This year, we commemorate both the 100th anniversary of the Soviet Socialist Revolution and the U.S. entry into WWI. This quiz is dedicated to those events.
1. Unlike many others in both the Russian and international socialist movements, Vladimir Lenin saw World War I as a war;
(A) to make the world safe for democracy.
(B) that socialists should support to advance socialism.
(C) to be opposed by international peace demonstrations.
(D) to be opposed as an imperialist war whose only positive end would be socialist revolution.
2. Lenin’s essay “State and Revolution” would become a foundational element of the global Communist movement. In that essay, Lenin argued that socialism would be built by;
(A) expanding workers political rights and winning elections to gain control of existing governments.
(B) breaking up all governments and parties and organizing society around workers cooperatives and collectives.
(C) dismantling exploiting class governments and replacing them in both form and content with governments representing and directly serving the working class.
(D) forming armed groups to seize control of governments by coups and violent revolutions.
3. Lenin’s theory of a working class revolutionary party, first put forward in “What Is To Be Done?” and developed in “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, held that…
(A) a leading party would be composed of class conscious workers and revolutionary intellectuals.
(B) a vanguard party was necessary to organize, educate, and coordinate the struggles of workers and people’s organizations against the exploiting classes and their governments.
(C) to prevent factionalism and division, a vanguard party would operate by democratic centralism, where all members would carry out the decisions adopted, on the basis of full and open deliberation, by democratically elected party leadership.
(D) building unity on issues, first among workers but also including other strata was the main operating principle of a communist party.
(E) a party’s vanguard status had to be won in the day to day struggles of the working class, not proclaimed by a slogan.
(F) All of the Above
4. The Communist International (or Comintern) was founded to facilitate coordination between Communist parties in different countries. What was the position of the Comintern on imperialism and anti-colonial struggle?
(A) Communists should support imperialism, because colonization by a capitalist power would destroy feudal society and install modern class relations as a basis for socialist struggle.
(B) Communists can ignore the colonized regions of the world in terms of organizing because people living under imperialist domination are unable to fight for socialism until after winning their independence.
(C) Communists should actively support anti-imperialist movements in the colonized regions and build Communist parties within those movements, since the victory of the working class in the industrialized countries and the liberation of the colonized peoples are interdependent.
(D) First World workers profit from imperialism and cannot play a leading role in revolutionary struggle, so Communists in the industrialized countries should model their tactics and strategies on those of the anti-colonial liberation movements.
5. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, the major capitalist countries:
(A) decided on peaceful co-existence with the new Soviet state.
(B) sent over 500,00 troops to fight on the side of counter-revolutionary “white armies” led by former tsarist generals to destroy the revolution.
(C) supported independence for the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa as their answer to the Soviet revolution.
(D) pursued a lasting peace based on disarmament and international cooperation.
(Access answers and commentary by clicking here.)
Join Now