Historian Every Saturday: Serhiy Gromenko. Modern Russian school history textbooks (08.06.2024)
An academic lecture by historian Serhiy Gromenko (the “Historian Every Saturday” series) on modern Russian school history textbooks. Gromenko shows how the Russian state gradually monopolized history education — from the diversity of textbooks in early Putinism, to the Historical-Cultural Standard of 2014 (the year of the annexation of Crimea), to the “single textbook” of Medinsky and Torkunov in 2023 — and argues that the principal aim of this textbook is to justify the aggression against Ukraine and to reshape the consciousness of young people, on whom TV propaganda no longer works. A source for the article on the instrumentalization of history in Russian textbooks.
Key moments
- 01:00 History as a science (truth) versus history as a school subject (an educational goal)
- 02:21 Early Putinism: textbooks varied; in 2013 Putin proposes a single textbook
- 04:18 The Historical-Cultural Standard of 2014 — the year of the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas
- 07:00 2023: a genuinely unified Medinsky–Torkunov textbook; the rest are to be banned
- 10:29 Rehabilitation of Stalin; the Zubov case (dismissed in 2014 for comparison to the Anschluss)
- 16:30 The textbook's main goal — to justify the aggression against Ukraine
- 17:45 Targeting the young, because TV propaganda no longer reaches them; militarization of schools