History is (re)written by the Vladimirs
I cannot express how disappointed I am that I there are no Viktors associated with this story...
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues. The UK news is occasionally punctuated by reports of missiles killing civilians, slow developments on the battlefront, and pledges of “lethal aid”.
Amidst this dribble of news came reports of new history textbooks published in Russia. Russia’s new schoolbook attempts to justify war in Ukraine, headlined the BBC.
Long-time readers may remember the early months of the war when we took a look at how Russia was using history education as a weapon in its armory.
But the new history textbooks tell us something surprising about the potential direction of Russian education. And Russia’s iron grip on what’s taught in schools has an unexpected mirror image in the West.
One book to rule them all
Until recently, there had been several history textbooks available in Russia. While publishers compete for school sales, Prosveshcheniye Publishers is the runaway market leader. (Arkady Rotemberg, the company’s billionaire owner, has a close relationship with Vladimir Putin.)
But the move to consolidate the History curriculum has been accompanied by a more centralised approach to publishing. At a press launch for the new textbooks, the head of the Ministry of Education turned the topic from history to economics:
Kravtsov named the price of the new textbook - 849 rubles, 20% cheaper than the previous edition. “We used to have a paperback textbook, but here it is a hardcover. Cheaper due to the fact that the textbook is state-owned, the rights belong to the state[.]”
You might imagine that Rotemberg would be disappointed to lose a decent money-spinner. But countervailing the reward is the risk if anything in the textbook is wrong1. Out-of-favour oligarchs braving multi-storey buildings are prone to sudden fatal encounters with gravity.
Is the Soviet-era textbook dead?
If you’ll permit a stereotype, Soviet-style textbooks tend to be dense and formal, concerned with the imparting of facts and statistics. Questions are typically direct and absolute, prompting a reflexive recounting of details, rather than reflective and asking students to present evidence for their own thoughts.
But this book may be different, as Yk24 unironically reports:
The manual contains many microstories, curious facts, rare illustrations, dramatically fewer numbers, dates, dry statistics, more stories about people, real events. All this is done to make the study of history easier.
[…]
The new textbook is also designed to teach young people to compare information, analyze it objectively and draw their own conclusions. In addition, it will help schoolchildren not to become victims of numerous fakes from the Internet.
These microstories include stirring biographies of heroic figures, such as this account of the superlative Alexander Zhikharev:
Always been the best. One of the best students in the school. The best cadet […]. The best in special disciplines. The best in foreign languages. The best in sports […]. The best on a halt: wrote poems and songs. After college, he became the commander of the best platoon in the elite Pskov special forces brigade. And he died as the best of heroes: in the very first days of the NMD, in a desperate battle with superior enemy forces, his platoon withstood 10 hours of continuous assault and did not retreat.
Which is an unusual way of admitting to potential conscripts that the Russian military hardware is old and inadequate, often dating back to the Soviet era.
But that’s probably not the conclusion Russia wants schoolchildren to draw. Especially since these books will be sent to the occupied territories in Ukraine to be taught alongside the imported Russian curriculum.
The identity politics club
Russia isn’t the only country asserting a tighter grip on history textbooks.
Having become a friendship with benefits partnership with no limits, China is rewriting Hong Kong’s colonial history. This is a key part of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to foster a Chinese identity in Hong Kong. This is only to be expected of a country with such determined censorship that protesters resorted to holding aloft blank sheets of paper after slogans were outlawed.
But it might come as a surprise just how authoritarian control over textbooks is becoming in America.
Back in June 2022 I wrote about how Ron DeSantis was getting all hot under the collar about woke Mathematics. His reaction to the traces of Social Emotional Learning was a comical amount of bluster and a foundation for a - now failing - campaign to become the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race.
Earlier this August, the Miami New Times reported on an audit for inappropriate materials by Miami-Dade Public Schools. Three books (one primary reader and two young adult novels) were removed from libraries in the district:
“These books were neither objected to nor challenged. However, through an audit, they were identified as inappropriate due to the adult content and sexually charged language utilized throughout the books,” the school district says.
The publishers must be breathing a sigh of relief this wasn’t a school board in a state further north, where things have become even more restrictive.
In July 2023, punitive legislation came into force in Tennessee for any…
… book publisher, distributor, or seller to knowingly sell or distribute obscene matter to a public school serving any of the grades kindergarten through twelve (K-12)”.
[…]
A violation […] is a Class E felony, and, in addition, a violator shall be fined an amount not less than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) nor more than one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000).
Meanwhile, in Iowa - another Republican state - revised legislation requires schools to ensure the curriculum and teaching content provided is…
“Age-appropriate” [which] means topics, messages, and teaching methods suitable to particular ages or age groups of children and adolescents, based on developing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral capacity typical for the age or age group. ^Age-appropriate" does not include any material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act as defined in section 702.17.
Violations of this legislation will result in formal letters in the first instance and disciplinary action in any subsequent instances.
Schools are, naturally, worried. They were given just three months to comply with the legislation. Mason City Community School District recognised that sifting through the content of books would take time and effort that was scant in supply. So, instead, they outsourced the verdict about whether the books complied with the law to Chat-GPT.
Chat-GPT duly identified be non-compliant non-compliant books, and so The Handmaid’s Tale, Beloved, The Kite Runner, and The Color Purple were amongst the 19 titles taken off shelves.
The high stakes of conservative legislation are resulting in schools and publishers becoming more risk-averse. Faced with this level of financial risk as book bans surge across Republican states, publishers are choosing to withdraw from the markets.
In the US and Russia alike, thoughts of challenging the official narrative are going out the window.2
Or “Wrong is Right”, as Orwell might have it if he fancied another slogan for the Ministry of Truth.
And yes, that is a defenestration gag.