How Russia rewrites history in textbooks

History-as-science versus history-as-school-subject

First, a distinction that Gromenko himself (a co-author of Ukrainian textbooks) makes: science strives for truth, while the school subject of history is multifunctional and, alongside its cognitive purpose, carries an educational one^[1]. The question, then, is not whether a textbook should “educate,” but what exactly and in whose interest it educates. The Russian answer to this question is what turns the textbook into a weapon.

From diversity to monopoly

Under early Putinism there was no direct coercion to uniformity: various textbooks were published — from openly pro-Stalin ones (condemned by the liberal public) to liberal ones (criticized by the “patriots” and by Putin himself). In 2013 Putin for the first time proposed a single textbook; after public criticism, instead of it, in 2014 a single historical-cultural standard appeared — tellingly, in the very year of the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas^[2]. At the same time a coalition of “statists and patriots,” with state support, began to push through its agenda.

The final step was taken by the full-scale war. At the end of summer 2023 a genuinely single textbook by Medinsky and Torkunov appeared, and the rest are being prepared for a ban. Medinsky and Torkunov did not write the textbook themselves — they merely signed off on the concept; which of the pair is the principal is clear from whose surname recurs^[3].

The rehabilitation of Stalin

The most precise “thermometer” of these changes is the attitude toward Soviet repressions. In the 1990s–2000s no one doubted that the repressions were an evil; some textbooks were emphatically anti-Stalinist, and one even compared the annexation of Crimea to Nazi Germany’s Anschluss of Austria — for which historian Andrei Zubov was dismissed from his post in 2014 and emigrated^[4]. The new textbooks, by contrast, present the Soviet period positively and extol Stalin.

Why: to justify the war and capture the young

The main — perhaps the only substantial — reason for the appearance of the textbook in precisely this edition, Gromenko stresses, is the justification of Russian aggression against Ukraine^[5]. Imperial “great-power-ism” here is merely the backdrop.

The intended audience is no accident either. Classic television propaganda no longer works on the young — they live on the internet, not in front of the TV. So the state moves on the young from two sides: it brings Telegram and electronic media under control (a wave of arrests of channel administrators on fabricated “economic” charges) and militarizes schools and universities^[6].

A separate front: military history

Alongside the general textbooks, Russia has opened a separate front — military history as a direct instrument of mobilization. As military historian Vasyl Pavlov observes, after the invasion the restraints were removed: this is directed by the same Medinsky (head of the Russian Military Historical Society), and already in 2024–2025 three new textbooks, “Military History of Russia,” appeared for various grades^[7].

The logic of the narrative is to weld into a single whole the military history from the Principality of Muscovy to the present-day Russian Federation, even though these entities at times fought one another. Only the line leading to a centralized state is selected; national features are erased (with disdain for the Finno-Ugric peoples — the Chuvash, the Mordvins), and the participation of Ukrainians in the Second World War is simply discarded^[8]. This is the same appropriated “single” history as in the renaming of Muscovy to “Russia”.

All of this is reinforced by an international campaign: for the 80th anniversary of the “victory,” Russia toured exhibitions around the world in several languages, in which Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, and people of the Baltic states are either absent or shown as “collaborators”; short translations of the textbook are distributed through embassies^[9].

Not only school: Naryshkin’s academic multivolume

The same state machine works not only at the school level. In 2024 the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Historical Society began publishing the newest synthesizing narrative — “The History of Russia” in 20 volumes (29 books). And tellingly, who heads its editorial board: Sergei Naryshkin — formally a Doctor of Economic Sciences, but in fact the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (since October 2016) and a permanent member of the Security Council, head of the Russian Historical Society since 2012, a person under EU, US, and British sanctions. The very composition of the leadership, notes historian Vitaliy Dribnytsya, who has dissected this edition, “inspires great mistrust”: the editorial board is rounded out by Academician Chubaryan — the same one who wrote the school textbooks for the senior grades together with Medinsky^[14]. In other words, the top of the academic project and the top of the school one are effectively the same people, and Naryshkin, according to the reviewer, “with a magic kick” hastily assembled the edition in order to entrench the required ideologemes in the academic course as well^[14].

The methodology of appropriation here is the same as in the renaming of Rus’ to “Russia”, only dressed in academic apparatus. The edition itself cites the golden rule — the history of a state is written within its present-day borders — and immediately violates it, drawing the entire history of Eastern Europe, centered on Kyiv, into “the history of Russia.” Yet the center of statehood, as even the text itself admits, was outside the territory of the present-day Russian Federation: the future Russian lands were the outskirts of the Kyivan state^[15]. The technique is not new — back in the 19th century a Czech philologist aptly described it: Russians call everything East Slavic “Russian” in order ultimately to declare everything Slavic Russian.

The most eloquent proof is in the very titles of the chapters. The third chapter of Volume 2 is called “The Steppes of Eastern Europe, the North Caucasus, Crimea, and the South-Eastern Baltic.” Crimea is already written into the title. Crimea is internationally recognized territory of Ukraine, occupied by Russia; the academics, Dribnytsya stresses, have no right whatsoever — historical, moral, or political — to write Crimea into their history^[16]. The fact that the occupied peninsula made it into the title of an academic volume even before it came up in the text lays bare the very logic of the project: the borders are written not according to history but according to the front line.

Paradoxically, the academic text sometimes refutes its own school textbooks. The edition (p. 246) states plainly that the hypothesis of Ladoga as the “first capital of Northern Rus’” has not been confirmed, and that Novgorod was dependent on Kyiv from the time of Princess Olha — whereas “the first capital, Ladoga/Novgorod” is built precisely into the Medinsky school textbooks. In the same place (p. 253) it is acknowledged that the Moscow River basin in the 10th century remained “deserted,” and that the Slavs arrived there late^[17]. In other words, even under the editorship of the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, the specialist authors have not yet fully “lain down” before the anti-scientific propositions Medinsky disseminates — and this gap between the academic text and the school myth is precisely what exposes where science ends and propaganda begins.

The scheme that the textbooks reproduce

The textbook does not invent its narrative from scratch — it reproduces a historiographical scheme. And tellingly, the bearers of this scheme articulate its mechanics themselves. In a street conversation, Vitaliy Dribnytsya’s interlocutor, who presents himself as a credentialed historian and adherent of the “Eurasian” conception, admits: Ukrainian textbooks reproduce the scheme of Hrushevsky, while his own follows the scheme of Solovyov and Klyuchevsky, that is, the “history of the Russian state”^[10].

It is from precisely this that Dribnytsya derives the flaw of the Russian scheme. The history of a state, he notes, is written within the borders that existed at the moment of writing: when Solovyov and Klyuchevsky composed their “history of Russia,” the territory of Ukraine was mostly part of the empire — so the scheme drew it into the Russian narrative. Ukraine has long been outside those borders, but the scheme has remained unchanged^[11]. Under a normal geographical principle of writing history this is not done — yet the Russian scheme violates it, declaring as part of “its own” history a Rus’ centered on Kyiv, while the future Russian lands were its periphery^[12]. The very term “Rus’,” according to Dribnytsya’s observation (he draws on Boris Rybakov’s distinction “Rus’ in the narrow and broad sense”), begins to be applied to the territories of present-day Russia only from the second half of the 15th century — that is, as a later territorial claim, not as an original self-designation^[13].

This is the same operation of appropriating continuity that is examined in detail in “How Rus’ became Russia” and “Between Rus’ and the Cossacks”. The school textbook is merely the last rung, on which this armchair scheme reaches the child as an “obvious” truth.

Where the scheme came from: science from the 19th century versus Tatishchev

To understand why the scheme is exactly as it is, it is worth recalling how it took shape. In a lecture on the most widespread Russian myths, Dribnytsya recalls a banal but, for Moscow, inconvenient fact: all four manuscripts of the “Tale of Bygone Years” — the Laurentian, the Hypatian, and the two Novgorodian ones — historically ended up on the territory of present-day Russia, so it was Russians who first set about studying their history “as a state” on the basis of these chronicles^[18]. And, most importantly, they did so before history became a science. For history as a discipline with source criticism took shape only from the beginning of the 19th century, after the works of the German historian Leopold von Ranke; Tatishchev and Karamzin, who had undertaken to interpret the chronicles earlier, worked in a still pre-scientific manner^[18].

Later, the scholarly historians Solovyov and Klyuchevsky, seeing in the chronicles the Rurikid dynasty that had “settled” in Kyiv, derived the idea that Russian statehood originated on the banks of the Dnipro. Within the borders of the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th century this was normal, Dribnytsya stresses — what is abnormal is that these chronicles are read the same way today, when Ukraine has long been outside those borders^[19].

A subtlety easy to miss: the various Russian myths were born in different eras. Imperial historiography of the late 19th century treated the Eastern Slavs as a single “Russian people” of three tribes — Great Russians, Little Russians, and Belarusians. But the myth familiar to us of the “cradle of three fraternal peoples” is already an invention of Soviet historiography, which, paradoxically, did acknowledge the separateness of Ukrainians and Belarusians. Contemporary Russian historiography, according to Dribnytsya’s observation, has slid even lower than the Soviet one — down to imperial savagery, as if the Ukrainian people did not exist at all^[20]. This is the same “rollback” that is visible in the renaming of Rus’ to “Russia”: the textbook merely delivers it to the schoolchild as an axiom.

What this means

Russian historical myths are not a collection of random errors but a product of the state machine, which every year reaches a new generation through the school. To understand how this factory works — the single textbook, the historical-cultural standard, the rehabilitation of Stalin — is to see the source of the myths themselves, not merely their consequences. And to see that this educational policy directly serves the war.