Rewriting history to find a vanished Russia
Under the Soviet regime, education too was the subject of state attention. Now, with the new textbooks, Stalin’s glorious victory on 9 May 1945 becomes Russia’s “new baptism”, subsuming Soviet ideological rhetoric and the latest incarnation of sobornost, the universal union of peoples led by Moscow.
The motivations for Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has upset the entire world order, are varied and rather confused, from political and economic to ideological and religious, oozing from the soup of anger and resentment that underpins the idea of Russkiy Mir (русский мир), Russian world.
Since the main actors and "motivators" – from President Putin and Patriarch Kirill to the many propagandists and leaders, army generals and owners of mercenary companies – are often uncertain and contradictory in explaining the ins and outs of the "special military operation", all the claims and proclamations are scrambled and revitalised in the favourite dish of the many "cooks" of Russia’s spiritual-military cuisine, i.e. historical revisionism.
The clash with Ukraine is explained starting with the Baptism of Kievan Rus' in AD 988, renamed "Novgorod Rus", the northern city founded in AD 860, of which Moscow is supposed to be the only true heir, covering the whole millennium of shared history and splits of the Eastern Slavic peoples, inspired by this idea.
Putin has devoted hundreds of speeches and Kirill thousands of homilies to this topic, although Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) can be considered the real specialist. Dubbed “Putin’s spiritual father”, he has produced documentary films (his real vocation since he studied cinematography), and written books and various articles since the 1990s, stressing one key historical concept: "Russia can only exist as an empire."
Its vast territories and various Eurasian peoples who live together impel to "unify" everyone around the spiritual superiority of the Russians, the only depositories of the "true faith", the Orthodoxy betrayed by Latins and Greeks, Europeans, and Americans, threatened by Muslims and Orientals, who are still preferable to the apostates of the Churches of Rome, Constantinople and especially nowadays, Washington and Kyiv.
In order to inculcate these visions of patriotic orthodoxy in the minds of Russian, the Kremlin has adopted basically a three-pronged approach.
For people 50 and over, who can still remember Soviet times, it is enough to persistently pump the official propaganda on television and the press, supported by central and regional institutions, in order to trigger the instinct of submissiveness still firmly rooted in the minds of post-totalitarian “boomers”.
The unlucky middle generation, the 30-to-50 something, gets the least appetising dish, whose main ingredients are: persecution and repression of any form of dissent, mobilisation for war with a good chance of not surviving, escaping to more hospitable latitudes, or simply just sticking their head in the sand, hoping to make it through the night.
The heavy is, however, on the shoulders of young people, which is to build the Russian World whilst trying not to lose Russia itself, handing over the anti-globalist utopia to other peoples and countries, starting with rising China, which is trying to get the most out of Russia’s war.
This explains the hysterical attempts to control the Internet, through a sovereign runet; monitoring and shutting down social media, blogs, and sites; blocking VPN access and any form of free expression that runs via evil cables. Cutting Russia off from any of this could remove it from the geopolitical map, but also deprive Russian society of today’s technical and informational tools.
The State, however, holds a much more traditional and powerful instrument, which does not provide for any real competition, and which has a decisive impact on boys and girls, at least until they reach the age of majority: school.
The Soviet regime was also keen on schools, which were one of Lenin's first concerns after the October Revolution. After winning less than 20 per cent of the vote for the Constituent Assembly, Lenin and his Bolsheviks dissolved that body when it met for the first and only time in February 1918, as well as all state institutions, setting up a new regime based on two “sacred institutions": the Party and the Red Army.
In March 1918, Lenin introduced a law instituting the new system, titled Separation of the Church from the State and the School from the Church, insisting not only on the "spiritual replacement" of Orthodoxy with the new communist religion, but also on the Party’s educational hegemony over family, traditions and culture, with the "official version" to be passed on to the "new men" created by the revolution.
Rewriting history was thus common to both the Soviet Union and present-day Russia, and it is precisely in this domain that Putin’s regime is now working on.
Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, a new "hour of religion" has been introduced in all schools, titled Conversation about Important Things, with soldiers and priests used as support staff alongside often unreliable teachers.
At first this course was optional, but eventually parents who opted out for their children began to suffer serious consequences for not sending them to hear “important things”.
Since teachers are poorly trained on things that matter, teaching tools have been provided, such as new history and geography manuals, but also textbooks on art and literature, even chemistry and physics.
Military training has replaced physical education, with drills in schools exalting the homeland and its conquests, and perhaps getting pupils to do socially useful manual works, like weaving blankets and making clothes for the heroes fighting at the front.
To coordinate the major overhaul of school content, Putin appointed one of Russia's most active propagandists, namely Vladimir Medinsky, formerly head of the Culture Ministry, one of the most useless departments in government. As general adviser to the president on "important things", he can pass them on to young people.
In addition to many initiatives and publications, Medinsky recently released History of Russia from 1945 to the Start of the 21st Century, the new "Gospel of the Russian World", the modern history guide for students in the last year of senior high school, to learn by heart for their final exam.
The thousand years of the prophetic-apocalyptic history of the missionary people are channelled into the rewritten history of the last 70 years, which overlap with Putin’s own lifetime, from childhood to the present, fighting to save the whole world from the assault of the Ukrainian-Anglo-Saxon Antichrist.
Victory Day on 9 May 1945, the day of Stalin's glorious triumph over the Nazis (which the "allies", according to the manual, could never have done), is the day that marks Russia’s “new baptism”, a medley of Soviet ideological rhetoric and the current vision of Sobornost (собо́рность), the universal union of peoples led by Moscow.
The 450-page manual will be the basis for all new textbooks, including those used in elementary schools, starting next year; all references to the “Tatar-Mongolian yoke”, which is currently very irksome for Russians, will be struck out.
Medinsky explains the ongoing revision by citing Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod (the secular head of the Russian Orthodox Church) in the second half of the 19th century. Dubbed the “Russian Torquemada”, Pobedonostsev, whose names propitiously translates as “bearer of victory”, said that “the multiplicity of manuals in schools is the great lie of our time” since it produces unacceptable competition in the things that really matter.
Pobedonostsev was a stalwart supporter of the monopoly of Orthodoxy and against freedom for other religions. Medinsky, for his part, is concerned about pro-Western or even pro-Ukrainian sentiments, which still survive in the minds of many Russians, especially those who have relatives abroad or in Ukraine.
As he notes, the new text modifies the previous one “by 70 per cent, especially with respect to biographies, the role of major figures, and the most recent events".
The book is not only long, but very intense, without the “many useless images" found in previous editions, with “lots of information and citations of sources".
Unlike the "false interpretations" spread by others, the manual explains that the era of the "revolution of comfort” began in 1945, thus no Stalinist terror, Khrushchev-era thaw, or Brezhnev-era stagnation.
The real Russia, the one that exists in the minds of Putin and Kirill, overcame the final crisis of the Soviet Union, sparked by "Western aggressions" and Gorbachev’s ineptitude, as well as the troubles of the Yeltsin years. Now Russia is free from all foreign oppression, especially that of “devil Biden”, and can look forward to a bright future in a world of freedom and spiritual communion. On paper at least, that of manuals.
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