Daily Quiz: On Soviet Union’s history

1 / 6 |
In a bid to overturn what he called the ‘era of stagnation’ of the Soviet Union beginning from Leonid Brezhnev’s term, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a series of reforms that infused socialism with ideas from liberal economics. What was Gorbachev’s ‘initiative’ called?

2 / 6 |
The Soviet Union maintained camps throughout its territory where both conventionally convicted criminals and political prisoners were interred and condemned to forced labour. The collective name for these camps was the Russian acronym for “Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps”. What was the acronym?

3 / 6 |
Beyond the official ranks assigned to members of the governmental apparatus of the Soviet Union, one way was to separate them by their perceived competence. Those in the lower ranks were called apparatchik and those higher up,_______, literally “a system of names”. Fill in the blank.

4 / 6 |
________ is a tendency towards openness and transparency, away from restrictions on the flow of information. While Gorbachev popularised the term, it emerged during a Moscow rally of the same name in the 1960s, a notable expression of the Soviet civil rights movement. Fill in the blank.

5 / 6 |
Prior to the phenomenon in Q4, the Soviet Union maintained a strict system of censorship encompassing all media available at the time. X emerged in response after Stalin’s era as a form of dissident activity in which individuals would make copies of censored works by hand and pass them on. Name X.

6 / 6 |
Visual question: A Soviet biologist led a movement as part of which he had thousands of biologists jailed or executed, destroying biological research at the time. The movement was eventually denounced as dangerous pseudoscience but not before it garnered the (reluctant) support of Joseph Stalin. Name him.