The 1917 Revolution and Civil War in Current School Textbooks in the Russian Federation

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

Abstract

Even before the official proclamation of a Unified Conception of History in 2013 and the establishment of the Historical-Cultural Standard in 2016, high school textbooks on Russian history were changing toward a more sympathetic presentation of the Soviet past in line with then-Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinskii's highly ideological popular book series on Russian history. This paper examines the nature of these changes as they pertained to presenting the history of the revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed in high school textbooks, and how the state seeks to influence society's perception of these events through youth education.

Author

• Anatol Shmelev, Hoover Institution