Today Russia is "invincible" as it was in World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a meeting with a group of teenagers on September 1. For the Kremlin, the past is also a battle in its present confrontation with Ukraine and the West. And the best way to earn it is to give it to schools. The academic year in Russia began that day and the Government is sending them the first history manual that includes the war that broke out in February 2022.
In the new textbook, which justifies Russian military intervention in Ukraine, students in the last two years of high school will read that Ukraine has neo-Nazi authorities and that Russia is the victim of an economic blockade organized by a hostile West.
The work, coordinated by the presidential adviser and former Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinski, completely rewrites the sections dedicated to the period from 1970 to the present, and also adds a new one that includes the armed intervention in Ukraine. This chapter is entitled “Russia today. Special military operation”, which is what the war is officially called. 650,000 copies have been printed, Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov said during the manual's presentation on 7 August.
“It is the first textbook of its kind since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Medinski said. In it, the authors directly accuse the West of promoting Russophobia and the outbreak of popular revolutions in ex-Soviet countries in order to weaken Russia, achieve its disintegration and appropriate its resources.
"The main battering ram" of such a policy would be Ukraine. The text describes the pro-Western revolution of the Maidan of 2014 as a "military coup", the official position of the Kremlin. The authors question the independence of the neighboring country, another of Putin's theses.
Students will also have to learn that Putin saved human civilization by launching his “special military operation” against Ukraine. Otherwise, Ukraine would have joined NATO, which “would have caused a conflict in the Crimea or the Donbass” and Russia would have been forced to wage a war against NATO that “would have possibly been the end of civilization. This cannot be allowed to happen,” the textbook states.
According to the new wording, the military intervention in Ukraine united all Russians. A statement that does not take into account what happened in the fall of 2022, when hundreds of thousands of men of military age fled Russia to avoid being called up to fight in Ukraine during the mobilization ordered by Putin.
It also ignores the allegations against Russia raised by Ukraine and its Western allies. The manual "conceals the truth and distorts the facts about gross human rights violations and war crimes by Russian troops against the Ukrainians," said Anna Wright of Amnesty International.
The interpretation of the events described in the new textbook, according to co-author and rector of MGIMO University Anatoli Torkunov, comes "from our current understanding of what happened and what is happening at the present moment."
The manual also reviews moments of the 20th century that in today's official narrative constitute fundamental periods for the country's existence. This is the case of the Second World War, in whose victory the West downplays, according to Moscow, the role of the Soviet Union. “The history of the Second World War has been updated, where the role of the Great Patriotic War in the general result has been emphasized,” explained another co-author of the project, Alexander Chubarián.
The new manual is one more element with which an attempt is made to promote the patriotism of Russian schoolchildren. This course is once again taught as a compulsory module of elementary military training. The program will teach high school students to use a lalashnikov assault rifle and hand grenades. Drones have been included in it. Schoolchildren will learn the basics of their use in combat, as well as ways to counter them.
The school patriotic curriculum is not something definitive and will be completed according to the news. "After our victory, we will supplement the textbook again," said Minister Kravtsov.
