State Duma deputy suggests taking Gulag Archipelago off Russian school curriculum

Dmitry Vyatkin, a State Duma deputy and member of the conservative United Russia party, said that literary works that “have not stood the test of time and do not correspond to reality,” like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, should be removed from school curricula.

Vyatkin also suggested reinstating several Soviet-era novels about World War II, such as Alexander Fadeyev’s Young Guard and Yury Bondarev’s Hot Snow, that have, in his estimation, appropriately patriotic content.

Olga Kazakova, Chair of the State Duma Committee on Education said Vyatkin’s proposals were not under consideration.

Solzhenitsyn’s novel Gulag Archipelago, about Soviet repressions, was included in the Russian compulsory curriculum in 2009, at Putin’s request. In January 2023, Putin announced that Soviet classics, like Fadeyev’s Young Guard and Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered should be returned to the general curriculum.