Test your knowledge about Stalin and Putin

[Larry1]

This is an online ten-question quiz to test your knowledge about Stalin.  It's ok, but I think some of the questions aren't that good.  As always, post your results if you like.  Mine are here:

Results
80%
Thank you for taking our quiz. Your score is 80% meaning you have answered 8 correct answers from total 10 questions.

7-10: Is your name Lavrenty Beria? You know so much it really should be!
4-6: It might be time to lie low for a while, just in case there's another purge around the corner...
1-3: I guess you'll soon be off to the Gulag for a spot of reeducation...

http://www.rferl.org/section/quizzes/2871.html

If enough people like the idea of a Stalin quiz but want a longer and better one, let me know and I will create one.

Just under the Stalin quiz there is a Putin quiz.  I whiffed on that one:

Results
40%
Thank you for taking our quiz. Your score is 40% meaning you have answered 4 correct answers from total 10 questions.

7-10: If you're not in the siloviki, you should be!

4-6: You might have done enough to get a decent middle-management role with Gazprom...

1-3: It looks like you could soon be hanging out with Pussy Riot in a remote prison camp...
You may start the quiz again by clicking the button below.

Hmmm, I wouldn't mind hanging out with the lovely Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot.  I'd prefer to do it on a nice beach rather than the penal colony in Mordovia where she is languishing away.

[mendeleyev]

Stalin I know pretty well, however I messed up on the poetry question and the source of the quip about his height. I knew that he wrote poetry, idolized several popular Russian poets that he eventually turned against, and that his friends called him Koba--but that wasn't the name connected to his poetry apparently.

      Results        80%
   Thank you for taking our quiz. Your score is 80% meaning you have scored 8 correct answers from a total of 10 questions.



Now on to Putin:

      Results        90%
   Thank you for taking our quiz. Your score is 90% meaning you have answered 9 correct answers from total 10 questions.
 
 7-10: If you're not in the siloviki, you should be!


Perhaps it was unfair for me to take the Putin quiz as I've covered him as a journalist. The dog names, his wife, his former ranks and KGB postings, etc, were very familiar. One of the things a journalist does it prepare "backgrounders" and "obits" on important figures for use when needed. I'd done both for Mr. Putin. The question that threw me was about cooking. I knew that his grandfather was a chef for several of those names, but one caught me by surprise and I thought "no way." I was wrong.

[Slumba]

60% on Stalin, 50% on Putin.  Clearly I need to do better...

[jone]

Larry (and Mendy),

I had a 70% as well on Stalin.  Thought he wrote poetry under his Party Name, Kova (I mean Koba.)
Hehe.

Also got the stroke question wrong - didn't know that they all stood around after he had had the stroke.  And I read some pretty good Stalin books too.

Lana Peters lived in Wisconsin about 40 minutes from where I grew up.  We Badgers were all comparing notes last week.  She was a recluse but everyone knew who she was.  (She died last year.)

Great quizzes.  Keep 'em coming.

-j

[mendeleyev]

Also got the stroke question wrong - didn't know that they all stood around after he had had the stroke.  And I read some pretty good Stalin books too.

Recently released archives tell a story somewhat different from previous versions of his stroke and how it was discovered. As he had arrested his best physicians in the "Doctors Plot" the medical condition given him was by junior physicians who traveled to prison to consult with his primary doctors who were awaiting trial.

Some accounts say that Beria jumped for joy until Stalin opened his eyes upon which the evil bastard got down on his knees and begged forgiveness. Whether or not that is true, Stalin has installed so much fear even upon those in his inner circle that it can be safely concluded that the men of his innermost circle which included Khrushchev, Beria, Malenkov and Bulganin, were not exactly rushing around to save him. Khrushchev would claim that he was poisoned with rat poison and that claim helped him eliminate Beria, but some recent research in 2009-2010 casts doubt on the rat poison theory.

Whatever the cause, Stalin had just begun another round of purges and this time he was arresting those very close to himself and the idea that he was poisoned by those close to him is a very plausible theory.