The Substantive Concepts of Modern Russian and Soviet History

A few years ago, Michael Fordham led an online project to quantify the substantive concepts students should know by the end of KS2 and KS3. The result was a list of several dozen recurring concepts, ranging from Absolute Monarchy to Working Class.

Fordham’s approach to substantive concepts, which he subsequently developed in a brilliant chapter in MasterClass in History Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning (eds. Counsell, Burn, and Chapman, 2016), focused on terms that describe recurring phenomena across and through periods of history. These, he argued, quoting Ashby and Lee, make up “the content of history, what history is ‘about’.”

 

Substantive Concepts in Practice

Fordham’s substantive concepts list has been hugely valuable to our curricular history planning and teaching practice in our school and trust, flagging up the vocabulary and their (often slippery and changeable) meanings that we want students to pick up over time through our teaching of various topics. If anything, however, we found the original list too restrictive and limited – after a review involving myself and my wonderful colleague and now Trust Director of History, Tommy-James Alexander, we decided the list had to be significant expanded and become more flexible to encompass a greater range of terms that would inevitably shift as our curriculum and its topics developed.

Knowing substantive concepts and their meaning(s) is essential to students’ understanding what we teach them and helps them make connections between distinct periods of history. For example, if we want to teach students about peasants (surely a key concept for teaching about almost any period of history since the establishment of sedentary agriculture), they must be able to make connections with farming, feudalism, power and authority, trade, and the economy. In other words, they must know the meanings incapsulated within and expressed through individual conceptual terms.

This project is my attempt to begin to quantify the concepts students need an understanding of to grasp Russian and Soviet History at KS5. It proceeds from a question that has occupied me for some time: what language do our students need to be able to tackle Russian and Soviet History?

The result is a detailed list of concepts (linked here), ranging from Abdicate/Abdication through to Zionist. This is free to download and browse at your leisure!

 

What it is

It comprises a list of (in its original form) over 200 terms denoting particular phenomena, from individuals and groups to interactions, ideologies and beliefs, that recur throughout our KS5 Russia/USSR course, c. 1855-1964. This list is sub-divided by:

• vocabulary: tier 2 (multi-context, widely used terms) and tier 3 (specialised, contextually dependent terms)
• frequency: high (very commonly used through our course), medium (recurring, but less common), low (seen infrequently)

It includes working (not dictionary!) definitions that could be used to explain the concepts in abstract to students, as well as examples (not exhaustive!) of their use in the context of our course.

It also includes a list (again, not exhaustive!) of linked concepts, illustrating how concepts may relate to one another.

This list of substantive concepts is very much context-specific, in the sense that it is of use to Russian and Soviet history but not necessarily applicable to other historical contexts. However, for teachers of Russian and Soviet history, it may provide a useful reference resource and starting point to thinking about concepts.

 

What it is not

This is not a vocabulary list, dictionary, or thesaurus that can simply be handed to students. It certainly isn’t intended as a knowledge organiser-type tool that students are required to regularly revise from and receive retrieval tests on. Instead, this is really a tool for teachers to ensure they are aware and mindful of the conceptual vocabulary and its interconnections that needs to be introduced and used in their teaching of our course in order to facilitate and develop students’ understanding of its content.

It is also not a static, or by any means complete, project. This is intended to be a “living document” that can be added to, expanded, and developed as our teaching develops. Inevitably, I will have overlooked some concepts in this first draft and missed some valid connections, definitions, or examples that could be included. If you use this, and spot anything missing that should be there (or mistakes!) please let me know!

 

Notes on terminology and language

Wherever possible, I have used the most common English-language terms which students are most likely to encounter not just in their lessons, but also outside of the classroom, for these concepts. These include, for example, “socialist”, “liberal”, “peasant”, and “Orthodox Christian”.

Some English-language terms, however, only approximately express an idea from original Russian terms. Where this is the case, the Russian term has been given in italics and in brackets. For example, “commune” refers to the Russian term “mir”, while “populist” refers to the Russian term “narodnik”.

Other terms require clarification in lay language. Where this is the case, their lay language form has been given in brackets after “=”. So “proletariat” is clarified as (= working class), and “bourgeoisie” is clarified as (= middle class). Where a particular connotation to a concept is intended, this is also clarified, so there are two entries into “culture”: (everyday = byt) and (high = the arts).

Finally, some Russian-language terms without any widely accepted English-language equivalent have been given in their Romanised transliterations in italics, rather than attempting a translation. So “Kulak” is given for a wealthier peasant, “Apparatchik” for a bureaucrat of the Soviet state apparatus, and “Burzhui” for the revolutionary slang epithet aimed at wealthy middle-class elites.

 

I hope this is of use to you and your students, and would love to receive your thoughts and comments on it!