Graduate Students please write four to seven and

undergraduates please write three to five pages.

The answers should be double spaced with normal width margins.

1. Now that you have finished your paper, please first discuss the major points of it and then tell me how you would improve it now that it is done.

2. In this class we read three books, so far anyway. Please write about the average Russian peasant after the reforms of 1861. You may start with his or her parents and go through most of her or his life, or may simply pick up particular aspects of that sort of person’s life. Bring to bear the readings especially in Hosking and Engelgard.

3. Please put yourself back into the beginnings of the Muscovite monarchy. What, according to historians, were some the major reasons that Moscow and its rulers were successful at consolidating their hold on their own area and adding others around them to it.

4. The Decembrist uprising is one of the great turning points in the relationship of the Russian nobility with the tsar and of the revolutionary movement. Describe for me please the main reasons that the Decembrist movement came about, the ideology of its principal members and their fate after their failure that cold winter day in 1825.

5. One of the ways in which Russian monarchy strengthened itself over time was the very dynamic reform tsars. Please pick three such tsars and describe their reforms in detail and how these reforms fit into the overall picture of the survival of Russian autocracy.

6. As much as the Russian monarchy was able to survive and progress because of reform tsar, it was also undermined by some rather weak individuals. Pick three such individuals and show me first how these persons have been viewed in "traditional" historiography and then how one might reinterpret their lives.

7. The problem with succession expressed itself well at the end of the Romanov Dynasty’s rule over Russia. Leaving that problem aside, please discuss first what other principal problems led to the downfall of the monarchy and then which one of them seemed to you to be the most determining.