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Russian History Essay

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History is taught and viewed with bias. The term history is seen through usable pasts has been a theme in our class. World leaders and historians key in on certain events in history and ignore or down play other events to explain certain traits and events of modern times. The same event is history can be viewed in an entirely different light depending on who is analyzing the past. Westerners view IV as the “Terrible” while some aspects of Russian society prefer to think of Ivan as the “Awesome”. Everything taught in history is based on the teachers perspective and how the teacher wants to portray an event.
1) Lee is an American student with little in the way of Russian history knowledge. He sees the history in the lens that some Americans …show more content…

Equality in voting was not achieved however because noble’s votes did not count. The Zemstov had a primitive form of medical care. They were in charge of hiring a physician for their people. Additionally, Alexander reformed the legal system people were now entitled to a trial by a jury and judges were now independent of the governors’ influence. In 1874 he made changes to the structure of the Russian army. The general staff was restructured and conditions for regular soldiers were improved. This improvement helped the Russians decidedly defeat the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish war. Only intervention by Austria and other major powers prevented Russia from indirectly dominating the Balkans and European Turkey.
2) While Stalin defeated Hitler and the Nazi’s during world war one to simply say “mistakes were made” is a grievous understatement. Sasha is using the usable past put forth by Russia during Stalin’s reign shortly after the end of the war. In this Sasha and the Russians see that the ultimate enemy that defeated the Russian state a mere 20 years earlier (German) was defeated under the reign of Stalin. She fails to see that starvation and gulags that Stalin created killed double the amount of people that were killed in the Holocaust. Lee sees the evil that Stalin created and then projects it on to all of communism. This usable past that shows communism as inherently evil is the usable past that western powers used during the cold war. In

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