In publishing this rather controversial article, the editors of the Russkiy Mir site have a clear goal – to once again draw the attention of our readers to the topic of the study and teaching of history, the importance of which seems self-explanatory. Here, we offer arguments made by Evgeny Naumov in connection with a recent discussion by members of the Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History on how to teach Russian history in schools.
The passions seething a few months ago in connection with the establishment of the Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History have somewhat subsided recently. Therefore, when the commission members formally met for the first time in half a year on January 16, the news almost went unnoticed, despite the fact that the theme discussed this time, to use Leninist language, was overarching – how to teach students the history of Russia.
As usual, the views of the commission members were divided. In the opinion of professional historians – Academician Andrei Sakharov, director of the Institute of History (Russian Academy of Sciences), and Alexander Chubaryan, director of the Institute of World History – teaching should be objective as possible, which means that students should be familiar with different viewpoints that exist in academia. However, some members of the commission strongly disagreed, most notably Doctor of Historical Sciences, Natalia Narochnitskaya. “History must be moral,” said the former State Duma deputy, which means that a single “moral” version of national history should be taught in schools without going into the details of academic disputes.
Unfortunately, Natalia did not explain what this would look like in practice, which is a pity. Too much in Russian history remains unclear without at least mentioning something about current academic debates. These debates are not about ideological differences between scholars; rather, they primarily concern assessments of certain facts. Even if we take only historical “facts,” a consensus on many of them cannot be expected.
Let us take, for example, the events of May 15, 1591, when Prince Dmitry Ivanovich, son of Ivan the Terrible and the last representative of the Rurik dynasty, died in Uglich under mysterious circumstances. There exist two official versions as to the reason for the death of Dmitry, as we know, and both concern the same person – Vasily Shuisky. The ambassador to Uglich and head of a special investigative commission, Shuisky officially announced that the prince, who suffered from epilepsy, had accidentally fallen on a knife during a routine attack. A few years later, having become tsar, he accused his predecessor, Boris Godunov, of murdering Dmitry.
What do professional historians think about this? Despite the fact that the body of sources on the Uglich matter is rather limited and fairly well understood, scholars have not reached a consensus. Professor Ruslan Skrynnikov, for example, believes in the story of Shuisky the investigator, and in all his books he argues that the prince was killed in an accident. His colleague, Alexander Zimin, by contrast, favors the version of Shuisky the tsar, arguing that Dmitry had indeed been killed by people close to Boris.
Which of these versions should be taught in Russian schools? On what basis should a simple teacher, never having held a primary source, choose which of these eminent scholars to trust? And finally, most importantly, what does this academic dispute have to do with the “morality” that Narochnitskaya talks about? On what basis can we decide whether the version of suicide is more or, conversely, less “moral” than the assumption about murder?
The riddle of the Uglich matter is certainly not the only case where it is impossible to talk about an historic event “without going into the details of academic disputes.” Just as an illustration, let us take another example from the same era – the mysterious origins of False Dmitry I, who ascended to the throne in 1606.
Alexander Pushkin, following Karamzin, accepted the official version of Godunov's propaganda, according to which “an unworthy monk by the name of Grigory, of the Otrepievs, from the Chudov Monastery” acted under the name of Dmitry Ivanovich. However, another Russian classic author, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, believed that False Dmitry and Otrepiev were two completely different people. Therefore, in his “Tsar Boris” the runaway Chudov monk ends up in the camp of the rebel Cossacks at the same time a messenger from the Pretender arrives from abroad.
Historians have even more disagreements about the character of False Dmitry than do the classic writers. In an essay on the historiography of this issue, Vladimir Kobrin mentions several mutually exclusive versions of the origin of False Dmitry. According to one of them, in 1606 it was Ivan the Terrible's son Dmitry who really became the Russian tsar, escaping miraculously from Uglich and fleeing abroad. Among the supporters of this hypothesis Kobrin names major pre-Revolutionary genealogists S.D. Sheremetev, professor of St. Petersburg University K.N. Bestuzhev-Rumin, and the prominent historian Igor Belyaev. To this list we might add N.I. Kostomarov, who once remarked that “it was easier to save than to forge Dmitry.”
However, in the case of False Dmitry the picture is somewhat more settled than on the question of the Uglich tragedy: the majority of contemporary scholars, including Kobrin, believes that False Dmitry I, most likely, was in fact Grigory Otrepiev. However, even if only this hypothesis is left in the textbooks, it is still decidedly unclear what is “moral” in this version and what is “immoral” in the assumption put forth by Aleksey Tolstoy.
Once again – we have deliberately chosen as examples issues that lie far away from the burning ideological disputes that affect the perception of national history. So if even in such matters there is no unanimity and none can be expected, and “morality” on any side cannot help, then what can we say about more pressing topics?
Of course, one can find any number of facts about which there is consensus among scholars. But then, I'm afraid that the situation with the teaching of history in the pre-Revolutionary schools will be repeated, which was so cruelly described by Doroshevich: “History ... starts with figures, continues with figures, and ends with figures. It is more like arithmetic, bound in a breakdown of addresses and calendars. Names and numbers. It is also interesting to learn how to memorize a list of telephone numbers: 91 – Julius Caesar, 1113 – Vladimir Monomakh.” Several “people in this phone book” of the same name will have several “numbers,” because with many dates, scholars have not yet reached a consensus.
