Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine: the term "Great Patriotic War" from the textbooks must be excluded

The head of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine Sergei Kvit said that he fully supports the idea of ​​the Institute of National Memory to exclude the term "Great Patriotic War" from textbooks, replacing it with the term "Second World War". It is reported by "Interfax-Ukraine."

“For Ukraine, this was not the Great Patriotic War,” the minister explained. “Ukraine was a victim of a showdown of totalitarian states.”

The country needs new history textbooks, Kvit added. “Competitions will be organized, and there will be textbooks,” he assured.

In June 2013, six months before the start of the Revolution of Dignity, the deputies from Freedom Irina Farion and Yuri Mikhalchishin prepared the draft resolution of the Verkhovna Rada to exclude the term "Great Patriotic War" from textbooks and official documents. In the explanatory note to the draft resolution, the Great Patriotic War was called the key "totalitarian myth of the Soviet period of history", which was inherited by independent Ukraine.

The deputies insisted that "a return to the interpretation of the history of Ukraine from the time of the Soviet occupation regime does not correspond to the historical truth, the Ukrainian measurement of the Second World War." Also, they noted, such an interpretation contradicts the needs of modern Ukrainian society and provokes in it misunderstandings that reach conflicts.

The deputies reminded that for some time the term "Great Patriotic War" was already excluded from textbooks and official documents. He returned there only in 2011 "to please the supporters of the communist idea in Ukraine and the leadership of a neighboring state, as well as in accordance with the new approaches of the Ministry of Education and Science."