There is little dispute that the old Soviet history was a tissue of lies. But with the new school year underway in Russia, there is no consensus on the new truth. Unrepentant communists joust with democrats while nostalgic nationalists seek refuge in the 19th century. “Nationalists want to portray the glorious past of the Russian czars, and the so-called democrats are flagellating themselves, saying, ‘We have done all wrong to everyone on earth, and we have to repent’,” says Vladislav Zubok, 34, one of a new wave of post-glasnost historians. Laments historian Roy Medvedev, 67, still a committed socialist despite years as an anti-Soviet dissident: “What is happening negates all the things we once considered achievements, as if we had nothing good to show from 70 years of history.”
For teachers, the confusion means ignoring the textbooks. Revised two years ago, they are already date views of class struggle and claims that the Baltic States “volunteered” to join the Soviet Union. Not even the new “ideology-free” textbooks promised by Russia’s Education Ministry, to be sent to schools later this year, have much chance of keeping up. Almost weekly, it seems once-secret Soviet archives reveal new evidence of atrocities committed under Stalin and Lenin, and figures vilified or omitted by Soviet histories-including Czar Nicholas II and revolutionary Leon Trotsky-are the subjects of sympathetic articles. So teachers will make up lessons as they go, assigning newspaper articles and readings from Italian and British historians. Still, confusion is so great that history exams have been declared optional at School 109.
Even professional historians are disoriented. Mikhail Narinsky of the Academy of Sciences admits that his past writings about World War II lack key facts that only recently emerged from the archives. The students’ plight is even tougher. “It’s hard to know what the truth is about Soviet history. In class we try to avoid the whole subject,” says Dima, 20, a college history major. One of Nadezhda Garazha’s star pupils, Natasha Stefanovich, drawing on outside readings, points out that textbooks still fail to mention Stalin’s secret 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler. Says Stefanovich, “The books are awful; I doubt everything in them.”
Nihilism isn’t an option for teachers, however. “It never thrilled me to teach about the Communist Party’s glorious achievements, or Brezhnev’s brilliance,” Garazha says. “But I won’t just paint Soviet history black for my students. We were a great power.” She and other historians would like to stop the historical pendulum short of extremes-for once. In a society that many fear is headed toward another social explosion, that’s a timely lesson.
