History as written by Vladimir Putin Analysis by Politico

Politico has published an article that says the Russian leader has wanted a new history curriculum for over a decade and now he has it — one written partly by himself and his unabashed apparatchiks. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

The decade-long wait wasn’t worth it. It was inevitable that Russia’s new official history textbooks would just advance the Kremlin’s dreary weaponisation of memory, that they would tighten its control over the historical narrative presented to the nation’s schoolchildren. We knew this would be the case.

And, of course, the four new textbooks Russian high-schoolers will be cracking open at the start of the school year next month — covering the period from 1945 to the present day — are also focused on justifying the invasion of Ukraine, placing it in the context of “demilitarisation” and “denazification,” while casting Russia as a victim of so-called Western aggression.

How could it be otherwise when Russia’s pseudo-historian-in-chief, President Vladimir Putin, ordered the rewrite himself, and the drafting was overseen by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, the chairman of the Interdepartmental Commission on Historical Education of Russia?

Medinsky, who also served as an arch-patriotic minister of culture from 2012 to 2020, bragged earlier this month that the textbooks were written in record time — a mere five months, he claimed.

“No textbook has ever been created in our country in such a short time,” he boasted. But that’s not even true. Putin had asked for a new history curriculum more than a decade ago. However, it was delayed amid disputes and bureaucratic inertia.

Clearly the whip was cracked to finally get the project completed, and Medinsky is the kind of apparatchik who knows how high to jump when the boss is losing patience.

And what a fitting individual to oversee the drafting of pseudo-history. Medinsky’s academic background isn’t primarily in history but in journalism, communications and political science — though, shortly before becoming culture minister, he did submit a risible doctoral dissertation on “Problems of objectivity in the coverage of Russian history from the second half of the 15th to 17th centuries,” which received plagiarism complaints.

Philologist Ivan Babitsky and a pair of historians characterized the dissertation as a “propaganda pamphlet,” writing it was full of “curious errors” and not based on original sources — not much objectivity there. A top academic council even had the audacity — or one could say recklessness — to recommend revoking Medinsky’s doctorate, but that was overruled by the Ministry of Education and the council’s own executive committee.

Medinsky is chairman of the Russian Military Historical Society (or RVIO) as well, which, among its many great accomplishments, can list the sponsorship of a monument dedicated to Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle — a sculpture that was mocked for somehow depicting the wrong weapon, displaying a German World War II-era rifle instead. Oh well, details, details . . .

Medinsky has also been keen to raise monuments to another devoted advocate of good-faith history, Joseph Stalin, arguing statues of him should be erected wherever locals want one. And as Putin’s top culture cop, he’s been at the forefront of the persecution of Gulag historians and chroniclers. Over three years, Medinsky’s RVIO has done all it can to disrupt the painstaking work to identify those who were slaughtered in Stalin’s merciless and blood-gorged purges — an act of remembrance and memory frowned upon by the Kremlin. 

Among those targeted has been local Stalin-era chronicler Yury Dmitriyev, who has been languishing in jail since 2016. Dmitriyev was convicted on a sexual assault charge that was widely seen as trumped up.

However, his real offence, according to supporters and other Gulag historians, was to persist in the work of locating the execution sites and mass graves of Stalin’s Great Terror — also known as his “Great Purge” — in an endeavour to identify as many victims as possible.

When he was arrested, Dimitriyev was close to finishing a book that had taken nearly a decade to research. It lists the names of 64,000 people who were deported from across Russia and died in the forests of Karelia, working under appalling conditions and freezing temperatures.

In the mid-1990s, Dmitriyev also oversaw excavations that revealed a mass burial site in a dismal 25-acre pine forest at Sandarmokh, where more than 6,000 people were executed and buried in the mid-to-late 1930s.

Sandarmokh has become a key skirmish in the battle over Russia’s history. And it also became a place of pilgrimage — including for Ukrainians, until the invasion.

Nearly 300 Ukrainian writers, playwrights and scientists are thought to be buried there, with all the field work and secret police interrogations pointing to the site being a mass grave for victims of the purges.

Not so for the Kremlin-sponsored RVIO though, which set out to upend this facts-based narrative and blame the mass grave on the Finns instead. The RVIO organized its own truncated and rather casual excavation concluding, with scant evidence, that many of the victims might have been Soviet soldiers who were either shot by the Finns while they occupied part of Karelia between 1942 and 1944, or who died of starvation or illness during their captivity.

Russian historian Anatoly Razumov, who has also been working for decades to identify those who died at the hands of Stalin’s executioners, told me back in 2019 that history shouldn’t be rewritten because it is politically convenient.

“Atrocities come from excuses,” he said, lamenting how the authorities under Putin view memorializing the purges as unpatriotic — an act undertaken by traitors, a remembrance that’s exploited by Russia’s foreign foes.

“We need to remember,” Razumov said. “We are working for people who will want to know someday.”

But that day seems far off. The writing of history is firmly in the hands of apparatchiks like Medinsky, ready to unashamedly serve the powers that be.

And in these new textbooks, co-authored by Anatoly Torkunov of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and Aleksandr Chubaryan of the Institute of General History, schoolkids will be “taught” that Russian soldiers saved the peace by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, that the West has always been an unrelenting foe and current economic sanctions will be denounced as worse than Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1812 invasion of Russia.

“The authors wrote it practically with their own hand,” Medinsky breathlessly told a press conference earlier this month. I wondered what he meant by that. Were there other hands?

And of course, there were. The books parrot Putin’s tendentious arguments in his long meandering essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” where he claims Ukraine doesn’t exist as a nation or state.

But that isn’t what his soldiers are learning on the front lines.