under the titles of his five year plans.

Collectivization was the process of transforming small Russian farms, which had all been individual inter-large collective farms, which were big enough to use modern machinery on.

120,000 tractors were actually provided to the Collectivised farms of Russia in the 1930s.

But grain production only reached pre-World War I levels in 1940, given a pretty clear indication that not all the results of collectivization were beneficial.

If we focus next on the five year plans, we'll see that actually they helped the Soviet Union to become the second largest industrial economy, which is a massive achievement when we keep in mind that under Russia, the USA Germany and Britain had all had larger industrial economies in Russia.

But despite some of the advances in the quantity of production under the five-year plans, quality remained a major issue in Soviet industry.

For example, considering the 120,000 tractors provided to Soviet farms, it's estimated that roughly half of them broke down within just a few months of being provided for use on farms. So let's make sure that our understanding of what we've just heard is really secure.

I want you to study the table of steel output from 1906 to 1936 shown on the screen.

Which of the three judgments provided is most convincing? The industry did not grow under the five-year plans? The industry grew slightly under the five year plans? Or the industry grew significantly under the five year plans? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was C.

We can see from our table that industry grew significantly under the five year plans.

Now, if we notice from our data, we can see that steel output was growing in tsarist Russia, but that between 1916 and 1926 in large part, as a result of the civil war which devastated Russia, steel output actually fell.

But over the next 10 years, from 1926 to 1936, which closely resembles the period when the five year plans were begun in 1928, we can see that steel output increased by roughly six times.

Actually a little bit more than that in the Soviet Union showing a significant growth in industry.

Now I want you to study the Soviet propaganda poster shown on the screen.

This was a poster supporting the process of collectivization.

Which detail A, B, or C, helps to demonstrate the modernization of agriculture which collectivization introduced? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was B.

If we focus carefully on what's labelled in B, we can see a tractor shown in the background.

This relates to the fact that as part of the processor collectivization, 120,000 tractors were in use in Soviet farms by the end of the 1930s.

This contrasted sharply with the statistic available from 1927 when only 7,000 tractors were in use across all of the Soviet Union.

And so now we can think about society in Soviet Russia.

According to Karl Marx, a socialist state would treat all people equally, and the Soviet Union was set up to be a socialist state, ultimately to become a communist one.

So theoretically, we would expect it to be an equal society.

The state did take control over land and factories, which reduced wealth inequality.

Although there were some reductions in wealth inequality, you must also keep in mind the urban housing remained overcrowded.

The conditions that the proletariat the industrial workers lived in often remained quite poor.

By contrast, communist party elites received special treatment including holiday homes.

These could be quite large and were often in quite nice locations around the country.

Stalin, for example, had some holiday homes on beach resorts on the south coast of the USSR.

So let's make sure our understanding of Soviet society is really secure.

We have a statement on the screen that says, "Communist party policies led to an end of inequality in Soviet Russia." Is that statement true or false? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that that statement was false, but we need to be able to justify our response.

So two justifications have appeared on the screen.

The first says that, "Agricultural workers received better housing than others." and the second says that, "Communist elites received better housing than others." Which one of those two justifications is correct? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct justification was B.

"Communist elites received better housing than others." For example, Stalin, the lead of the USSR, enjoyed special holiday homes located in places such as beach resorts on the southern coast of the USSR.

So now we're ready to put all of our knowledge into practise.

I want you to study the three statements which compare tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia.

They say, "The Communist Party accepted political opposition, whereas the tsarist government used a secret police force to prevent it." "Agriculture and industry was not modernised in either tsarist Russia or Soviet Russia." And the third says, "There was inequality between people under both tsarist and communist rule." I want you to do two things with these statements.

Firstly, you need to identify which statements are true and which statements are false.

Then secondly, I want you to rewrite any of the false statements so that they are true.

So pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to reflect on your answers.

So for task B, I asked you to do two things.

Firstly, I asked you to identify which statements were true and which were false.

So our first statement was false, as was our second, but the third statement was correct.

There was inequality between people under both tsarist and communist rule.

Although this inequality looked a bit different between the two societies.

For the second part of task B, I asked you to rewrite any of those false statements so that they were true.

Your answers may have included "The Communist party removed opposition during the Red Terror and the purges and tsarist government also used a secret police force to prevent opposition." "Agriculture and industry had not been modernised in tsarist Russia, but collectivization and the five-year plans modernised the economy in Soviet Russia.

So really well done if your own answers looks something similar to those which we've just seen.

And that means we are now ready to move on to the third and final part of our lesson for today, where we are gonna focus on historical arguments and specifically making counter arguments.

Historians often explain the logic of others' arguments, even if they do not agree with them.

To ensure that their own point of view remains clear, historians can provide counter-arguments when analysing alternative judgments.

These counter-arguments explain why alternative arguments are not completely convincing.

Historical counter-arguments work best when they maintain a similar focus to the view being counted and also when they provide specific evidence and explanation as part of the counter-argument.

So we are gonna think about what this can look like in practise.

We have a historian making the following argument.

"Communism did transform politics in Russia.

Tsarist rule had lasted in Russia for centuries.

Communism put new people like Lenin and Stalin who'd previously lacked power in charge." Now a weak counter argument to this might look like as follows.

"Nevertheless, inequality remained an issue so it is clear that Russian society was not completely transformed." Now it's clear that an alternative point of view is being emphasised here, but the counter-argument is weak for a couple of reasons.

For one, it changes focus from what the original argument was talking about.

It doesn't talk about the politics of tsarist and Communist Russia.

And secondly, it's not very specific.

We don't have a lot of evidence to back up what's being said here.

As a result, the counter-argument loses a lot of its persuasive force.

We are now gonna analyse a much stronger counter-argument.

So against our original historian's claim, a stronger counter-argument might look like, "Nevertheless, the communists created a single-party dictatorship so governments in Russia continued to have absolute power like the tsars." Now there's a couple of reasons why this is a strong counter-argument.

Firstly, it maintains the focus on politics that we saw from the original historian.

Then it provides specific details, the fact that the communists ran a single party dictatorship, and it also offers explanation by saying that this meant there continued to be absolute power for governments in Russia, explains how the evidence does not support the view of the original historian.

And therefore, we have a strong counter-argument.

So thinking about what we've just analysed, let's make sure our understanding of making counter-arguments is really secure.

We have a statement that says, "Strong counter-arguments focus on the same topic as the original view." Is that statement true or false? Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that that statement was true, but we need to be able to justify our response.

So two justifications have appeared on the screen.

The first says that, "Keeping the same focus demonstrates why an alternative argument is not convincing enough." The second says that, "Keeping the same focus lets the historians show off how much knowledge they have about a single topic." So which one, those two justifications is correct.

Pause the video here and press Play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct justification was A, "A strong counter-argument will focus on the same topic as the original view," the one that it's countering because keeping that same focus demonstrates why the original argument is not convincing enough.

Okay, so now we're ready to put all of our knowledge and understanding into practise.

On the screen we have a statement from Sam.

Sam says that, "Communism completely transformed." In other words, completely changed life in Russia.

And I want you to do free things in response to to Sam's statement.

Firstly, do you agree or disagree with Sam? Secondly, I want you to write one paragraph explaining why some historians would have a different point of view to yourself.

And thirdly, I want you to provide a counter-argument to the historian's view you outlined in question two.

So pause a video here and press Play when you're ready to reflect on your responses.

Okay, well done for all of your work on that task.

I was asking a lot from you.

So let's think about what we've written.

So we had Sam's statement where he said communism completely transformed life in Russia.

Now, firstly, I asked whether you agreed or disagreed with Sam.

So you may have said, "I agree with Sam's view." I then asked you to write one paragraph explaining why some historians would have a different view to you.

So you may have written, "Some historians might disagree with Sam's view because some social problems continued.

For example, communist elites received special treatment such as getting holiday homes, which ordinary people did not.

This shows that communism failed to lead to all people being treated equally in Russia and that like tsarist Russia, there was inequality." So well done if your own response is, especially to question two, looks something like that model we've just seen.

But there was a third part to this task.

What I asked you to provide a counter-argument to the historians view you outlined in question two.

Now, especially because we were aiming to write strong counter-arguments, yours is gonna be very specific to the answer that you wrote in question two, but our answers may have included.

"Nevertheless, the state did take control over land and factories under communism.

This meant that wealth inequality between the richest and poorest people in Soviet Russia was reduced significantly compared to tsarist Russia.

Now, as I said, your own answer to question three is gonna be very specific to what you wrote in question two.

So it may look slightly different to what we've got on the screen from our model.

So really well done for all of your work on this task.

And that means we've reached the end of today's lesson, which puts us in a good position to summarise our learning.

We've seen that in February, 1917, tsarist rule in Russia came to an end.

And in October, 1917, the Communist party seized power.

Soviet Russia's economy was modernised by Stalin's communist policies leading to significant changes in industry and agriculture.

Both tsarist and Soviet Russia were led by governments with absolute power who did not tolerate opposition.

And communist party rule reduced wealth inequality in Soviet Russia but new types of inequality were created, especially between communist party elites and ordinary people.

So really well done for all of your effort throughout today's lesson.

It's been a pleasure to help guide you through it, and I look forward to seeing you again in future.