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What’s Wrong with Anthologies?

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What’s Wrong with Anthologies?

09.10.2014

By 2015 the Ministry of Culture intends to have compiled a list of 100 key documents of Russian history that will be recommended for studying in the senior classes of school, at colleges and universities.

March of Oleg on Tsargrad, miniature painting from the Radzivilovsky Chronicle, XIII centuryThis news gives rise to a number of questions, at least in my mind of a university teacher with a 12-year record who also worked at the high school. The first question is “Why the Ministry of Culture?” I understand that national history is an important part of our culture and bringing it home to our citizens in an interesting format is a useful matter. But we are talking about schoolchildren and university students, which means this is the domain of education to be tackled by professional historians and pedagogues.

Of course, the Ministry of Culture has quite a few experts of its own, and they are working now on a special site, where full versions of historic documents with scholarly comments, references and tests will be posted. But they are going to recommend these to schoolchildren and students, and this is already the competence of the Ministry of Education and Science. Doesn’t it have enough strength to plan these projects and bring them to fruition?

Are readers all that wrong?

Code of Laws of Ivan IVLet’s not be formalists. It’s not that important who the initiator is; quality work is what really counts. But then another question suggests itself: “Why?” Officials from the Ministry state confidently: in recent years schoolchildren and students seldom get acquainted with full-text documents and the “classic” knowledge based on fragments from different sources does not reflect the diversity of historic reality. This is not a quote, but retelling the Ministry’s response published in Izvestia. Yet it rather eloquently demonstrates that public officials have a lame logic. Let’s overlook the phrase “in recent years”, since this has always been the case: few students of history would plunge into the sources suggested, not to mention other freshmen for whom history has always been of secondary importance.

Better let’s take a closer look at the fact that “classic” knowledge, which by definition implies carefully selected knowledge based on documents, suddenly proved incapable of rendering the entire diversity of our national history. Yet anything may happen. How can they be so sure that the reading of full-size historic documents, with some of them like the Law Book of Ivan IV being rather lengthy, will help the youth have a glimpse of those bygone epochs? The ministry’s experts seem to be ignorant of the ABC of history. Here they are:

— it is impossible to reconstruct a single event by tapping into one source, let alone the entire epoch;

— to understand the information in any source, good knowledge of the epoch when it was created, is required;

— any source reflects a certain view on the events, which can be as opinionated as ours today.

If adult people with higher education and life experience do not know this, should we require this knowledge from students? Are our teenagers capable of doing the work which savvy historians took decades to finish? Another question is even more important: should adolescents conduct a full-scale scholarly analysis of the sources which won’t reveal their secrets without that? The answer is a definite “no”!

A good textbook, exciting lectures, methodologically elaborate seminars and creative home assignments for comparing historic events or establishing connections between them would be enough for the students who are not going to devote themselves to Clio muse. Of course, a lot will depend on teacher’s training and talent, but raising skills simply by inviting them to read sources together with students is utopia. Painstaking efforts are needed to create an attractive image for the given vocation and it is necessary to compile “live” books, rather than boring event-related textbooks citing different opinions and fragments from sources. And the Ministry would do a wise thing taking care of putting methodology in order.

Knowledge of certain sources cannot give a complete picture of history

The Domostroy (Household Book)But let’s not dismiss the “100 sources” straight off. Perhaps this project, according to the head of administration department at the Ministry of Culture, Mikhail Ipatov, will indeed help curbing the avalanche of “speculative, opinionated historic constructs distorting our national history”?

Maybe… I tried hard but failed to find any firm links between the studying of textbooks by schoolchildren and the victory over an inflow of obtrusive textbooks on history. Their influx is part of the information war which will hardly be escaped by simple acquaintance with historic documents.

One example is the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact already entered in the list of the Ministry of Culture. Beyond any doubt, it will also be complemented by the secret protocol about dividing the sphere of influence between Germany and the USSR. Even though the original has not been found either in the national or in German archives, and what we have now, is just a fabrication published by Americans in 1948 at the height of the World War. What can you do about it if adding the “treacherous supplement” has already become a tradition? What will youthful seekers after wisdom learn from this document? I’m afraid nothing, except the popular idea that the USSR secretly colluded with Germany, thus untying her hands and paving the way to World War II… Because without knowing the entire background of that Pact they would hardly be able to guess that the Soviet Union, unprepared for a large-scale war, at that tense moment avoided fighting on two fronts against the Japanese and Germans; actually it was the democratic UK and France that had Soviets on edge by drawing out during half a year the negotiations about joining hands in the fight against Hitler.

To make the picture fuller, it would be great to supplement the non-aggression pact with a number of other texts: the Munich Treaty of 1938, the correspondence of British and French attaches stationed in Moscow in summer 1939, and the Soviet-German trade agreement as of Aug. 19, 1939. If they compare all these documents, it may dawn upon some students that the signed pact was… an outstanding victory of Soviet diplomacy! An unexpected conclusion, isn’t it? But warranted, at that, because according to that agreement we obtained from the foe on the eve of the war against it, what we were denied by our “friends”: a loan of 200m DM to acquire the most precious industrial equipment and military hardware!

It comes out that chasing the fullness of the text we may miss out on something much more important: holistic perception. Therefore, in my opinion, it would be better to use a regular history reader or anthology, where carefully selected fragments from original sources are given for each subject and plot.

Questions to compilers of the list

Manifesto from February 19, 1861The list of main sources also gives rise to some questions. It already includes the Russian-Byzantine Treaty of 911 A.D., Law Book of Ivan IV, The Domostroy, Pozharsky’s charter about the convocation of the Zemsky council, the Council Code of 1649, Stalin’s speech on July 3, 1941 and the Helsinki Act of 1975. Why torturing kids with ancient texts which they are unable to understand or even to read correctly? Maybe this will add high experiences to the lives of some, but will more likely bring even more humdrum to the process of tuition. Legal monuments are also specific: not each of us could read the Constitution of 1993 to the end, and now poor kids are invited to crack the norms of the ancient law with numerous long titles and unfamiliar words. I do hope they won’t include in this list the Manifesto from Feb. 19, 1861, noted for the fact that even the contemporaries of serfdom abolition could hardly understand what it was talking about.

A separate question regarding the Helsinki Act: “Is it self-irony or exposure of Europe in the light of recent events?” For it was not so much devoted to the protection of human rights as rather to the entrenchment of the results of WWII and affirmation of the inviolability of European borders. The document was attached tremendous importance, especially in the Soviet Union, while West-European nations quickly “forgot” about it already in the late 1980s, when they started openly pushing Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia towards the breakup and approved the “reunification of Germany”. Incidentally, this dangerous game with redrawing the borders continues today. 

Perhaps we should not find fault with the new project, given that it won’t replace the main curriculum, being advisory in nature, and will probably interest many teenagers. Nobody knows what it will look like in reality. And yet it seems to me that the Ministry of Culture should better promote Russian history along its specific lines. For instance, the Ministry might finance documentaries like the excellently directed Great War, or help people like Andrey Shalyopa, who make feature-length documentary films.

Alexei Fyodorov
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