In September 2025, the process of introducing a new series of school history textbooks for teaching Russian history was completed. The reform, overseen by Putin’s close advisor Medinskii, implies that for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union, students no longer have a range of textbooks to choose between: from now on, there will only be one textbook for each grade.
For any regime, the power to control the official interpretation of national history is an important instrument for nation building and nation maintenance. Through mobilizing a real or invented common past, the historical narrative is seen to strengthen the sense of belonging to and identification with the nation. In the process, historical narratives are subject to re-construction and contestation. Ancient cultures may be appropriated to extend the “national” roots, alternative histories that do not fit with the current administrative map may be silenced, and inconvenient historical episodes forgotten to present an image of a united nation destined for a bright future together.
School history textbooks represent important locales for such struggles between competing historical narratives. As history books, school history textbooks represent a special genre in which complicated issues are reduced to undebatable “shared truths” ready for student consumption. Here, the past is first and foremost meant to provide meaning to – and legitimation of – the present and to help stake out a common course for the future. With their near universal reach to entire cohorts of youths, school history textbooks are a powerful tool for spreading the message of the current regime of who and what the nation should be – and for legitimizing the powers-that-be.
In this paper, I examine continuity and change in the presentation of three foundational moments of Russian history – Kyivan Rus as the foundational myth of Tsarist Russia, the October Revolution as the foundational myth of the Soviet Union, and the Great Patriotic War as the foundational myth of contemporary Russia – in Russian school history textbooks. The analysis aims to explore changes in the understanding of the national self and the regime’s legitimation strategies.
I rely on Soviet school history textbooks in use in the early 1980s as a “baseline”. Then I trace how the same key events have been depicted across three sets of post-independence school history textbooks: textbooks that were in use in the second half of the 1990s, textbooks that were introduced after the 2016 adoption of the new historical-cultural standard, and the post-2022 unified textbooks developed under the auspices of Medinskii. What historical “facts” remain constant? What has changed? And what can these shifting interpretations of historical events tell us about changes in the evolving understanding of the national self and the regime’s legitimation strategies?
