Leon Aron: What Russia's New Government-Sanctioned Textbooks Tell Us About Putin's Horrifying Worldview
On June 18, 2007, a national conference of high school historians and teachers of social sciences was convened in Moscow. The agenda called for the discussion of "the acute problems in the teaching of modern Russian history," and for "the development of the state standards of education." It soon became clear that the real purpose of the gathering was to present to the delegates--or, more precisely, to impress upon them--two recently finished "manuals for teachers." One of them, to be published in a pilot print run of ten thousand, was called Noveyshaya Istoriya Rossii, 1945-2006 GG: Kniga Dlya Uchitelya, or The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006: A Teacher's Handbook. It was the work of a certain A.V. Filippov, and it was designed to become the standard Russian high school textbook of Russian history, scheduled to be introduced into classrooms this month.
Unusually heavy artillery was deployed in the textbook's support. Speaking at the conference were Andrey Fursenko, the minister of education and science, and Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin chief ideologist and first deputy chief of staff. Surkov is the inventor of the concept of "sovereign democracy," which became the centerpiece of the Putin regime's worldview, justifying authoritarianism in politics, re-centralization in economics, and anti-Western truculence in foreign policy. (As Russian wits like to say, "sovereign democracy" and "democracy" are as different as "electric chair" and "chair.")
The project's origin and the author's provenance were soon disclosed by liberal websites, which these days are looking more and more like a kind of cyber samizdat. The textbook's editor, Alexandr Filippov, who is listed as the sole author on the cover, is a deputy director of the "National Laboratory of Foreign Policy," which, in his own words, "assists the state organs, including the presidential administration, in the development and implementation of foreign policy decisions." He later confirmed the rumor that it was the presidential administration, along with the ministry of education, that had "invited" him to assemble the manuscript, making the textbook nothing less than an expression of Vladimir Putin's view of Soviet history.
The author of one of the chapters turned out to be Pavel Danilin, the editorin-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." Addressing on his blog teachers and scholars who might be less than enthusiastic about such an approach, Danilin, who is thirty years old and is not known to have ever taught anything, wrote:
"You may ooze bile but you will teach the children by those books that you will be given and in the way that is needed by Russia. And as to the noble nonsense that you carry in your misshapen goateed heads, either it will be ventilated out of them or you yourself will be ventilated out of teaching.... It is impossible to let some Russophobe shit-stinker (govnyuk), or just any amoral type, teach Russian history. It is necessary to clear the filth, and if it does not work, then clear it by force."
The official promotion of the history textbook resumed after the summer vacation, when the ministry of education and science scheduled teachers' conferences in seven Russian regions, at which the authors and the government functionaries were to be joined by the "representatives of the president's administration" and those local governments. To show how it should be done, a meeting took place last September at the Academic Educational Association for the Humanities, with Moscow's top education functionaries, university presidents, and directors of research institutes on hand, including the director of the Institute of General History and the rector of Moscow State University. Representing the Kremlin was Dzhokhan Pollyeva, secretary of the Presidential Council for Science, Technologies, and Education, who called on historians and education administrators to wish the textbook's authors a great success, and assured the audience that there would be sufficient funding for all the seminars and courses required for the training of teachers to support the curriculum.
In fact, the clearest expression of the Kremlin's goodwill toward the textbook came two months earlier, with an invitation to the conference participants to visit President Putin at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside Moscow. In a long introduction to the discussion that ensued, Putin complained that there was "mishmash" (kasha) in the heads of teachers of history and social sciences, and that this dire situation in the teaching of Russian history needed to be corrected by the introduction of "common standards. " (Four days later, a new law, introduced in the Duma and passed with record speed in eleven days, authorized the ministry of education and science to determine which textbooks be "recommended" for school use and to determine which publishers would print them.) There followed some instructive exchanges:
"A conference participant: In 1990-1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of all-human values.... It is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we will judge when and how you have done.... In exchange for our disarming ideologically we have received this abstract recipe: you become democrats and capitalists and we will control you.
Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so....
[Note: This article extends over 9 web pages.]
Read entire article at New Republic
Unusually heavy artillery was deployed in the textbook's support. Speaking at the conference were Andrey Fursenko, the minister of education and science, and Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin chief ideologist and first deputy chief of staff. Surkov is the inventor of the concept of "sovereign democracy," which became the centerpiece of the Putin regime's worldview, justifying authoritarianism in politics, re-centralization in economics, and anti-Western truculence in foreign policy. (As Russian wits like to say, "sovereign democracy" and "democracy" are as different as "electric chair" and "chair.")
The project's origin and the author's provenance were soon disclosed by liberal websites, which these days are looking more and more like a kind of cyber samizdat. The textbook's editor, Alexandr Filippov, who is listed as the sole author on the cover, is a deputy director of the "National Laboratory of Foreign Policy," which, in his own words, "assists the state organs, including the presidential administration, in the development and implementation of foreign policy decisions." He later confirmed the rumor that it was the presidential administration, along with the ministry of education, that had "invited" him to assemble the manuscript, making the textbook nothing less than an expression of Vladimir Putin's view of Soviet history.
The author of one of the chapters turned out to be Pavel Danilin, the editorin-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." Addressing on his blog teachers and scholars who might be less than enthusiastic about such an approach, Danilin, who is thirty years old and is not known to have ever taught anything, wrote:
"You may ooze bile but you will teach the children by those books that you will be given and in the way that is needed by Russia. And as to the noble nonsense that you carry in your misshapen goateed heads, either it will be ventilated out of them or you yourself will be ventilated out of teaching.... It is impossible to let some Russophobe shit-stinker (govnyuk), or just any amoral type, teach Russian history. It is necessary to clear the filth, and if it does not work, then clear it by force."
The official promotion of the history textbook resumed after the summer vacation, when the ministry of education and science scheduled teachers' conferences in seven Russian regions, at which the authors and the government functionaries were to be joined by the "representatives of the president's administration" and those local governments. To show how it should be done, a meeting took place last September at the Academic Educational Association for the Humanities, with Moscow's top education functionaries, university presidents, and directors of research institutes on hand, including the director of the Institute of General History and the rector of Moscow State University. Representing the Kremlin was Dzhokhan Pollyeva, secretary of the Presidential Council for Science, Technologies, and Education, who called on historians and education administrators to wish the textbook's authors a great success, and assured the audience that there would be sufficient funding for all the seminars and courses required for the training of teachers to support the curriculum.
In fact, the clearest expression of the Kremlin's goodwill toward the textbook came two months earlier, with an invitation to the conference participants to visit President Putin at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside Moscow. In a long introduction to the discussion that ensued, Putin complained that there was "mishmash" (kasha) in the heads of teachers of history and social sciences, and that this dire situation in the teaching of Russian history needed to be corrected by the introduction of "common standards. " (Four days later, a new law, introduced in the Duma and passed with record speed in eleven days, authorized the ministry of education and science to determine which textbooks be "recommended" for school use and to determine which publishers would print them.) There followed some instructive exchanges:
"A conference participant: In 1990-1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of all-human values.... It is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we will judge when and how you have done.... In exchange for our disarming ideologically we have received this abstract recipe: you become democrats and capitalists and we will control you.
Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so....
[Note: This article extends over 9 web pages.]