Inter: Vitaliy Dribnytsya on the teaching of the Second World War in textbooks (09.05.2025)

A television interview on the “Inter” channel (ahead of the Day of Remembrance, 09.05.2025) with historian and blogger Vitaliy Dribnytsya. Dribnytsya, who began teaching history in 1991, traces the evolution of how the Second World War has been taught in Ukrainian textbooks over thirty years of independence — from the inherited Soviet concept of the “Great Patriotic War” through the “German-Soviet war” to the modern European view of the Second World War as a whole. He separately examines why the Russian narrative needs the concept of the “Great Patriotic War” (to conceal the USSR’s complicity in 1939–41) and why the St. George ribbon yokes together the irreconcilable — the cult of the red Victory Banner and the symbolism of Vlasovite collaborators. A source for the article on the cult of the “Great Victory.”