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Concept of single history textbook presented to Putin

The concept was approved last year

MOSCOW, January 17. /ITAR-TASS World Service/. Russian President Vladimir Putin met on Thursday with designers of the concept of teaching Russian history at school, on the basis of which new textbooks will be written.

The concept was approved last year, the RBC Daily writes. Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin, who chairs the Russian Historical Society, led the process. It will take another year-and-a-half or two to write the textbooks, Education Minister Dmitry Livanov believes.

“Voluntarily or not we are playing down what was done by our ancestors,” the president said explaining a need to overview history. Not only difficulties in assessing this or that event exist, but also ‘kicks in the teeth’, the president believes. “Not only must the events be assessed, but also the aftermath,” he continued. “It is said that after WWII, Europe plunged into an occupational dark of Stalin’s regime. Yes, Soviet-style ideology did exist there, but what would have happened if fascism had won? Many nations would have been wiped off the face of the earth,” Putin said.

“We gave a minimum of personalities that can and must be added into the textbook by its creators,” the dean of Moscow University’s faculty of history, Sergei Karpov, told the RBC Daily after a meeting with Putin. “In my opinion, the school students should know not only positive personalities. However, what is the difference between the historian-patriot historian and the historian-nihilist? One will write about dramatic events of his Fatherland with compassion, while the other one — with mockery,” he said.

The developers of the concept have withdrawn from the course of Russian history such notions as for example the “Mongol-Tatar Yoke” and the “October Revolution”, replacing them with “Yoke of the Horde” and the “Great Russian Revolution”.

Among “difficult issues of Russian history,” the authors of the concept list the formation of the ancient Russian state and the role of Varangians in that process, Ukraine’s entry into Russia, reforms of Peter the Great, assessment of serfdom, the fall of the monarchy in Russia and Bolsheviks’ coming to power, Stalin’s autocracy and reasons behind repressions, as well as “the causes, aftermath and assessment of stabilization of Russia’s economy and political system in the 2000s”.

Itar-Tass is not responsible for the material quoted in the press reviews.

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