Varied and active lesson in which students: generate a list of relevant questions; prioritise their own reasons; role-play the arguments used by 4 different named historians, and relate this to recent revised textbook versions used in Russia today. Contains lengthy excerpts from Conquest and Figes and a PowerPoint, which offer stimulus and a summary of the 7 main theories e.g Ilic and Arch Getty.
Why did Stalin carry out the Terror?
Possible lesson sequence
1. Teacher introduction about the complexity of the issue of Stalin’s motivation; highly contentious. Lots of conflicting views, added to by the opening up of the new archive. Publication of a new Russia textbook – see PowerPoint slide 2 – shows that it is still a live and hotly debated issue. The manual informs teachers that the Great Terror of the 1930s came about because Stalin ‘did not know who would deal the next blow, and
