Q 01/05

What does the name of Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party's daily founded in 1912, mean in English?

A) News

B) Spark

C) Truth

D) Star

Answer · why

C) Truth

Truth was the name, while the government paper Izvestia meant 'the news', which gave Soviet readers a joke: there is no news in Pravda and no truth in...

Q 02/05

What does 'Bolshevik', the name of Lenin's faction from 1903, literally mean?

A) Majority

B) Minority

C) Vanguard

D) Brotherhood

Answer · why

A) Majority

Majority, from the Russian bolshinstvo, was the label Lenin's side took after winning key votes at a 1903 party congress, leaving Julius Martov's riva...

Q 03/05

The Communist Manifesto's first section calls all recorded history the history of what?

A) Class struggles

B) Great men

C) Economic cycles

D) Religious wars

Answer · why

A) Class struggles

Class struggles, in the first chapter's opening line, make up 'the history of all hitherto existing society'; in 1888 Engels added a footnote narrowin...

Q 04/05

May Day, 1 May, marks 1886 eight-hour-day strikes that climaxed days later in the Haymarket affair in which US city?

A) New York

B) Philadelphia

C) Pittsburgh

D) Chicago

Answer · why

D) Chicago

Chicago's Haymarket affair of 4 May 1886, when a bomb was thrown at police breaking up a labour rally, capped a strike wave that began on 1 May; in 18...

Q 05/05

The alias Joseph Stalin used from 1912 derives from the Russian word for which material?

A) Iron

B) Stone

C) Granite

D) Steel

Answer · why

D) Steel

Steel, or stal in Russian, gave Ioseb Jughashvili the alias usually rendered 'Man of Steel'; before that he had gone by Koba, a name borrowed from the...