New Russian Schoolbooks Preach Hatred of Ukraine and the West

When some million and a half 10th- and 11th-graders across Russia and the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine started the school year on Friday, they received new textbooks for their history classes. Of these, the most notable is the new 11th-grade Russian history text, hastily written at the direction of a Kremlin aide to justify what the Russian government calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine. Along with the other new schoolbooks, this volume marks the latest step in the Kremlin’s yearslong effort to rewrite the Russian and Soviet past for the purposes of historical whitewashing and patriotic indoctrination.

The new textbook, titled History of Russia: 1945 to the Early 21st Century, serves an obvious purpose: to imprint the Kremlin’s version of its war against Ukraine on the next generation, including thousands of young Ukrainians in the territories still occupied by Russia. Leaked online after its presentation to Russian education authorities early last month, the textbook has been blasted by Western experts and exiled Russian journalists as a wholesale falsification of commonly accepted facts—even many facts previously accepted in Russia. On Friday, Amnesty International denounced the book as a “blatant attempt to unlawfully indoctrinate school children in Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories,” pointing out that teachers in the occupied parts of Ukraine “are at risk of violence, arbitrary detention and ill-treatment” if they refuse to teach the material.

If the book’s final chapter glorifying Russia’s brutal war has rightfully attracted attention, what’s even more illuminating is the entire book’s obsession with Ukraine. Over more than 400 pages, Ukraine is mentioned more often than any other former Soviet or Russian possession. Its supposedly central role in Russia’s own history is unambiguously promoted, while Ukrainian independence and alignment with Europe are “unthinkable” and “civilization-ending.” Tellingly, the co-author of and main force behind the book, Vladimir Medinsky, is no historian, but a former journalist and public relations operative who was once Russia’s minister of culture. As a propagandist, he was part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests—a body that kick-started various efforts to rewrite Russian history and cast the current regime in a better light. (Russian diplomatic academy historian Anatoly Torkunov is named as a second author, but it’s unclear how much of a role he played in crafting the book.)

Very much in the tradition of Soviet conspiratorial paranoia, the book also builds a narrative of constant perfidy by the West and its collaborators. Medinsky and his co-author relitigate 77 years of Soviet and Russian history since 1945, presenting Moscow as beset by domestic and foreign enemies constantly striving to paint its actions in a bad light. The most infamous periods of Soviet history—genocides, mass deportations, political prisons, mass executions—are barely mentioned at all. If they are, they are always bookended by commentary that diminishes the atrocities, whitewashes the perpetrators, and blames the victims or the West.

Rather than shining a light on history, the new book erases it—and nowhere more so than when it talks about Ukraine. When describing Russia’s supposedly “historical” ownership of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, for example, the book claims that ethnic Russians make up the “absolute majority” of Crimea’s population. But Russians only became the dominant ethnicity in Crimea through a policy of colonization and ethnic cleansing—especially after 1944, when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of the indigenous Crimean Tatar population, which he falsely accused of collectively collaborating with the Nazis.

Tens of thousands of Tatar women, children, and elderly men—estimates are as high as 250,000—were loaded into cattle cars and dumped in the steppes of Central Asia; many either perished on the gruesome journey or at their destination, while Tatar men fighting at the front were demobilized and imprisoned in labor camps. Medinsky only mentions the deportations in passing, conveniently omitting the fact that the Tatars’ removal was followed by a massive resettlement program that handed the emptied Crimean towns, villages, and farmland to mostly ethnic Russian settlers. Although the Soviet government belatedly acknowledged this ethnic cleansing as the “barbaric actions of the Stalinist regime” in 1989, that act of historical honesty has been thoroughly revoked in today’s Russia. Echoing Stalinist propaganda, the textbook cynically claims that the Soviet authorities made “maximum effort to ensure that the [deportees] were properly fed and housed.”

Describing the Soviet dissident movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the textbook briefly acknowledges the censorship that stifled creativity in the Soviet Union. But that’s Medinsky’s cue to scold the censored and persecuted artists, writers, film directors, dancers, and musicians for having their plight covered by Western media and emigrating in search of “freedom of expression”—a term he places in scare quotes, lest anyone think that persecuted artists had a legitimate reason to turn their backs on the Soviet Union.

If the book idealizes and whitewashes everything it covers, it reserves a special nostalgia for the supposedly golden Brezhnev era, previously known as a time of great stagnation and imperial overreach that paved the way for the Soviet collapse. The book celebrates the era’s industrial and technological advancements, the Soviet Union’s rise to superpower status, and what, for ordinary Soviet citizens, was an unprecedented level of stability and relative prosperity. When the textbook acknowledges that continued shortages and lack of consumer goods could not satisfy the growing demands of the population, it predictably pivots to blaming the West: Foreign films and advertisements had supposedly spread a false “image of the Western way of life,” creating unrealistic expectations among the Soviet masses.

It will come as no surprise that the book channels Putin’s frustrations about the collapse of the Soviet empire. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to withdraw Soviet troops from the other Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War was “especially ill-thought out,” the authors write. They also question the failure by the hard-liners organizing the 1991 coup against Gorbachev to repress pro-democracy protesters by force.

All throughout the book, the emphasis is always on how an action makes Russia look. Whenever approaching a sticky subject, the authors make sure that the student knows it’s not Russia or the Soviet Union that did something bad, but the dastardly West that forced Russia to look bad in some way. Whether it’s the construction of the Berlin Wall or the persecution of Soviet citizens by their own government, the book’s laser focus is invariably on how it makes the country look—never the plain, observable, recorded facts. Nothing in this world happens on its own, and every action is always driven by some hidden agenda.

It is no coincidence that Medinsky began his career as a spin doctor in the 1990s, and he doesn’t mince words about his approach to writing history. In the epilogue to War: Myths of the USSR 1939-1945, one of a series of books Medinsky wrote to glorify Soviet and Russian history and present negative views as Western slander, he makes his intention as a writer plain: “It all begins with interpretations, not facts. If you love your Motherland, your nation, then the history written by you will always be positive. Always!”

It should be clear that Russian students will not be learning about history as much as about channeling the historical grievances of Putin and his propagandists in hopes that they will support the Kremlin’s goals of reestablishing its empire. Even according to the inherently unreliable official polls, Russian youth are lukewarm at best about the invasion. The indoctrination of young Russians is therefore a clear priority for the Kremlin, especially since many of them will be expected to fight and die for Russia’s ambitions. It remains to be seen whether the textbook’s heavy-handed misrepresentations can fool Russian teenagers, many of whom are technologically savvy enough to seek out and find alternative sources of information despite the Kremlin’s best efforts to block them.

In its relentless attempt to give a positive spin to everything the Kremlin does, the textbook even manages to turn Russia’s increasingly bleak war economy and economic isolation into a herald of a bright future. “After the departure of foreign companies, many markets are open before you,” the authors tell their young readers. “This is a fantastic opportunity for launching a career in business or a start-up. Don’t miss this chance. Today’s Russia is truly a land of opportunity.”

Provided, of course, you don’t get forcibly conscripted into the Russian army after graduation, like thousands of your peers, and thrown into the trenches to defend the charred ruins of an occupied town in a foreign country—where the fact that you’re hated can’t be blamed on anyone’s dastardly machinations but your own nation’s.