What an ordinary Russian is taught about history

Russia’s state account of history has grown steadily more unified and centrally directed through the 2020s. In September 2023 schools adopted the first compulsory single history textbook, co-authored by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky. What an ordinary young Russian takes away from that textbook and school — and how far it diverges from what Estonia and the Tatars here actually lived through — is the subject of this article.

One textbook, one truth

In 2013 Russia’s president called for a “unified historical-cultural standard” and a “canonical version” of the country’s history. In September 2023 it reached grades 10–11: a compulsory single history textbook came into use, written by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky and Anatoly Torkunov, rector of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). Medinsky has stated that history is always a constructed narrative — a principle that lets the state itself decide which story is heard in the classroom.

The Victory cult

At the centre stands the Great Patriotic War — as Russia calls the Second World War on the eastern front — and the 9 May Victory. Victory has become the central myth of national identity, around which both the history lesson and the state’s commemorative calendar are built. Within this story the Soviet leadership’s decisions are presented largely as matters of security and necessity.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Baltics

The textbook presents the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as a defensive measure. The treaty “allowed the USSR to postpone a German attack for almost two years” (p. 283), and the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of interest is described as a step by which the Soviet Union signalled that it would not permit a German occupation. The 1940 incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSR is portrayed as democratic: “in elections held in July 1940, pro-Soviet forces were victorious” (p. 289).

The documented picture is different. The elections were held under the presence of the Soviet military, with single-candidate lists and a suppressed opposition; the official results were strikingly uniform — for the pro-Soviet lists 92.8% in Estonia, 97.8% in Latvia, 99.19% in Lithuania. The secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of interest was long denied in Soviet and later Russian accounts: 1990s textbooks still mentioned it, but by 2003 it had disappeared from new textbooks. Medinsky’s 2011 book also denied Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre — responsibility the USSR itself acknowledged in 1990.

The pact had a direct consequence in the Baltics. On 14 June 1941 the occupation authorities deported over 10,000 people from Estonia to Siberia in a single day — whole families, children among them. This June deportation took place while the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was still in force and Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were still treaty partners; Germany attacked the USSR only eight days later, on 22 June 1941. So the pact the textbook presents as a defensive measure was, at that very moment, the framework under which the Soviet occupation carried out mass deportation in Estonia. See Dance of death between two devils.

The war against Ukraine in the textbook

The 2023 textbook also writes in the war against Ukraine that began in 2022. It is presented as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War: the fighting framed as “denazification”, Ukraine as an “aggressive anti-Russian bridgehead”, with Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO given as the reason for going to war. The same construction — casting oneself as the victim and presenting occupation as pre-emptive defence — repeats the logic of the textbook’s 1939 section.

The school as a front: patriotic education

The narrative does not stay in the textbook. From September 2022 the Russian school week begins on Mondays with a flag-raising and a lesson called Razgovory o vazhnom (Conversations about Important Things), whose themes range from traditional values to the image of Russia as a besieged fortress and to justifying the ongoing war. From September 2023 compulsory basic military training was reinstated in schools (about 160 hours for grades 10–11). Yunarmia, the Ministry of Defence’s youth organisation founded in 2016, enrols children from the age of eight. The patriotic-education budget reached nearly 40 billion roubles in 2022.

A thousand years of a strong state

Behind the individual events lies a larger frame: Russia as a strong state a thousand years old, ringed by enemies and held together by a strong central power. Within this story Stalin, too, is gradually rehabilitated — presented more as an effective manager than as the organiser of terror. Repression, the deportations and the Gulag are either mentioned in passing or placed in the context of strengthening the state.

Memory politics and laws

The account is shaped not only by the textbook and the school, but by laws and institutions. In 2014 an article penalising the “rehabilitation of Nazism” was added to the criminal code; in practice it has been used above all to punish statements that bring out the Soviet Union’s role in the events of 1939–1940. A 2020 constitutional amendment added the state’s duty to protect “historical truth” and the “memory of the defenders of the Fatherland”. In December 2021 Memorial, the human-rights society that had documented the victims of Soviet repression, was outlawed; part of the archives remains classified. The interpretation of history has thus become something the state administers — a matter of law and institution rather than open inquiry.

The link to us

What an ordinary Russian learns about history at school diverges directly from what Estonia and the Tatars here lived through. The textbook calls 1940 essentially a voluntary accession; Estonia lived it as an occupation that lasted until 1991. The same machine of russification described in minority peoples in present-day Russia still presses on minority languages today — Tatar among them.

That is exactly why the Estonian Tatar community documents and revives Mišär in a free Estonia, where it can be written in its own Latin alphabet. See also Russia and its soldiers, russification, the Soviet Union’s policy toward minority cultures and Dance of death between two devils.

Sources: Required reading: Russia’s new mandatory history textbook (The Insider); Inside Putin’s push to rewrite Russian history (NBC News); Russia introduces history textbook that redefines the Ukraine war (Kyiv Independent); Manipulating Memory: Rewriting School History Books (EUvsDisinfo); How Russian Kids Are Taught World War II (The Moscow Times); Conversations about Important Things (Wikipedia); Russia’s new ideological battlefield: the militarization of young minds (The Conversation); Occupation of the Baltic states (Wikipedia); Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism (Wikipedia); The ‘Liquidation’ of Memorial (National Security Archive).