Q 01/05

What does the name of Pravda, the Soviet party's official newspaper from 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 Lenin's faction won at a 1903 party congress vote, 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 claimed after the vote, leaving Julius Martov's rivals branded Mensheviks, the 'min...

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 Marx's famous line, make up 'the history of all hitherto existing society', with freeman and slave, lord and serf as the opening e...

Q 04/05

May Day, 1 May, commemorates an 1886 general strike for the eight-hour day in which US city?

A) New York

B) Philadelphia

C) Pittsburgh

D) Chicago

Answer · why

D) Chicago

Chicago's Haymarket affair of May 1886 is what the Second International chose to honour in 1889 when it fixed 1 May as a worldwide day of labour demon...

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 the man born Ioseb Jughashvili a name usually rendered 'Man of Steel', chosen years before he rose to power.