Starting in this school year, history is being taught in a new way at Russian schools but not according to a universal textbook, as was promised by the Russian Ministry of Education and Science.

Now historical studies are based on the universal historic-cultural standard that underlies an entire line-up of textbooks on history. Their publication is expected in 2015-2016.

“Most likely, there will be a universal textbook on history,” stated Russian minister of education and science Dmitry Livanov. “We’ll have a universal historic-cultural standard. It has been developed, methodological recommendations on its implementation have been published, teachers have completed the skill-raising courses and schools have received methodology recommendations.

But while having a new concept of studying the history, we still do not have textbooks capable of breathing life into it. And while the Ministry of Education and Science assures that the expert evaluation of new textbooks on history won’t take too much time, scholars still have a lot of questions regarding this expert evaluation.

“The concept of teaching has been developed in general,” says Sergey Zhuravlev, deputy director for academic work at the Institute of Russian History under the RAS. “It eliminated one-sided approach to grand-scale historic events, helped getting rid of silencing or whitewashing of some dubious periods in the history of Russia, which were either silenced or crippled by numerous versions that confused the middlebrow, alienating the latter from scholarly research. Yet the new concept of teaching history is an instrument that needs to be harnessed first and, secondly, the concept will be constantly augmented and refined.

According to Zhuravlev, scholars have come to consensus above all on the key events of the 20th century and the Soviet period, within the framework of the universal historic-cultural standard, but they have yet to carry out the scholarly evaluation of the newest history of the 21st century. Thus, in accordance with the pivotal concept, Russian revolutions in February and October are merged as the Great Russian Revolution that is divided into three stages: February 1917 (earlier referred to as the “February revolution”), October 1917 (earlier referred to as “The Great October socialist revolution”) and the third stage which is the Civil War of 1917-1923. Scholars assessing the history of the Soviet period, revolution of 1990-1991, formation of the CIS, Boris Yeltsin’s reforms, “shock therapy”, first and second Chechen wars have reached the basic consensus but work goes on. The concept is predicted to be further refined at least 5 more years.

The situation with the newest history of the 21st century is even more complicated. Thus, scholars will have to write a textbook chapter on reunification of the Crimea and Russia in 2014 as well as a chapter on the history of Novorossia that will become an integral part of school history. As was noted by political scientist Igor Shatrov, Bismarck is now relevant as never before: in the war won by Germany (the war of the XIX century for unifying the nation) the actual winner was the Prussian school teacher.” Paraphrasing Bismarck, Shatrov affirms that in the XXI century, the era of the Internet and freedom of speech, the winners are the media and cultural-information space. 

“The filtered, revised and zombified past is the unpredictable past,” Shatrov opines, “destroying the present and depriving us of the future. It is for this reason, by developing universal views on history, patient and painstaking enlightenment, we should make facts, rather than their interpretation, the real history. For instance, by creating common or bilateral textbooks on history – I mean first of all the CIS nations.”

This view is shared by many scholars, but they are notably more cautious than political scientists. “It is important to contemporize two school courses of history,” knows Alexander Chubaryan, director of The Institute of General History under the RAS – world and national. Both earlier and now the most notable flaw has been separate and hence incoherent teaching of these two courses. As a result, schoolchildren have no integrated historic perspective of the world, and it will be very difficult to reverse this trend. One of the ways is preparing bilateral, trilateral textbooks or the ones developed by a team of international authors. This work is being carried out, in spite of high costs and labor intensity, and it is locally successful. 

According to Alexander Chubaryan, not only will such approach allow schoolchildren to get an idea of what was happening in the world in this or that period of Russian history; it will also be conducive to creating by scholars from different nations of an unbiased picture of the world, bereft of any ideology. The research fellows from the Institute of General History and the Institute of Russian History admit that the involvement of international experts in the development of concerted historic versions of different events or joint textbooks on history has several problems. The first one is objective. Russia and the CIS differently divide history into periods, and scholars from different nations will have yet to agree on periods. The second difficulty is subjective. Some of the CIS and Baltic nations build their national historic tradition and historic research on creating the image of an enemy and unfortunately choose their big neighbor Russia for this role. Although several bilateral scholarly commissions of Russia with Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldavia, Latvia and a number of other nations have so far been ineffective. Thus the Russian-Latvian and Russian-Ukrainian commissions suspended their work several times “because of insoluble contradictions,” but not between the scholars, but between politicians who tried to impose on historians their own versions of some historic events and their bias. 

Therefore, as many historians, despite the wish of presidents from the nations of the Customs Union and their initiative “to write a joint textbook on the history of the CIS” that would be taught in the Commonwealth nations in accordance with the concerted standards, this initiative would hardly be realized in the nearest years. For now the Russian initiative of studying history based on the universal historic-cultural standard seems most viable, and an entire line-up of textbooks on history is in the pipeline.