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Teaching History in Russia After the Collapse of the USSR
Tatyana Volodina
Tula State Pedagogical University
Tula, The Russia Federation
| DRAMATIC CONFLICTS and ideological changes occurred in Russia during the past decade. They inevitably influenced Russian education, particularly history teaching. We can identify a number of problems that have arisen in history education, from the emergence of new ideological symbols to inequities between schools for the rich and schools for the poor. In this essay I would like to call readers' attention to two issues. The first concerns the popularity of history among Russian high school students. The second looks at the problem of national identity and how it has played out in history teaching.1 |
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In Russia, students' attitudes towards history education tend to differ markedly from those of American and European youth. Writing about American schools, James W. Loewen observed, "High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last."2 Even considering Loewen's tendency to strong opinions, we cannot overlook his point. Evidence of similar attitudes has been exposed in many countries of Western Europe. In the 1990s, the Koerber Institute in Germany carried out a large survey titled Youth and History: The Comparative European Project on Historical Consciousness among Teenagers. Sampling 35,000 students in twenty-seven countries of Western, Eastern, and Northern Europe, as well as in Turkey, Israel, and Palestine, the project yielded rich data for cross-cultural comparison of common and unique features in the historical consciousness of young people.3 As the table below will show it exposed great diversity in the relevance of history to students. The table, which is based on the survey, compares general attitudes toward history.4 Positive (+) values indicate strong validity of the factor. Negative (-) values indicate weak validity of the factor.
| Country |
Antipathy for history
as a useless and
distasteful topic |
Relevance of history
as a means of social
orientation |
Relevance of
history as a guide
for the individual |
| Scotland |
+0.18 |
-0.13 |
+0.12 |
| England/Wales |
+0.35 |
-0.12 |
+0.17 |
| Poland |
+0.06 |
+0.02 |
-0.10 |
| Russia |
- 0.26 |
+0.61 |
-0.07 |
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This data indicates that students in Scotland and England/Wales are rather skeptical about history and its role in explaining present day society. Many students in those countries also found the subject antipathetic. The Russian sample diverges in those respects. Do these differences reflect a correlation between the type of instruction and the significance of history to students? The survey gives abundant evidence that teachers in England are sophisticated in using a variety of media, activities, and methods of instruction. By contrast, Russian teachers tell stories and use a blackboard, chalk, and maps. Methods of teaching do seem to explain the difference. I therefore suggest that history appears to be more attractive to Russian students because of cultural conditions, particularly those of the past decade or so. |
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The graph below is a schematic expression of change in the Russian nation's level of historical optimism between 1985 and 2001. The period from 1988 to 1991 is displayed here was a time of euphoria, when people were rediscovering their past. Discussion of history, and its revision, surged in newspapers, magazines, television shows, and radio programs. The whole country was reading, arguing, and thinking about the history that had been newly unsealed. One could hear historical disputation in any bus or on any street. Heated discussion notwithstanding, most Russians also believed that the formula for rewriting history was simple. It was to fill up the "blank spaces" in the past by investigating democracy, private property, and individual rights — the three themes that had previously been neglected and that opened the way for the country's future development. |
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With glasnost and perestroika, historical studies began to display sweeping changes. Referring to the Soviet-era schoolbooks, a famous Russian historian professed, "I can give you my assurance that there is not a single page without a falsification. It is immoral for young people to take exams on such textbooks."5 Teachers found themselves under attack. History exit exams at secondary schools had to be cancelled. The typical situation in the early nineties is exemplified in a seasoned history teacher's letter to Teacher Magazine in which he told about a meeting with ex-students. One of them declared, "I would hang you, Semion Moishevich, and all the history teachers too! You painted a fairy-tale about a bright future and now we have to pay for that."6 High school students accused their teachers of lies, but at the same time they wanted to devour new historical knowledge. |
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The period of euphoria came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The graph line from 1992 forward displays the decline of public spirit and a rising tide of confusion, guilt, humiliation, and fear for the economic future. Relatively few citizens cared about the soviet in Soviet Union, but most of them did care about the union. It was painful to consider friends and relatives in the Ukraine as foreigners (perhaps potential enemies) and familiar regions as parts of alien countries. People suddenly discovered that under the new circumstances their national life and memory became obsolete. A sociological survey in 1995 showed that thirty per cent of the population in northeastern Ukraine gave surprising answers about their identity. They considered themselves to be neither Russians nor Ukrainians, but Soviets.7 This response did not mean that they wished to retain communist values but that they nonetheless opposed the breakup of the USSR. |
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In Russia the transitional years lacked the surge of social solidarity that characterized post-communist reform in Eastern Europe and other states of the former Soviet Union. People in those other countries saw themselves as escaping from Moscow's domination and battling for self-determination. Georgia, Hungary, the Baltic Republics, and other states, accusing the USSR of having repressed them, directed their resentment against the new Russian Federation. Russian people, in turn, perceived their country as losing international prestige and influence. |
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The new history textbooks that appeared in Russian schools in the mid-1990s had a reproachful, anti-communist tone. Children had to be told to swallow bitter truths. Revolutionary heroes were dethroned, not only Bolsheviks but all the Russian revolutionary leaders. The texts proclaimed democracy, private property, and individual rights to be positive values in history, even though the Russian past gave little evidence of them. Democracy had not been a strong point in pre-revolutionary history, to say nothing of the Soviet period. The new books informed students that the conservatism of the last of the Russian tsars brought the country to revolution, which was reprehensible. The policy of the entire Soviet period was terror to one degree or another. All the Communist rulers were either tyrants, like Lenin and Stalin, or narrow-minded bureaucrats, like Khrushchev and Breshnev. |
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Learning from these books, students too readily concluded that, as the proverb goes, every nation gets the government it deserves. In other words, perhaps the main trouble was not the government but the Russian people themselves. The way the new texts handled World War II, for example, induced feelings of national inferiority. In the Soviet era this subject had been a source of pride. The Russian people smashed fascism, and they spared no sacrifice to achieve victory. The textbooks of the 1990s, however, focused attention on the victimology of the war.8 They reported that fifty million people of all nationalities died. Russia lost twenty-eight million, while Germany, which fought longer and in more places, lost fifteen million. Was military success worth the human cost, students might ask? Was the war the victory of a brave but brainless people? Moreover, in the aftermath of the war communist regimes came to power in Eastern Europe, replacing the beast of fascism with the monster of Stalinism. Russians might reason that the Stalinist fiend was an improvement over the Nazis, but few found that easy to believe. |
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From the mid-1990s, Russian citizens began to react vigorously against the self-reproach of the immediate post-Soviet years. Questions about Russia's relationship to "Europe" and the "West" arose again in public debate. Does Russian belong to Europe or not? Does it even want to belong to Europe? As Russians once again reflected critically on their own past, controversy between oppositional political groups of "westernizers" and "neo-slavophiles" came to the fore. Public opinion swung again in the direction of nationalism, and some leaders reintroduced into political discourse theories of Russia's historical uniqueness as an antidote to the post-Soviet sickness of guilt and humiliation. |
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At the same time, a wider spectrum of history textbooks for all school grades became available because anyone with sufficient money could publish one and put it on the market. One new text, carrying the unsubtle subtitle "History Textbook for Developing Russian National Consciousness," was a shocking mixture of xenophobia and chauvinism.9 On the other hand, only books subjected to solid expert assessment were entitled to the label "Authorized by Ministry of Education." All current textbooks that carry this authorization may be divided into two groups, those produced with public money and those published under private patronage. |
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Textbooks published by the government try to combine moderate nationalism with high appreciation of Western history and culture. They emphasize national spiritual values and Russia's cultural achievements, but at the same time, they positively assess western economic development and democratic governance. By comparison, in the most western-oriented history texts, published by the Soros Foundation, veneration of the national past is virtually absent. Rather, fifth-graders learn, for example, that in the eighteenth century "nobody would do anything without an order in Russia." They are instructed that "Russian serfs did not try to work hard, while western laborers worked hard because they knew that the harder they worked the more they would earn." Students are even told that "Western customs were good, Russian customs were rude."10 Not surprisingly, texts produced with Soros Foundation money offended many people and raised public controversy. |
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To offer an example with which I was involved, some local education authorities prohibited adoption of a Soros textbook by Alexander Kreder on twentieth-century world history, charging the author with a deficiency of patriotism. Critics asked why he had written so much about Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway but was silent on the Battle of Stalingrad. The obvious answer was that, in writing a world history text, he wanted to avoid duplicating the twentieth-century Russian history curriculum, which was taught to students in the same grade. I was invited to take part in a program on this theme produced by the broadcasting station of the city of Tula. I argued that local authorities had no right to prohibit any books and that the text was fundamentally a good one. The program was live, however, so people could call the studio. To my great surprise many people, particularly of the older generation, expressed intense hatred for Kreder's book and declared that all defenders of Kreder and Soros were the participants in an anti-Russian Zionist plot. |
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The logic of this nationalist trend in public opinion may be explained by a combination of economic difficulties and mass psychology. Many Russians have become tired of feeling guilty, inferior, and indebted. They want national self-esteem but also a careful consideration of their past. Consequently, the study of history in Russian schools has received sincere public support. At the same time, history educators have been approaching the task in a way that develops students' thinking skills. They recognize that history must play a role in reshaping Russian national identity and that citizens must inquire into the past in order to understand the present. They also recognize that no one in Russia is the gatekeeper of historical truth and that students must approach the subject critically. |
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When state history examinations were reinstated, the Ministry of Education published special instructions and sent them to schools. This document affirmed that students may voice opinions that agree with neither the classroom teacher nor the textbook. However, students should support their opinions with facts and arguments. The Ministry also recognized that the best textbooks invite teachers and students to develop their historical thinking abilities. Books like these encourage students to wrap their minds around difficult analytical questions such as:
- Were the events of October 1917 a revolution or a counter-revolution?
- Does Peter the Great deserve his title?
- Was the Russian Tsarist empire "the prison of nations" or was it not?
- Why did serfdom exist in Russia in the nineteenth century, when it had been abolished in all other European countries?
- Does the President of Russia, according to the recent constitution, have much the same powers as the last Russian emperor did?
Students are encouraged to address historical problems, and the best textbooks do not give them ready answers. Furthermore, different texts may expose quite opposite views on important questions.11 Therefore, students get an opportunity to argue about and interpret facts, not trusting any authorities, verdicts, or opinions. |
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After the USSR collapsed, national scholars and political elites began to construct fresh national histories in all the new, post-Soviet, independent states. Constructing new histories was part of the mission to justify the existence of these new independent states. That process has reaffirmed the words of Eric Hobsbawm: "Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market."12 The new recipes for national identities are not original. They involve inventing deep historic, even pre-historic roots for a people, fashioning new historical heroes, and constructing versions of history that stress glory and achievement. This process is an understandable response to the nationalist charge to legitimate new states and can be accomplished partly with the tools of education and scholarship.13 History is a powerful instrument for raising self-esteem and revalorizing the status of a nation among other nations. The logic is specific: we are a people with a glorious past and our roots are in ancient times. Ergo, we should enjoy special rights, for example, the right to be free of taxes paid to a federal center, that is, Moscow. |
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This observation, however, applies not only to peoples who have now created fully independent states. We may take an example from the Tatarstan Republic, which is not an independent state but a region within the Russian Federation. The Tatars are Turkic-speaking people who have lived in the middle Volga region for several centuries and whose origins are associated with the Mongol campaigns of conquest in the thirteenth century. The Tatar autonomous republic was founded in 1918. In the 1990s, its population was 3.5 million, half ethnic Tartars and a little more than forty percent Russians. Because of large migrations during the past three centuries, however, Tatar populations were established from the Baltic Sea to Siberia. Therefore, the Tatars living in Tatarstan had come to constitute only thirty per cent of the entire Tatar population of the Soviet Union. |
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When the Russian federal government was engaged in the early 1990s in resisting territorial disintegration even within its own post-Soviet borders, it displayed a surprising political correctness on the educational front. Regional political elites were permitted to commission the writing of local curricula and distinctive regional textbooks. In the Soviet era, schoolbooks depicted the Tatars as nomadic barbarians who had crushed Russia, founded the parasitical Mongol state known as the Golden Horde (Khanate of Kipchak), and fastened a cruel yoke on all conquered peoples. In the 1990s, however, textbooks published in the Tatarstan Republic declared that this yoke was in fact an alliance with the Russians that protected them from the dangerous West. These textbooks describe a glorious succession of "states of the Tatar people" from the Turkic kaghanat of the sixth century C. E. to Kazan Khanstvo of the sixteenth century. Russia then conquered the region, and there followed a long period of suppression and suffering. From that moment, according to these texts, Moscow was a monster and the Tatars abject victims.14 |
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Both textbooks and regional scholarship, however, tend to be inconsistent and conflicted on the question of Tatar origins. From which of two equally glorious states did Tatarstan emerge? One candidate was the Volga Bulgars, descendants of Turkic-speaking inhabitants of a powerful state that flourished in the Black Sea region in the seventh century. These people later migrated northeastward, founding the Bulgar state in the Middle Volga. The second candidate was the Golden Horde, which Batu, a grandson of Chingis Khan, founded in the thirteenth century following the Mongol invasion. Consequently, in current textbooks for children of Tatarstan, two different versions of ethnogenesis, the Bulgar and the Golden Horde, fight for dominance.15 The issue is profoundly political. As one Tatar scholar expressed it, "If we are the Bulgars, then we live in our own land, in the territory of the Bulgar state, but if we are Tatars, then we live in the territory of the Volga Bulgars."16 The Bulgar origins version gives local political elites an advantage in Tatarstan's struggle for full regional sovereignty apart from Russia. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mentimir Shaimiev, the president of Tatarstan, has supported this version of the past. |
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Nevertheless, the Golden Horde version of origins is more popular among local scholars and some political leaders. Advocates of Golden Horde origins argue that there are many Tatar groups in the Crimea, Siberia, and other places outside of Tatarstan. This inclusive understanding of the Tatars identifies with the rich history of numerous Turkic states that flourished in the post-Mongol centuries and offers a basis of ethnic unity far larger than the Bulgar theory can provide. The Golden Horde version is pan-Turkic and supports the particular claims of some more radical Tatar leaders. They declare in articles and conferences that the land of the Tatars embraced much more than merely the territory of the Tatarstan Republic.17 From this point of view, half of all Russian territory actually belongs to the Tatars, and the Tatar scholar has the duty to confirm these assertions with historical constructions. |
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Eventually, we may consider this debate as a play of nationally engaged academics, but the forging effects of historical representations on present politics and policy should not be underestimated. Historians write popular articles, take part in TV programs, and compose textbooks. Thereby, they may influence the course of political events. Are debates like the Tatarstan controversy only symptoms of the struggle for economic development and reform? Or are we witnessing an early stage in the Russian Federation's breakdown? It is difficult to draw conclusions about the long run of change, though the deep interplay between history and all the peoples of the former Soviet Union is undeniable. |
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Notes
1. The writing of this paper was assisted by a grant from the Russian Humanities National Foundation. On public controversy over history education in the United States and the United Kingdom respectively, see Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), and Robert Phillips, History Teaching, Nationhood, and the State: A Study in Educational Politics (London: Cassell, 1998).
2. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New Press, 1995), 1.
3. Magne Angvik and Bodo von Borries, eds. Youth and History: A Comparative European Survey on Historical Consciousness and Political Attitudes among Adolescents. Vols. A and B. (Hamburg, 1997).
4. Sharon Macdonald, ed. Approaches to European Historical Consciousness. Reflections and Provocations. (Hamburg, 2000), 69.
5. Iurii Afanas'ev, "Perestroika i istoricheskoe znanie," Literaturnaia Rossia: 8 (June 1988).
6. Uchitelskaia Gazeta, October 10, 2000, 10.
7. Etnicheskie i Regional'nye Konflikty v Evrazii, vol.2. (Moscow, 1997), 201.
8. For example, Aleksandr Danilov, Liudmila Kosulina, Istoria Rossii, XX vek. 9th grade (Moscow, 1996), 249–250.
9. Oleg Platonov, Russkaia Tsivilizacia. Uchebnoe Posobie dlia Formirovania Russkogo Natsionalnogo Samosoznania (Moscow, 1995)
10. About this see, Elena Lisovskaya, "Analyzing New Russian Textbooks: Governmental Programs and Private Initiatives," International Journal of Education Reform, 6 (October 1997): 428–433.
11. For example, quite opposite opinions about Russia as "prison of nations" are exposed in popular high school textbooks: I.N. Ionov, Russian civilization (Moscow, 1994), 259; and A.N. Bokhanov, Istoria Rossii v XIX veke (Moscow, 1998), 7–9.
12. Eric Hobsbawm, "Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe," Anthropology Today, 1992, 8:3.
13. There is a deep analysis of these phenomena in Natsional'nye istorii v Sovetskom i Postsovetskom Prostranstve (Moscow, 1999).
14. G.M. Davletschin, Rasskazy po Istorii Tatarstana (Kazan, 1994); R.G. Fakhrutdinov, Istoria Tatarskogo Naroda i Tatarstana (Kazan, 1995); Z.Z. Miftakhov, Istoria. Uchebnik dlia Srednikh Shkol, Gymnazii i Litseev (Kazan, 1995).
15. For example, a textbook by G.M. Davletschin keeps the Bulgarian version, and one by Z.Z. Miftakhov offers the Golden Horde variant.
16. Quoted by Viktor Shnirelman, Who gets the past? Competition for Ancestors among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia (Washington, 1996), 54.
17. F. Bairamova, Nastoiaschii Tatarin Ispytyvaetsia na Ploschadi, Vecherniaia Kazan (October 23, 1991).
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