'Country of Heroes': Wars in Russian School History Textbooks

• In Event: Contested Narratives: Education, Identity, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Era (Cases of Armenia and Russia)

Abstract

The field of education is one of the most important channels of ideologization and militarization. It is no coincidence that with the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the educational sphere in Russia underwent rapid transformations. Universities, and even more so schools, have become spaces for cultivating ideology and fostering communication with the military. However, to a certain extent, the task of glorifying war and creating a cult of military force is not new to Russian historical education.
Wars occupy a significant place in the presentation of Russian history. Depicting some of these wars as victorious, heroic, and glorious enterprises has been embedded in the Russian school curriculum. In my talk, I intend to trace how the depiction of various wars of the 20th and 21st centuries has changed over the past 35 years. I propose an original classification that allows me to demonstrate that while some wars have always been presented in textbooks in a dry, factual manner, others have gradually received increasing attention as examples of heroism or as precedents in justification for the use of military force. Meanwhile, certain wars have been utilized to transmit state ideology. The history of wars that fall into the second and third groups has been progressively “rectified”; instead of a critical or discussion-based approach, textbooks have increasingly offered unequivocal, often triumphalist interpretations of armed conflicts involving Russia or the Soviet Union. Some of these wars have been justified in accordance with Russia’s contemporary foreign policy concerns at the time of a textbook’s publication. In my presentation, I will also highlight some general trends in the coverage of wars in schoolbooks, which allow me to draw several conclusions about the significance of certain wars — as well as war and military victory in general — in historical education and upbringing in modern Russia.

Author

• Arseniy Kumankov, U of Mainz (Germany)