To understand Vladimir Putin's "horrifying" view of Russian history--which might not be so horrifying when one considers that history is always being distorted and rewritten--one need only look to a controversial high school textbook recently commissioned by the Russian government--a textbook intended, first and foremost, to instill a sense of pride in Russia's schoolchildren by downplaying or ignoring key historical events.

The author of one of the chapters turned out to be Pavel Danilin, the editor-in-chief of the Kremlin.org website and deputy director of the Effective Politics Foundation, which is headed by the top Kremlin propagandist Gleb Pavlovsky. Danilin--who is also affiliated with the "Young Guard of the United Russia," the Komsomol-like helper of the United Russia "ruling" party--was quoted as saying that "our goal is to make the first textbook in which Russian history will look not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instill pride in one's country. It is in precisely this way that teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud." ...

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While pages and pages of The Modern History of Russia overflow with official statistics attesting to the dazzling achievements of Soviet economy--the production of mineral fertilizers grew six-fold; of electricity, five-fold; of steel, double--or with positively loving recitations of the quality and quantity of Soviet military hardware, the Gulag is mentioned by name once. And this sole mention is by way of cautioning the reader against the "exaggeration" of its "contribution" to the economy: after all, there were only 2.6 million prisoners (in 1950), compared with 40.4 million in the country's workforce outside the barbed wire.

Among the many eyewitness accounts inserted into the textbook's narrative under the rubric "How It Was" (Kak eto bylo), there is not a single one from the flood of memoirs published in the late 1980s about the hell of the camps or "investigative prisons," where "testimony" was beaten out of the arrested; not a single quotation from Kolyma Tales, or Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or The Department of the Useless Things by Yuri Dombrovsky (another splendid Russian writer who miraculously survived three stints, amounting to a quarter of a century, in the Gulag), or from the brilliantly imagined prison and camp chapters in the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century, Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. The "Doctors' Plot" of 1953 merits a paragraph--but not the next step, which only Stalin's death thwarted: the planned public hangings of traitorous Jews on Red Square and a countrywide pogrom to be followed by the exile of more than two million Soviet Jews to the Far East.

Comments

[Pete]

Well, America isn't exactly innocent of whitewashing its school history textbooks either. You say manifest destiny, I say genocide...

[Brandon]

I thought the exact same thing when reading the article, though I thought of how the Greatest Generation was also guilty, like the Vietnam soldiers, of raping civilians and fathering children during World War II. I also don't think Abu Ghraib will merit much more than a short footnote, at best, when it comes time to mention our current excursion in Iraq.