A Level History Edexcel Chaos and Consent

Pre-enrolment Summer Task

  1. Create a timeline for Russia 1917 – 1991 and plot on it the most important events. These could be political (e.g. The October Revolution), economic (e.g. The Five Year Plans), social (e.g. Abortion being legalised) or cultural and scientific (e.g. the launch of a dog into space). This will help you to build up an overview of what you will study in the first unit.
  2. Read the sources below carefully and find out more about the context of each source – who wrote them, what China was like at the time, and why they might have been writing these sources. Note down what you find out as this will help you answer question 3.
  3. How valuable would these sources be for an historian trying to find out about why the Communists won the Civil War in 1949? Write at least one paragraph on each source.

Source 1: Excerpt from Mao’s instructions to the Red Army, 1937.
Be courteous and help out when you can
Return all borrowed articles
Be honest in all transactions with the peasants
Pay for all articles purchased
Be sanitary and establish latrines at a distance from people’s houses
Don’t take liberties with women
Don’t kill prisoners of war
Source 2: American Journalist, Edgar Snow wrote this about Chaing Kai-shek.
Chiang was no great tyrant, only a pettyone; he failed not because he was Caesar or
killed too many people, but because hekilled too few of the right people; he never
understood his worst enemies were insidehis own camp. Chiang was not resolute,only obstinate; not wise, only obsolete; notdisciplined, only repressed; not original,only a scavenger among the relics of thepast; not ruthless, merely vain – as noneknew better than the greedy parasites whosurrounded and finally consumed him.