Activity Six

This activity is to accompany Unit Three of the Curriculum Guide.

Incorporating the C.E.L.s:

• Independent Learning
• Critical & Creative Thinking
• Personal & Social Values & Skills

Concept Application Lesson for:

• Ideology
• Strategic Interests
• World View
• Spheres of Influence

This concept application activity allows students to investigate the historical events that shaped relations between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. Those events, combined with ideological factors, help to explain why the wartime alliance did not survive the ending of the war. The activity permits students to assume the role of the mass media with the purpose of transmitting a particular viewpoint.

Knowledge Objectives

The student will:

• know that the tensions that developed between the members of the Alliance against Germany were, in part, a product of prewar relationships between those countries;
• know that governments will use the mass media to rationalize its policies to both domestic and foreign audiences;
• know that the relationship between two nations will be impacted by the respective ideologies; and,
• know that the relationship between two nations will be impacted by their respective strategic interests.

Skills Development

The student will:

• practise describing cause-effect relationships;
• learn to synthesize parts into a meaningful whole, integrate them, and create a new product, rule or theory by:
  • identifying the parts to be combined and the relationships among them,
  • identifying a theme or organizer, and
  • identifying an effective means of presentation;
• practise communication skills.

Values Issues

The student will:

• discuss whether the events of the Second World War influenced the strategies that the major nations adopted to ensure their future national security; and,
• discuss whether the traditional mechanisms to support a nation's security, such as treaties, military force and spheres of influence, will eventually be replaced by an international body committed to the security of its members.

Outline of the Activity

Step One

Review relations between the Soviet Union and the western nations from 1917 to 1949. Make students aware of the following events:

• western intervention in the Russian Civil War;
• political isolation/non-recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States until the 1930s;
• the lack of cooperation between the western nations and the Soviet Union in stopping German aggression in the 1930s;
• western attempts to conceal the secret of the atomic bomb from their Soviet wartime ally;
• the massive numbers of Soviet casualties and damages incurred in the war; and,
• ideological tensions between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist West.

Step Two

Have the students write an article for a Soviet newspaper in which they state the Soviet view of relations between the Soviet Union and the West. They are to provide a case for Soviet control over Eastern Europe after the war.