Translated material
Knocks from the crypt
I’ll say right away: I didn’t notice any special changes between the manual and the textbook. The only thing that has disappeared is the now familiar phrase about Stalin as a “successful manager.” But basically, the basic approaches to teaching the modern history of Russia from the post-war years to the present day have remained the same. Actually, the main, in my opinion, controversial theses are the same: the USSR is not a totalitarian state, but a state of a great social experiment that ended in failure due to the mistakes of certain leaders; the main reason for the repression was the struggle for power of individual groups; The West is always hostile to Russia; The reign of Gorbachev and Yeltsin was destroying the country, and the current leadership is putting it back together.
Already in the introductory speech, the authors of the textbook (A. Danilov, A. Utkin, A. Filippov) especially emphasize that they are opponents of the concept of totalitarianism in relation to the USSR. The reason is that if you accept such a concept, the temptation inevitably arises to compare and identify the Soviet system and the Nazi regime. And this, according to the authors of the textbook, is unacceptable, because the Third Reich and the Soviet Union were guided by two completely different ideologies - the idea of national superiority and the idea of a social uprising of the masses.
This logic seems to me uncontroversial. Firstly, there may be totalitarian regimes with different ideologies, and secondly, in contrast to the theory, there was an extremely similar practice: in both states the political system was based on military force, fueled fanaticism of the masses, repression, demagoguery, a strict hierarchy of power, leaderism and the absence of political, and in the USSR, economic freedoms.
But this is a particularity, albeit a very significant one. The main disappointment is that the textbook is once again written as the history of power, rulers, the state, and not as the history of the people living in it. And people - those who build, plow, teach, heal, discover - they are all hostages of this power, its successes and miscalculations. One of the indicative episodes: touching literally in one line on the history of the famous 1966 trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the authors of the textbook consider it exclusively through the prism of the struggle of two groups at the top of the then government - Shelepin, Semichastny against Brezhnev. But who are Shelepin and Semichastny, who knows them, and why do modern schoolchildren need to remember this? Their names are nothing more than “knocks from the crypt.” Of course, on this basis it can be argued that all history is the whisper and rustle of withered leaves... But we are not talking about political science knowledge of history, but about such a study of it when the true subject of its study is a person.
As for me, the above party functionaries, along with Podgorny or Yegorychev, whose names are also present on the pages of “Modern History,” are not needed at all in a modern textbook. It is more appropriate to keep their names in family memory and in publications for specialists involved in the history of the CPSU. They are gone forever along with their role in the history of their party. And the authors of the textbook, based on the “letter of history,” willingly or unwillingly drag us back to yesterday.
How else can we explain that the post-war “Marshall Plan”, as well as Western “humanitarian aid” to the USSR in the late 80s, are interpreted as a loss of political independence and political sovereignty? In turn, the events in Tbilisi in April 1989 are commented on from the position of only one side - the military, clashes with which were allegedly “inspired by the opposition.” And the State Emergency Committee, it turns out, wanted to save the USSR, but showed passivity, “ allowing the Russian leadership to act as defenders of the rule of law.”
And once again about repression. It seems that the authors would like to somehow hide the repressions of the Soviet era, and for this, like a corpse after a crime, it is better to dismember it into small pieces and scatter it over episodes, covering it with all sorts of reservations. There is not a single chapter devoted to this topic in the textbook. Here is a typical passage about the consequences of Khrushchev’s report with revelations of Stalin’s personality cult: “Undoubtedly, the cessation of mass repression was a benefit for all residents of the country. However, the disappearance of constant pressure on the elite led to the formation of upper strata of society (party nomenclature) that were not controlled by anyone.” The persistent idea that, objectively, repressions also kept the bureaucracy in good shape, did not allow it to dissolve and contributed to mobilization for ambitious state tasks, ran as one of the red threads through the “book for teachers.”
We must pay tribute to the authors of the textbook: it is well published, quite competently written, full of numerous facts, methodically well designed, and mostly avoids total, “head-on” evaluation. And yet, especially when it comes to “current history,” that is, the last two decades, the authors act more as biased political scientists than as objective historians.
I recently held a round table on the topic of teaching modern history in schools. And of course, the participants could not ignore the new textbook. So, the teachers and methodologists who took part in the discussion (and there were many of them, and they adhere to different political views) were categorically opposed to bringing modern history to the present day. In their opinion, history itself should end for systematic study in 1991 at the most - the August events and the fact of the collapse of the USSR, if not earlier. And secondly, they unanimously spoke out against the imposition of any, even the most correct, but only one textbook. To be fair, we note that the authors of the new textbook do not insist on this.