New Russian High School Textbooks Seek to Justify War in Ukraine

As Russian highschool college students returned to courses after the summer time break on Friday, they had been anticipated to obtain a closely revised historical past textbook that claims that Ukraine is an “ultranationalist state” the place “opposition is forbidden,” and that the United States is “the main beneficiary of the Ukrainian conflict.”

The rewritten model of “The History of Russia, 1945 to the beginning of the 21st Century,” a textbook for 16- and 17-year-old college students, was first unveiled initially of August. The e book follows a singular and standardized model of historical past accepted by the best echelons of energy in Russia, and it seems to be the most recent push within the Kremlin’s youth-targeted propaganda marketing campaign to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The textual content devotes 28 pages to Russia’s conflict in Ukraine, which the authors body as a response to an more and more aggressive West that meant to make use of Ukraine as a “battering ram” to destroy Russia. Revised historical past textbooks for youthful college students will probably be launched subsequent yr, based on a report from RIA Novosti, a Russian state media outlet.

One of the e book’s authors, Vladimir Medinsky, is a former tradition minister and an adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin. Echoing Mr. Putin’s personal phrases, the authors accused the United States of spreading what they name “Russophobia” in former Soviet republics and of escalating the conflict in Ukraine, leaving Russia with “no other alternatives” than to name for a partial mobilization that aimed to press 300,000 males into service within the battle in 2022.

The revised historical past textual content is just one of a number of methods the conflict effort has affected primary eduction. The Ministries of Education and Defense has stated that, beginning in 2024, highschool college students will probably be required to take a category referred to as “The Basics of Defense and Defense of the Homeland,” which is able to embody restricted navy coaching. Boys will examine drill formation, drone utilization and the ins and outs of Kalashnikov rifles, whereas women will probably be instructed in battlefield first support.

Critics have referred to as the brand new textbooks a whole falsification. “Instead of history, they’re teaching propaganda in schools,” Anton Orekh, an impartial Russian journalist, wrote on the messaging app Telegram.

One instance of the omissions within the textbook is its remedy of gulags, the infamous labor camps the place the dictator Joseph Stalin despatched numerous political prisoners and the place thousands and thousands of Russians died between 1929 and 1953. They are talked about as an apart, with no particulars about their brutality.

Mikhail Myagkov, the director of the Russian Military Historical Society, praised the brand new academic supplies for offering a extra “objective” view of Stalin, whose insurance policies led to a famine that killed an estimated 3 to 4 million folks in Ukraine. The up to date textbooks current Stalin as somebody who “clearly defended the Soviet Union’s foreign policy interests,” Mr. Myagkov stated.

“Not a word of truth,” Lyubov Sobol, an exiled opposition determine allied with the jailed dissident Aleksei Navalny, wrote on social media.