Opinion Vladimir Kara-Murza: Putin thinks he can bend history to his will
So it should not be surprising that, even though the Russian state is focusing most of its resources on its ongoing aggression against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin found time to set up a special task force to prepare a new history textbook for Russia’s 10th- and 11th-graders. The panel, headed by his adviser Vladimir Medinsky, completed its work in a mere four months. This fall, as schools opened across Russia for the new academic year, Medinsky’s textbooks went into compulsory use. The Kremlin adviser, who likes to style himself as a “historian” (though his doctoral thesis was found to be plagiarized), had personally co-authored them.
As could be expected from a regime led by a KGB officer who spares no effort to whitewash and glorify the Soviet past, the new textbooks have very little to do with actual history. Instead they resemble compilations of propaganda slogans that have for years been advanced by Kremlin officials and state media outlets.
Russian students will be taught that both the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan were conducted at the behest of these countries’ own governments; that “human rights violations” (written exactly like this, in quotation marks) in the Soviet Union were just a pretext for Western interference in its internal affairs; and that Mikhail Gorbachev was an incompetent and ignorant leader whose policies led to the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” as the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. is described in the textbook, using Putin’s well-known expression. The history of the Soviet dissident movement is illustrated with a “primary source” — not a declaration or pamphlet by dissidents or human rights groups, of course, but a 1972 report from KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov about “organized subversive activity … by anti-Soviet elements.”
Some of the historical fabrications or omissions in the textbooks are simply funny. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who chronicled the history and mechanics of Soviet repression in his seminal “The Gulag Archipelago,” is listed among Russian cultural figures who “left the USSR in the 1970s and early 1980s.” Technically speaking, you can’t argue with that — Solzhenitsyn did indeed “leave the USSR” after being arrested, charged with treason and forcibly deported from the country in February 1974.
In another section dedicated to sporting achievements, the list of Soviet world chess champions stops with Anatoly Karpov in 1985. Garry Kasparov, who won the title from Karpov that year, also came from the Soviet Union — but as an opponent of Putin and the war in Ukraine, he can’t be mentioned in any context. In the same way, the names of people who had become “undesirable” during the Stalin era were simply cut or blacked out from books and encyclopedias — as if they never existed.
But the most egregious section in Medinsky’s history textbook concerns a subject that does not belong to a history textbook at all — the war in Ukraine. To any historian (and I am one myself), the very idea of analyzing current events as history is a breach of professional ethics. In his book “Outlines of Russian Culture” written in the 1890s, the eminent historian Pavel Milyukov declined to discuss governmental reforms enacted by Alexander II in the 1860s and 1870s because they were too recent and “as yet unfinished.” But nothing as mundane as professional standards could deter Medinsky from dedicating pages in his textbook to an event that is not only recent but also current and ongoing. (I would also wager that the public perception of the war is going to change dramatically in Russia in the years to come — making its treatment as part of “history” even more nonsensical.)
Students in Russian classrooms will be told that Ukraine is a “neo-Nazi” state led by a “junta” that came to power in a “military coup” in 2014, and that “any dissent in Ukraine is brutally suppressed, and the opposition is banned.” It was Ukraine that started this war, the textbook claims — while Russian soldiers are now “fighting shoulder to shoulder for goodness and the truth.” (I am not joking — this is an actual phrase from the textbook.) “The special military operation has consolidated our society,” the textbook asserts, using the official propaganda euphemism for the Ukraine war. Needless to say, it neglects to mention that opposition to the war is punished by long prison sentences — and that, despite this threat, thousands of Russians have publicly protested against it.
Russia, of course, has a history of using school textbooks for the purposes of government propaganda. But we also know how such efforts ended — and I am fortunate to have a personal experience of this. In Soviet schools one of the most ideologically charged history textbooks came in fourth grade; it was about the early 20th century and accordingly centered on the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 — “the Great October Socialist Revolution,” as it was called then.
For me, fourth grade started in September 1991, just days after Russia’s democratic revolution dealt the final blow to the Soviet regime. The very air, it seemed, smelled of freedom. Our school was near Lubyanka Square, and during recess we would go there to look at the empty pedestal from the monument of KGB founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky that had been toppled during the August days. The pedestal was covered with anti-communist graffiti; on top of it, instead of Dzerzhinsky, now stood a makeshift wooden cross in memory of the millions of victims of the Soviet regime. The atmosphere around us couldn’t be in starker contrast to the ideological nonsense written in the textbook.
Our history teacher never used it. “You can read it in your own time if you want to,” she would say at the start of every lesson. “And I will tell you what actually happened.”
Something makes me think the Medinsky textbook will meet the same fate — and much sooner than he or his boss might imagine. You could say it’s a historian’s intuition.
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