Spoken Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide

“Saying it right” is a particular challenge for teachers of Russian and Soviet History.

However familiar we are with the content and concepts of this area of study, the language – from people and places to the names of individuals and organisations, belief systems, and ideas – can often seem alien.

The purpose of this spoken dictionary and pronunciation guide is to provide teachers with accessible and accurate pronunciations for that language.

It comprises over 200 words, giving a brief definition and anglicised and Russian pronunciations for each.

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.

Finding the national in the communist: Soviet ethnic policies in the 1920s

A second teach of a topic can always help clarify thoughts, as can a good book.

This week, I finally returned to a part of our A-Level Russia/USSR course that has fascinated me, and had sparked considerable debate amongst our outgoing Year 13s – Soviet nationalities policy.

Brigid O’Keeffe’s fantastic recent book, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise has helped clarify and challenge my thoughts over the past year. The book is aimed primarily at undergraduate students but gives a superb introduction to any teachers wanting more context and clarity on this topic. It builds on a number of other works, notably including a seminal 1994 article by Yuri Slezkine and ground-breaking 2001 book by Terry Martin, which are referenced below.

This summary narrative, which provides the basis of this independent reading resource for students, is drawn from the ideas in one of the chapters in Brigid O'Keeffe's book. It aims to provide another way in which the questions of class and ethnicity could become conflated in a socialist state, something I explored in a previous post.

Telling the Soviet Story Through Posters

Google Images is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s now almost embarrassingly easy to find a vast array of visual sources from a historical period. On the other, typing key words into a search engine and clicking on an eye-catching picture requires so little thought that it can lead us to overlook the true significance of a source.

Posters provide some of the richest visual material on the Soviet era, giving fascinating insights into the preoccupations and mindsets of Soviet political elites. We might be tempted to use visual sources as a way of easily conveying messages to students who are reluctant, or lack the skills or confidence, to read extended historical texts. But these sources can also give what has been called a “sense of period” by highlighting the nature of how messages were conveyed at the time.

This post provides an explanation and outline of one approach to using posters from the Soviet period, c. 1917-1964, as a tool to (re-)tell the story of the period.