MOSCOW, January 16,/ITAR-TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the need to create a single textbook on Russian history had been prompted by existence of “ideological rubbish“in previous textbooks.
He said that some school materials contained things that were absolutely unacceptable not only for Russia and its people but for any country and any people. “It was just a spat in the face,” Putin said at a meeting with the authors of a concept of the new textbook on Russian history.
The president said that some assessments of the history of the Great Patriotic war were disgraceful.
“I am not talking about the intentional denigration of the role of the Soviet people in the struggle against fascism. There were more profound things. Some ideological rubbish, I would say, of which we should get rid of,” Putin went on to say.
He added that it should not be regarded as an attempt to introduce some kind of uniformity in thinking and assessments. The head of state commented on the most complicated themes in home history, including the Soviet Union’s role in the postwar history of Eastern Europe.
“There is an opinion that Eastern Europe submerged into occupational darkness of the Stalinist regime after WWII. The Soviet ideology functioned their partly and produced a negative impact on the development of those states. But if we are talking about the consequences, what consequences would have those countries faced if fascism had won? Some nations would have simply been exterminated and ceased to exist,” Putin emphasized.
In this connection, Putin urged Russian historians to work jointly with their foreign colleagues. “Together, we are going to work out maximum objective approaches to those assessments,” Putin said.
He believes that a new concept of Russian history should not only acquaint people with historical assessments of events but also make them realize a measure of personal responsibility for a country in which they live.