Telling Stories at A-Level: Chekhov, the Cholera, and the Contempt

Stories, it seems, are in vogue in the History classroom.

And for good reason. Telling a gripping tale, as Christine Counsell has recently advocated, can grip students’ imagination, revealing through memorable examples key parts of the bigger picture in a way which can inspire and enthuse.

Yet, as Claire Holliss and Jim Carroll (2025) have also noted, the use and purpose of story telling does require some careful thought, and can – despite our best intentions – lead to some surprising and frustrating outcomes.

I hadn’t been aware of Claire and Jim’s work on story telling at KS5 until this past summer, when Claire presented it at a brilliant session of the Schools History Project (SHP) conference. But by that point, I and colleagues had also been starting to think about how and why to tell stories at KS5 to students.

The Baron’s Cloak: A Study in Dynamic Continuity?

In my previous post, I made the case for a more dynamic understanding of historical continuity. Having tried to illustrate what this might look like in practice, I now want to turn to one story in particular. That story is told in Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak.

This brilliant book details the extraordinary and troubling life of Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, an eccentric mystic, reactionary nationalist, and ruthlessly violent Russian nobleman of Germanic origins. It follows Ungern’s life, from his birth in Graz to his family’s settling in Estland (modern-day Estonia) via Georgia, through his stuttering induction into the Russian army before the Great War to his career as a military commander in the anti-Bolshevik White movement during the Russian Civil War.

The book can be read in a several different ways: as a riveting story in its own right, as a tale of competing nationalism and radicalisms, as an exploration of huge upheaval and change. In Sunderland’s own words, it is “a study of the Russian Empire told through Ungern’s life” (p. 5), especially in its final years, as it collapsed and was then (partially) reconstituted by a new Soviet state.

However, reading this book, I found it to provide a highly stimulating narrative of dynamic historical continuity.

Here, using several short excerpts, I’ll retell key parts of the narrative in order to draw out some of the examples of continuity it seems to reveal. As I go, I’ll return to the diagrams of historical “paths” which I provided in my previous post, illustrating how I think the excerpts illustrate these.

Comrade Stalin, Destroyer of Nations? Approaching the Complexities of Soviet Nationalism(s) in the 1930s

Given the avowed internationalism of the communist movement, it’s surprising how favourably Soviet politicians viewed the idea of nationalism.

As I’ve previously written, in the early 1920s the Soviet Communist Party had decided – after much internal wrangling – to embark on a policy of promoting national identity amongst the non-Russian peoples of the USSR. National cultures, including language, dress, and literature, would now be promoted amongst non-Russian peoples, especially inside their own designated territories within the USSR. Non-Russians would be actively promoted as Communist cadres within the Soviet state.

This policy reversed the old Tsarist policy of Russification, in which Russian cultural and ethnic identity was imposed on non-Russian ethnicities in an imperialist attempt to assimilate and control. It also reversed much Marxist thinking which had anticipated that, with the construction of socialism, national identities would wane and be superseded by class.

From the 1930s, however, important aspects of these policies appeared to be shifting. Our school textbooks commonly indicate a swing away from the promotion of minority, non-Russian nationalisms, and back towards the kind of Greater Russian chauvinism seen under the Tsars.

According to one textbook, “Stalinist policy in the 1930s veered towards greater centralisation and less tolerance of the ethnic groups [of the USSR] as he [Stalin] sought to create a single ‘Soviet identity’. Nationalism meant Russian nationalism and the leaders of the different republics that formed the USSR were purged as ‘bourgeois nationalists’ if they deviated from the path laid down in Moscow.”

Another, summarising Stalinist nationalities policies after the Second World War, states even more baldly: “Stalin was as keen on Russification as the Tsars.”

Was he?

Representing the Jewish Revolution: Hopes, Fears, and Divisions

What did it mean to be Jewish in the revolution of 1917, and which groups could represent the complex reality of Jewish hopes, fears, and divisions in that year?

In my last post, I tried to make the case that representation of complex and diverse in History teaching is worthwhile but extremely complicated and carries a serious risk of both homogenising groups and misrepresenting many individuals’ and groups’ experiences of the past.

In this post, I’ll make the case that a rounded representation of complex and diverse groups from the past is nevertheless possible, but only if we embrace their inherent complexity and diversity. Using the example of Russia’s Jews during the 1917 revolution, I’ll try and demonstrate how this can be done by accepting and highlighting a group’s inherent divisions, as well as their common aspirations and anxieties.

We Need to Talk About Leon: Trotsky and the Dilemmas of Representation

A huge thanks to Claire Holliss for her thorough and careful critique of an earlier draft of this post. This draft is certainly fuller, and better, for her thoughts! It is also very long – if you would prefer to download it as a PDF and read offline, a copy can be accessed here.

 

As the feminist slogan goes, “the personal is political”. This strikes me as doubly true when thinking of representation in History teaching.

Firstly, our personal decision, as teachers, about who we give representation to in our teaching grants certain groups and individuals from the past the power and right to be seen and heard. This is of course not only political in a sense of abstract interpersonal power relations, but also in that it has become highly politicised, by groups and campaigns today who actively contest over which people should be included in the History curriculum.

Secondly, and more directly relevant here, when we select individuals to represent a wider group from the past in our History lessons, we grant those individuals remarkable power. Think about it for a moment: almost always posthumously, and certainly without their knowledge, these individuals in effect are authorised to speak, and even act as proxy, for others whose experiences we consider similar to theirs.

This means that we need to talk about representation. Beyond just which groups we encounter in History teaching (which is certainly important), whom we empower as representatives of those groups by giving weight and voice to their life stories and identities really matters. (What I mean by “representation” and “identity” is explained in a short post-script at the bottom of this blog post.)

For this reason, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the prominence of one individual in our course textbooks.

Russian Responses to the Great War: Reconsidering Textbook Narratives

In July 1914, Russia entered the First World War. It was a momentous decision, which would ultimately seal the fate of the Tsarist government and shape the revolutionary and Soviet regimes that succeeded it.

But how did the people of the Russian Empire respond?

This post provides an explanation and outline to teaching the question of the response of Russians (and non-ethnic “Russians” and non-Russians) to the outbreak of war. Lesson resources can be found in the link here.

“Did the First World War lead to…?” Seeing War and Revolution in a Continuum

It’s straightforward to ascribe a causal significance to the First World War in leading to Russia’s revolution of 1917. Follow the steps: war led to food shortages; which led to protests; which led to revolution.

In the past 20 odd years, however, something rather strange has happened amongst some historians of the Russian Revolution. For these historians, 1917 stopped being the important date. Or rather, it stopped being the only important date. And it all has to do with war.

As Peter Holquist phrased it in his enormously influential Making War, Forging Revolution, “war and revolution […] were not two discreet events but rather points along a common continuum.” War began for Russia in the summer of 1914 with the Great War. It didn’t end until at least 1921 with the end of the Russian Civil War. The revolutionary year 1917 was nestled within, and part of, that continued period of war.

This joined-up approach to war and revolution doesn’t just call on us to rethink where each is positioned in time. It also demands we reconsider the causal relationship between war and revolution. In this post, I’ll raise three observations historians have made about the “continuum of crisis” and how it not just led to, but shaped key aspects of, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War.

“The First Love of the Russian Revolution”: Alexander Kerensky and the Cult of Personality

In his recent book, Dictators (2019), Frank Dikötter places the “cult of personality at the heart of tyranny”. The phrase, “cult of personality”, invoked by Nikita Khrushchev during his 1956 Secret Speech, has been most obviously associated with Stalin. Yet the cult of personality in revolutionary Russia goes back all the way to 1917 and one man, in particular: Alexander Kerensky.

The life and times of Anatoly Zhelezniakov: Mapping 1917 through a story (that isn’t Lenin’s)

In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II’s government was replaced in power by a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists. In October 1917, that coalition was replaced by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

There’s a very simple narrative that’s tempting to give to students. 1917 was a story of Lenin’s growing power and the Bolshevisation of revolutionary politics. Yet many historians are now less sure about this narrative than they were before. For one, it was by no means clear in the spring of 1917 that Lenin and the Bolsheviks could have much influence over the revolution. For another, even as their power grew, they remained part of a wider constellation of left-wing groups that sought to overthrow the Provisional Government and replace it with… well, something (even if people couldn’t really agree).

This story obviously can’t be told without Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be told exclusively through them, either.

This post provides an explanation and outline of my approach to teaching the question of Russia’s changing political climate in 1917, using the story of an anarchist sailor, Anatoly Zhelezniakov.

Exploring the Symbolism of Protest in Tsarist and Soviet Russia

On 2 June 1962, workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works marked out of their factory workshops and set off to the party headquarters. Protesting against cuts to their wages (a result of Khrushchev’s policy of wage reforms) and rises to food prices, theirs was one of the boldest and clearest examples of worker unrest in the USSR since the 1920s.

Party on through revolution? Politics in 1917 beyond Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs

Political parties are usually given a prominent role in narratives of the Russian Revolution. The textbook I started planning my A-Level lessons from talks of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist-Revolutionaries, presenting a rather straightforward narrative of political contest in which the Bolsheviks ran out eventual winners.

This is, certainly, part of the story of politics in 1917 - but it is only a part. In this post, I’ll present three models for approaching party politics in 1917. Each one takes us a little bit further past the basic textbook model.

"Lost in the vermicelli"? How power really looked in 1917

According to one recommended textbook for our A-Level course, after the February Revolution of 1917 Russia experienced a period of dual power, “whereby Russia was governed by an alliance of the Provisional Government and the [Petrograd] Soviet.” This completely reasonable assessment, which echoes decades of historiographical orthodoxy, has just one problem – power in 1917 just didn’t look like this for most people.

In reality, power was shared across the Russian Empire by baffling configurations of seemingly endless councils, associations, committees, militias, unions, and so on which were rapidly established (or reconfigured) after Tsar Nicholas II and his government were overthrown, particularly outside the capital city, Petrograd.

I vividly remember a conference marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution where the brilliant Michael Hickey, an expert on the western Russian city of Smolensk, presented a paper entitled: “Lost in the vermicelli?” The title is a reflection of the frustration and confusion local government officials and activists felt at the seemingly labyrinthine structures of power during this time.

How might this confusing picture be conveyed to students, and what are the risks of doing so (when the exam board insists on sticking to an orthodox “dual power” framework)?

This post provides an explanation and outline of my approach to teaching the question of “dual power” and its corollary, “multiple power”.