HIS250: History of Russia

Winter 2009

Essay Assignment #2

Upload your papers to www.turnitin.com (see below) by 5:00 PM, MARCH 2, 2009

Turn your papers in as a HARD COPY to your tutorial instructor at the start of your tutorial that week (i.e., on MARCH 4 OR 5).

If you miss either of these deadlines, your paper will be considered late, and penalized 3 points per day or portion thereof. If you do not submit your paper to www.turnitin.com, you will receive a zero.

Develop a 4-5 page essay in which you compare and contrast one of the following pairs of readings:

• two first hand accounts of the revolution(s) of 1917 (Farmborough, Litveiko, Zhemchuzhnaia, or some other sources that you find, like Trotsky, or Victor Serge, or John Reed or something from the library)
• two descriptions of Russia’s peasants (Radishchev, Turgenev, or Chekhov, or again some other story or first-hand description (Semenova Tian-Shanskaia or someone else) you find)

Keep in mind issues like the politics of the author; the time in which the reading was written; the gender of the author; and the purpose of the author in writing his or her account.

Place a word count at the end of the paper (you can find that information easily in most word processing programs).

Number your pages.

Be sure you have a thesis statement. A hint: “these two accounts are in some ways alike and in some ways different” is not a good thesis statement. A thesis statement should be more specific.

Do not even think of plagiarizing. You will fail the class. Your paper should include primarily evidence taken from whichever accounts you chose to use; please cite both them and any other sources you use (again, I don’t recommend going much beyond the specific accounts).

Just in case, turnitin information:

The course ID: 2450183

The course name: HIS250: History of Russia

The course password: Smith250

Make sure you get confirmation that your paper was uploaded.